Cartels Are Shifting From Smuggling Drugs to Smuggling People. Anti-Smuggling Unit Explains Why.

The border is “open,” according to Detective Shawn Wilson. Despite working 80 miles from the border of Mexico in the Tucson Sector of Arizona, Wilson, a member of the Pinal County Anti-Smuggling Unit, regularly encounters illegal aliens and smugglers passing through the county.

Wilson says the smugglers’ strategy has changed in recent years.

Over the last few years, “human smuggling has increased dramatically,” Wilson told The Daily Signal during a recent ride-along. “Before, you’d see … a little bit [of] human smuggling and mainly marijuana. But now there’s hardly any marijuana or drugs, and it’s mainly human smuggling.”

At least two incentives are driving the change, according to Wilson: money and police penalties.

“People want to come and the cartels, and people down in Mexico who are making the money, they see the opportunity to increase their annual income,” he said. There are also less severe prison terms or penalties for smuggling people “than if you were smuggling methamphetamine or fentanyl,” the detective explained, “so there’s a lot less risk to it and a lot more money.”

The cartels “contract” drivers to pick illegal aliens up at the border and drive them into the interior of the U.S., Deputy Sheriff Mark Terry, who also serves on the Pinal County Anti-Smuggling Unit, told The Daily Signal.

The cartels “go on social media and they’ll basically put a job offering a certain amount of money to just take people from point A to point B,” Terry said. “That money can go for between $500 per person to $1,000 per person.”

When Terry and Wilson pull over vehicles in Pinal County they suspect might be involved in human smuggling, they often encounter illegal aliens from all over the world.

Nationals from Pakistan, Iraq, and India represent a sampling of the aliens officers have encountered being smuggled through their county.

Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb told The Daily Signal in an interview that “the cartels are very savvy to what politics are in the country” because their “business” is affected by it.

“These are billion-dollar businesses,” Lamb said of the cartels, adding that in the same way a “business like Amazon or Walmart” takes politics into account, the cartels do as well.

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