Drug Cartels Not Behind $2.3B Human Smuggling Operation To US: Study

Speaker 1: 00:00 Our top story today on midday addition, what's known about the smuggling trade, bringing hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to our southern border. And beyond the key questions, how does smuggling work from Central American countries and how lucrative is it for smugglers, a Rand Corporation study out this week, attempts to pin down answers with mixed results. Joining me is blast and Munoz and Neto. He's a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation and a coauthor of the report. Welcome. Thank you very much, mark. Delighted to be here. Well, the study focuses on the smuggling of people from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in 2017 start with a broad findings how much revenue was generated for smugglers. Speaker 2: 00:42 So what we found was that there's a wide range in the estimated revenues associated with human smuggling, which went from about 200 million on the low end to about two point $3 billion in 2017 Speaker 1: 00:57 and what accounts for such a wide wide range in these figures? Speaker 2: 01:01 So a lot of it has to do with the limited data that's available, um, on these issues. So in order to make this estimate, you have to know how many unauthorized migrants are coming to the u s not, not just those that are being apprehended, but you know, coming, uh, you have to know what percent of those migrants use smugglers and you have to know what the average fee they paid was. So we relied on some internal DHS data. Uh, we also used data from the [inaudible] in Mexico. Uh, and one of our recommendations for DHS is actually that if they find that this information is useful, uh, they, uh, need to look at ways to more systematically collect and clean the data that they have. Speaker 1: 01:40 Right. And we're going to delve into these figures. You're referring of course, to the Department of Homeland Security, DHS. Now, um, how do, how much did migrates typically pay smugglers to bring them north? Speaker 2: 01:51 So it really depends what kind of service there, um, uh, contracting for. And one of the other major findings in our study is that there's really a broad spectrum of actors engaged in human smuggling and only some of them and potentially relatively few of them are what we traditionally think of as transnational criminal organizations or you know, very organized, formal smuggling networks. Uh, there's a lot of independent actors working in this trade that made, you know, really only be working in a given location on the route north. And what am I going to pay is depends on how robust a set of services they're asking. They're looking for, uh, some migrants pay for end to end service will, they'll pay one fee, you know, in Guatemala, say, and that will get them all the way to the u s others really kind of pay as they go, you know, so they, they try to make it, uh, north on their own. And then when they get stuck, they'll pay someone locally to help them. Speaker 1: 02:46 And you found the, uh, the range was about six to $10,000 a on what's spent for the smuggling. Speaker 2: 02:52 On average. We found that, uh, on the low end, 6,000 high end, 10,000 seem to be the, you know, was supported by the data. Speaker 1: 03:00 Okay. And how many, uh, folks, uh, these migrants, do they hire smugglers Speaker 2: 03:04 in looking at subject matter expert interviews and uh, open source reporting as well as the data we looked at? You know, I think it's safe to say, uh, a majority of migrants probably use a smuggler, at least for a portion of the journey. I think where it gets tricky is, you know, it's difficult to really have a reliable estimate for how many are using end to end services versus how many are using, you know, just a portion of, of the route. Speaker 1: 03:31 And what are the means of transport, transportation? How are these people transported? Speaker 2: 03:36 Uh, generally what we found is that they use overland routes, uh, and that can be anything from buses to taxis to trains or, or walking. We did not find a lot of evidence for, you know, maritime or, or air transportation being used. Speaker 1: 03:52 And this was a, again, the calendar year 2017 how many people were estimated to pay for passage to the U s that year? Speaker 2: 04:00 We didn't have one estimate. We estimated a pretty broad range. And so, you know, on the low end of our estimate we looked at, you know, probably about a 20 to 25% using smugglers on the high end of the estimate. I think we looked at about two thirds or 66% using smugglers. Well we weren't able to identify, you know, one overall percent for people using smugglers. Speaker 1: 04:24 And can we assume these numbers a, the total number of migrants coming or higher now with the surging figures from the early months of 2019? Speaker 2: 04:33 Yeah, so obviously our report is based on 2017 data. I think what we've seen so far in 2019 is that, um, at least if you measure, um, you know, migrant flows by apprehensions using apprehensions made by agents as a proxy, we're going to more or less triple apprehensions this year than we did in 2017. So, you know, I think if the trends in our report continue today, I think you'd be looking at basically three times, you know, the estimate for this year. Speaker 1: 05:05 And what did the study find regarding drug smuggling in addition to trafficking and people? Speaker 2: 05:11 There's a lot of, I would say loose talk out there that the Mexican drug cartels are directly involved in bringing migrants to the border. We really found no evidence of that, but we did find is that the Mexican drug cartels, we'll pay, we'll charge a tax or what's known as a piece. So in Mexico, uh, to, you know, smuggling groups and migrants that are transiting the territory that is controlled by a cartel, uh, for the cartel. That's basically pure profit. Uh, and our, our estimate for that range was 32 $180 million in 2017. Speaker 1: 05:47 And what does the Rand Corporation study recommend going forward? Speaker 2: 05:51 We had a, a couple of recommendations that, one related again to the data that DHS on the use of smugglers and uh, what migrants paid a smuggler. So border patrol agents, you know, we'll interview migrants when they're apprehended and ask some questions, but it's not really done very systematically in the data is very noisy. Um, which it generally means that it's just not super reliable. So one of our core recommendations was if they found this study useful, uh, that they should look at ways to improve that data collection to make the data more reliable. Um, a second core recommendation was that, uh, we talked a little earlier about the wide range of actors and engage in human smuggling. And what this really means is that, um, smugglers can and do move up and down that spectrum. So you, you will see smugglers that may operate in one location and smuggled migraines and then they may, you know, also link up with other smugglers and that makes it difficult to target these organizations. Speaker 2: 06:54 But the one kind of smuggler that that seems to be, you know, worth focusing efforts on or some of these more robust facilitators who generally work, you know, in the northern triangle countries in Central America and you know, connect migrants with smuggling networks and basically recruit the migrants. So one of the challenges without obviously is that those individuals are generally not in the United States. So one of our recommendations is that a DHS should spend more attention focusing on partnerships with international law enforcement partners in order to target some of these individuals or it, I've been speaking with blast Nunez Nieto, senior policy researcher with the Rand Corporation and author of this report. Thanks very much. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be here. Speaker 3: 07:43 Yeah.