Washington, D.C. (July 7, 2021) – A Center for Immigration Studies three-part investigative report examines the human-smuggling conveyor belt that runs from South America, through Panama and Costa Rica on up through Mexico. A CIS expert joined smugglers, including uniformed Nicaraguan soldiers, as they directed their clients through the smuggling route, and he interviewed the migrants about their motivations, fears, and expectations.
“Extra-continentals” – including people from Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Russia, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and dozens of other countries – represent a growing percentage of those coming to the U.S. border. Significant numbers of Haitians are also en route to the U.S. although their trip does not originate from Haiti, but rather Brazil and Chile, where large numbers have resided for many years in relative safety.
After a ten-day visit to Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow and author of the report, said, “The significance of this extra-continental flow is that it ferries inherent national security risks from Muslim-majority nations where violent Islamic extremism is rampant. The migrants also are coming now from sub-Saharan African nations rife with war criminals and brutal tribal militias that commit atrocious human rights violations. At issue with this species of migration is that any criminal histories, violent backgrounds, and purported persecution stories are rarely discoverable by U.S. homeland security agencies.”
What Bensman saw on the ground validates recent data. The latest CBP statistics show that more than one in five migrants encountered by the agency in May 2021 was not from Mexico or the Northern Triangle of Central America. They totaled more than 40,000, over double the number in May 2019, before the pandemic, and accounted for 22 percent of the total, compared to just 12 percent in May 2019.
A United Nations Mass Illegal Immigration
Bensman’s many interviews led him to conclude, “President Biden’s immigration policies are inducing individuals who otherwise would not have done it to undertake the extremely dangerous trek to the U.S. For example, many Haitians have cited as a reason for their immigration decisions the Biden administration’s policy of swiftly de facto legalizing family units after they illegally cross the southern border.”
In one unofficial smuggling hamlet in northern Costa Rica run by two competing criminal gangs that move people and contraband, called La Trocha (The Shortcut), everyone in the town makes their living moving migrants. It is “a well-oiled smuggling assembly line” up to the U.S. border, Bensman said. “And, for the time being, the Costa Rica-Nicaragua bottleneck remains invisible enough that smugglers feel fairly comfortable operating and discussing their conveyor belt openly with little fear of repercussions.”
Biden administration officials have yet to mention or discuss extra-continental traffic, either unaware that it is happening, uninterested, or averse to drawing attention to it.
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