Underage Teenagers Being Recruited Into Human Smuggling Operations, Texas Sheriff Warns

The United States Flag and Texas State Flag are displayed at Murchison Rogers Park in El Paso, Texas, on June 24, 2021. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images

A recent traffic stop in Texas has brought new attention to how Mexican cartels use underage teenagers to carry out human smuggling operations.

The cartels convince underage teenagers to act as drivers and organizers in the illicit operations and tell them they won’t suffer any real penalties, according to a statement from the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office.

“This is frequently the case, as the U.S. Justice Department [DOJ] tends not to prosecute minors,” the office said in a statement posted to Facebook on Feb. 28. “When [the minors] turn 18, the cartels usually pressure them to transition to more dangerous work, like working as hitmen or drug smugglers and replace them with other children.”

Kinney County is an agricultural community in southwest Texas along the border with Mexico. According to the sheriff’s office, at a traffic stop over the weekend on Ranch Road 3008, a deputy “spotted another vehicle with a load of what appeared to be illegal aliens.”

“About half a dozen illegal aliens, mostly from Mexico” were crammed into the truck, which was driven by a 61-year-old Colombian driver, next to whom sat a 14-year-old boy who came from Mexico but was found to be living in Austin, Texas.

“It turns out the Colombian man was a subcontractor and driver—and the 14-year-old was the shot-caller with the connections,” the office said in the statement. “The Colombian man told authorities that he'd met the boy on a couple of occasions in an Austin laundromat, and at some point told him about how he was having health problems and that money was tight.

“He says the 14-year-old offered him $5,000 to make the trip with him.”

The U.S. Border Patrol later confirmed the man’s allegations about who was in charge.

It isn’t clear what will happen to the teenager in the case.

The sheriff’s office noted that sometimes the DOJ “will return underage smugglers to border cities far away from their homes, as a way to try to inconvenience them.” For example, a Matamoros smuggler might be sent to Juarez, according to the statement.

The Texas Department of Public Safety warned in 2011 that Mexican cartels were seeking to recruit Texas students as young as 11 to support their illicit smuggling operations, whether those involve drugs, humans, or weapons. Then-DPS director Steven McCraw told Reuters at the time that the drug gangs have a chilling name for the recruited young Texans—“the expendables.”

“These [Mexican] Cartels and their operatives are extremely violent, torturing and killing thousands of people in Mexico,” the DPS stated at the time. “They use transnational and Texas prison gangs to further their criminal operations in Mexico and the U.S.”