A recent report indicates that migrants are at higher risk for being victims of human trafficking.
A 2020 report from the Polaris Project, a nonprofit dedicated to combatting trafficking in North America, showed that 52% of victims reported to the Trafficking Hotline were not citizens of the United States or legal residents. Most victims of human trafficking come from Latin America and the Caribbean. Particularly vulnerable are migrants from Mexico, who frequently end up trafficked into the agriculture sector.
"The most egregious figures come from the agriculture sector, where 76% of the likely victims were immigrants and nearly half of all likely victims - immigrant and not - were from Mexico," according to the report.
According to the DEA, cartels have been seeking to increase profits by using drug trafficking routes for human trafficking as an additional source of revenue. Drug and human trafficking are strongly linked together. Cartels will take advantage of the women and children they smuggle across the border by forcing them to transport drugs.
"For traffickers, it doesn’t matter which product is being sold — both drugs and sex are lucrative industries — as long as money is made," according to the DEA. "Violent criminals like this see no difference between abusing a woman’s body by forcing her to swallow bags of drugs or by forcing her to have sex with hundreds of men."
FOX News recently reported that Mexican cartels make as much as $14 million dollars a day smuggling individuals across the border and into the United States. Retired Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal recently stated that trafficked individuals become slaves to pay to be smuggled across the U.S. border.
“A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings,” Villareal told FOX News. “Some are essentially indentured servants, and they’re working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt.”
As the U.S. faces an increase in illegal immigration, the fear is that human trafficking cases will rise as well. In July of 2021, law enforcement authorities caught 212,672 migrants attempting to cross the southern border illegally, U.S. News reported. This number is the highest the United States has seen in 21 years.
From May through July, Operation Rescue Me, led by U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) resulted in the recovery of three minors and the location of 75 more in Dona Ana County, N.M. The agencies offered services to these children that would help determine the exploitation threat to at-risk children.
One incident in Las Cruces shows the danger posed by cartels trafficking women. KVIA News reported that a police response to a 911 call near the end of July found 25 people crammed into two different hotel rooms. The caller noticed that some younger women were naked and appeared to have been under the influence of drugs. All 25 were found to be migrants, according to an unnamed source.
