Politics and Money

[Elroy Jetson]

Entrepreneurs are now offering families from Honduras and Guatemala express-bus service directly to the US border

Recruiters are selling clients in Guatemala on the journey with presentations akin to a travel agency offering a range of price points with different levels of passenger comfort, according to U.S. and Guatemalan officials.

The express-bus service from Honduras costs up to $7,000 per adult with a child but particularly appeals to families by minimizing some of the more intimidating and unsavory aspects of traditional Mexican smuggling operations. But lower cost options starting at $2,500 allow less affluent customers to ride in trucks or stand in cattle cars

One Guatemalan father, reached by phone in Houston where he was reunited with his wife and two children last month, said he paid $5,500 to bring all three family members to the border and, “They traveled on a nice bus, with their own seats.” The trip had cost $8,000 a year ago when he made the journey alone.

Many better informed refugees can make a similar journey at less cost with a $300 air ticket to a Canadian border city, with a cab ride to a US border station.

Last month, 40,325 arrived at the border fence in family groups, and the border patrol has been busy with arrests up 67 percent from January.

Families are first transported to staging areas at ranches and hotels in southern Mexico, where they are organized into bus groups and rushed north along Mexican highways, “stopping only for food, fuel and bathroom breaks,” according to the U.S. law enforcement documents.

Within 72 hours of leaving the staging areas, the buses arrive at predetermined drop-off points within walking distance of the U.S. border fence. Migrant families are clustered into groups that have at times exceeded 300 adults and children, and they walk directly to the fence and wait patiently to surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents and initiate asylum claims.

Each express-bus is directed to locations where spotters have located groups of Border Patrol agents who will be able to quickly process the surrender of large numbers of their clients. The mass “give-ups” let migrants skip lines at official points of entry, and they can await processing on the U.S. side of the border, where it’s safer.

“They line up as if it’s some kind of regular immigration process, in single file, like they’re checking in,” said one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the pattern. “It’s unbelievable.”

A US Border Patrol drone monitors a surrender group just South of the border fence near Antelope Wells, New Mexico


Under Trump's "zero tolerance policy" which requires agents to arrest those on US territory south of the border wall, the Border Patrol has been able to increase the number of migrants taken into custody at the El Paso sector by 434 percent in the past five months versus the same period last year, CBP statistics show.

With the swelling arrest numbers, calls for a border wall have intensified. But these large groups have been crossing in areas near central El Paso, where tall, modern steel barriers are already in place. Wading through shallow stretches of the Rio Grande, the migrants reach U.S. soil and wait to be taken into custody on the narrow strip of no man’s land between the river and the border fence.

Using the direct-bus method, smugglers can eliminate the need for stash houses along the border where they would normally keep migrants under the watch of armed guards before sneaking them across the border. The express routes “minimize overhead and maximize capacity,” according to the U.S. documents, allowing smugglers to reduce “operational costs to a minimum.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan told reporters the “shorter smuggling cycle” offered by the smugglers had cut the length of the journey from several weeks to “four to seven days.”

The new express bus system’s success would not have been possible in previous eras when the vast majority of migrants were single adults from Mexico whose goal was to avoid getting caught, but is custom made for the booming aspect of unauthorized U.S. migration — parents bringing children.

Since October, U.S. border agents have encountered at least 70 large groups of 100 or more migrants, up from 13 such groups during the 2018 fiscal year. Approximately 12,000 parents and children have arrived in the groups, generating tens of millions of dollars in smuggling fees.

Border arrests had peaked at 1.6 million in 2000 and began to decline, falling to 303,000 in 2017, the lowest point in half a century. But Homeland Security officials say they are on pace to encounter nearly one million unauthorized border crossers during the current fiscal year, as arrests reach their highest level in more than a decade.

U.S. officials call the system “The Conveyor Belt” and have asked Mexican authorities to help stop it. But the conveyor pattern has continued.

A large group of migrants, who arrived as part of the “Conveyor Belt” described in U.S. documents, waits near the Antelope Wells Port of Entry in Hidalgo County, NM


A Guatemalan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the express buses said the United States has been leaning on his government to crack down on the smuggling pipeline. But he said the Trump administration's strategies rely mostly on social media messaging — such as one with the hashtag #NoMigraciónIrregular — but those approaches lack credibility alongside the personal testimonies of friends, relatives and neighbors who have completed the journey safely and with relative ease.

U.S. officials say they have given Mexican authorities specific information on the location of ranches and compounds in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, as well as the names of individuals who appear to be coordinating the buses.

One staging location U.S. law enforcement officials have identified is a property ringed by a seven-foot concrete-block wall close to the center of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, where a fleet of gray buses loads up as many 150 migrants at a time, documents show. A cargo truck loaded with Guatemalan migrants crashed along a highway near the city last week, killing 25, and leaving more than 30 injured, authorities said.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December, has sought a contrast with this predecessor’s immigration policies, promising to be more welcoming to Central American migrants. More quietly, his administration has been cooperating with an experimental U.S. policy to make Central Americans wait in Mexico after filing their U.S. asylum cases, until they are settled in immigration court.

The express-bus "Conveyer Belt"