When Vice President Kamala Harris visited Mexico last year, she cited poverty, crime, and political instability as “root causes” driving millions of migrants to cross the U.S. border.
Criminal organizations, these experts say, have stoked rampant corruption, especially in Mexico, as they pay bribes to police and other local officials to ease passage of their cargo. The migrants themselves are prey to gangster elements that, according to one account, leaves more than two-thirds of them victims of crime and nearly one-third of the women subjected to sexual assaults.
“Mexico is probably one of the most dangerous places for the transit of migrants,” said Dr. Juan Luis Hernandez Avendano, rector of the Ibero-American University of Torreon-Monterrey-Saltillo, who has been an outspoken critic of the surging corruption in his country.
“And despite this, the routes to enter the United States continue to be fed not only by Central Americans, but increasingly by Caribbeans, and according to reports from the Jesuit Migrant Service, more Asians and Africans,” Avendano told RealClearInvestigations. “In effect, we are experiencing a humanitarian crisis, since they are not only extorted by the cartels, but also subjected to labor and sexual slavery. It has gotten worse because Venezuelan migration has joined” the human tide.
Avendano has been sharply critical of the situation for years, going so far this year as to declare swaths of Mexico “failed states” for the inability of authorities to protect native Mexicans and illegal immigrants, and the increasing corruption and unreliability of federal forces and local authorities.
While much attention in the United States has focused on the problem caused by migrants at the border, Avendano is part of a growing chorus of people who say the Biden administration’s policies are exacerbating problems to the south. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Encounters with illegal immigrants are up 37 percent in 2022 from 2021, and to date more than 3 million have crossed into the United States since Biden’s inauguration. To put that number in perspective, the total number of illegal immigrants under Biden would top Chicago’s population to become the 3rd largest city in the U.S. The border crossers would constitute the union’s 34th largest state, exceeding the population of Mississippi and nearly equaling that of Arkansas.
Although the administration has claimed that the border is secure and that it has told migrants not to come to America, it has instituted many policies they see as welcoming. This began on President Biden’s first day in office, when he declared that no one would be deported for 100 days.
Most recently, the route to the United States for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants begins in Venezuela, a country rich in oil and natural resources but impoverished by more than two decades under the governance of a socialist military dictatorship.
Today thousands of Venezuelans just beginning the trek occupy makeshift camps along streets in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, with flags proclaiming their home country and signs begging for money and food.
“It’s shocking—there are families on the streets here with kids,” said Roberto Leiton, a U.S.-based businessman with operations in Costa Rica. “There’s thousands of them; my wife was crying as we drove by and we went to the supermarket to get bags of food. But they have no money, they’re going to have to steal—something is going to happen.”
Just how countries north of Costa Rica are coping with the human rivers transiting them can be difficult to gauge.
Not everyone familiar with the situation thinks the massive increase in illegal immigration spells worse conditions for those making the arduous trek. In some cases, the increase has made the process more purely transactional for groups profiting handsomely from the torrent and thus, oddly, made it safer.
“Things have changed a lot and the violence has been transformed,” said Guadelupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University who researches border issues and has written about the Zetas, the defunct Mexican criminal organization that infamously massacred some 300 people in Allende in 2011.
“Kidnapping is still an issue, but I have not heard the stories I heard in previous years and I don’t think they are doing now what they did four or five years ago,” Correa-Cabrera said. “Some rapes and violence have continued but not the shocking bloodshed we saw previously.”
As recently as last July, however, non-governmental organizations and individuals concerned about the situation throughout Central America were decrying what Doctors Without Borders first described as “a humanitarian crisis” in a 2017 report. That report, derived from verbal questionnaires the group did with illegal immigrants at its Mexico treatment stations, concluded that more than two-thirds of those making the trek had been victimized by criminals and nearly one-third of the women had been sexually assaulted. Doctors Without Borders declined to speak with RealClearInvestigations.
The letter cited more than 10,000 cases of “kidnapping and other brutal attacks” in Mexico, where since 2020 “organizations have documented deeply concerning incidents of members of Mexico’s National Guard and the National Migration Institute (INM) beating Black migrants, separating families, and utilizing excessive force towards migrants along Mexico’s southern border.”
The solutions proposed in the letter were more streamlined and open border policies, as “enforcement-centric policies fuel violence and attacks towards migrants, increase humanitarian crises at our borders, and enable smugglers and traffickers to prey on migrants,” according to the letter.
RCI reached out to more than a dozen signatories to the letter, but only the Washington Office on Latin America responded. In July, it produced a report on deplorable conditions for immigrants in Tapachula, Mexico, near the border with Guatemala. A humanitarian crisis is unfolding there in what immigrants dub a “prison city,” according to Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico and an author of the report.
“You can try to stop it or move it around, but that simply leads to a dip or a reconfiguration of the migration routes,” Brewer said.
U.S. taxpayers have contributed to aid programs for immigrants in Mexico, contributing more than $38.7 million, or 77 percent, of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees budget in that country in 2021. Despite such contributions, Brewer echoed Vice President Harris’ view in pointing to “root causes,” arguing that those moving toward the United States are driven by the crime-riddled and poverty-stricken pockets of their native Latin American countries. “The push factors outweigh the pull factors in the decision to leave,” she said.
Nevertheless, such attention has yielded no dividends. That is evident not only in the ever-increasing numbers of illegal immigrants pouring across the southern border but in Central American capitals, too.
Todd Bensman, who for two years has reported from various hotspots along Central American immigration caravan routes for the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said he always asks immigrants what they have seen along the way. The images they show him on their phones—of corpses, some of them of pregnant women clutching their dead infants—has convinced him the surge in traffic is something close to an international crime.
“There’s most definitely a lot of blood on the hands of the Biden administration for opening the Southern border on purpose, and not to know what will happen and then how to deal with it,” Bensman told RCI. “Untold numbers of people are dead.”
