CARRIZO SPRINGS, Texas – From the street, the little brown house was unusual, but pleasant. A bright yellow school bus and red truck hung from the hog wire fence, and the facade of the house featured a large lone star from Texas. But in the backyard was a dilapidated mobile home that a prosecutor later described as a “house of horrors.”
It was discovered one day in 2014, when a man called from Maryland to report that his stepfather, Moises Ferrera, an immigrant from Honduras, was being held there and tortured by smugglers who had brought him to the United States. His captors wanted more money, the stepfather said, and were hitting Mr. Ferrera’s hands repeatedly with a hammer, vowing to continue until his family delivered.
When federal agents and sheriff’s deputies descended on the home, they discovered that Mr. Ferrara was not the only victim. Smugglers had held hundreds of migrants for ransom there, their investigation found. They had mutilated limbs and raped women.
“What happened there is the stuff of science fiction, of a horror movie — and something that we just don’t see in the United States,” prosecutor Matthew Watters told a jury when the accused smugglers went on trial. Organized crime cartels, he said, “had taken this terror across the border.”
But if it was one of the first such cases, it was not the last. Migrant smuggling at the US southern border has evolved over the past 10 years from a scattered network of independent “coyotes” into a multibillion-dollar international business controlled by organized crime, including some of the world’s most violent cartels. drugs in Mexico.
The deaths of 53 migrants in San Antonio last month who were crammed into the back of a tractor trailer with no air conditioning — the country’s deadliest smuggling incident to date — came as the tightening of U.S. border restrictions- of, exacerbated by a pandemic-related public. health rule, have encouraged more migrants to turn to smugglers.
While migrants have long faced kidnappings and extortion in Mexican border towns, such incidents have been on the rise on the US side, according to federal authorities.
More than 5,046 people were arrested and charged with human smuggling last year, up from 2,762 in 2014.
Over the past year, federal agents have raided the shelters that held dozens of immigrants almost every day.
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Title 42, the public health order introduced by the Trump administration at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, has authorized the immediate deportation of those caught crossing the border illegally, allowing migrants to cross repeatedly in the hope that they will eventually have success. That has led to a significant escalation in the number of encounters with immigrants at the border — 1.7 million in fiscal year 2021 — and brisk business for smugglers.
In March, agents near El Paso rescued 34 migrants from two airless cargo containers in a single day. The following month, 24 people held against their will were found in a secret house.
Law enforcement agents have engaged in so many high-speed pursuits of smugglers recently in Uvalde, Texas — there were about 50 such “rescues” in the city between February and May — that some school employees said they failed to took a lockdown order seriously during a mass killing in May because so many previous lockdowns had been ordered when smugglers ran through the streets.
Teófilo Valencia, whose 17- and 19-year-old sons died in the San Antonio tragedy, said he took out a loan against the family’s home to pay smugglers $10,000 to transport each boy.
Fees typically range from $4,000 for migrants coming from Latin America to $20,000 if they have to move from Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a smuggling expert at George Mason University.
For years, the independent coyotes paid the cartels a tax to move immigrants through the territory they controlled along the border, and the criminal syndicates stuck to their traditional line of business, drug smuggling, which was much more profitable.
That began to change around 2019, Patrick Lechleitner, acting deputy director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Congress last year. The sheer number of people seeking to cross made migrant smuggling an irresistible money maker for some cartels, he said.
Enterprises have teams specializing in logistics, transportation, surveillance, secret houses and accounting — all supporting an industry whose revenue has grown to about $13 billion today from $500 million in 2018, according to Homeland Security Investigations, the agency federal agency that investigates such cases. .
Migrants travel by plane, bus and private vehicles. In some border regions, such as the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, smugglers place color-coded bands on migrants’ wrists to identify who they belong to and what services they are receiving.
“They are organizing goods in ways that you could never have imagined five or 10 years ago,” said Ms. Correa-Cabrera.
Groups of Central American families who recently crossed the Rio Grande in La Joya, Texas, wore blue bracelets with the Gulf Cartel logo, a dolphin and the word “entregas” or “surrender” — meaning they intended to hand over to the U.S. . authorities and seek asylum. Once they had crossed the river, they were no longer the cartel’s business.
Previously, migrants entering Laredo, Texas, crossed the river on their own and faded into the dense urban landscape. Now, according to interviews with immigrants and law enforcement officials, it’s impossible to get by without paying a coyote affiliated with the Cartel del Noreste, part of the Los Zetas syndicate.
Smugglers often recruit teenagers to transport newcomers to hideaways in working-class neighborhoods. After rounding up a few dozen people, they load the immigrants into trucks parked in Laredo’s sprawling warehouse district around Killam Industrial Boulevard.
“Drivers are recruited in bars, at truck stops,” said Timothy Tubbs, who was deputy special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for Laredo until he retired in January.
Trains carrying immigrants mingle with the 20,000 trucks that travel daily on I-35 to and from Laredo, the nation’s busiest land port. Border Patrol agents stationed at checkpoints inspect only a portion of all vehicles to ensure traffic continues to flow.
The tractor-trailer discovered June 27 with its tragic cargo had passed through a checkpoint about 30 miles north of Laredo without arousing suspicion. By the time it stopped three hours later on a remote road in San Antonio, most of the 64 people inside were already dead.
The driver, Homero Zamorano Jr., one of two people indicted Thursday in connection with the tragedy, said he was unaware the air conditioning system had failed.
The 2014 Texas hideout incident resulted in the arrest of the perpetrators and a subsequent trial, providing an extremely vivid look at the brutal tactics of smuggling operations. Although kidnappings and extortions occur with some frequency, such trials with cooperating witnesses are relatively rare, federal law enforcement officials say. Fearing deportation, undocumented relatives of kidnapped migrants rarely call authorities.
This case began in the thick country eight miles from the Rio Grande, at Carrizo Springs, a popular transit point for people trying to avoid detection. “You could hide a million elephants in here, this brush is so thick,” said Jerry Martinez, a captain with the Dimmit County Sheriff’s Office.
Torture victim Mr. Ferrera, 54, first immigrated to the United States in 1993, going to construction sites in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where he earned more than 10 times what he earned in Honduras. He returned home a few years later.
“In those days, you didn’t need a coyote,” he said in an interview from his home in Maryland. “I’ve come and gone several times.”
When he set out in early 2014, Mr Ferrera knew he would have to hire a smuggler to break the border. In Piedras Negras, Mexico, a man promised to guide him to Houston. Mr Ferrera’s son, Mario Pena, said he sent $1,500 as payment.
After arriving in Texas, Mr. Ferrera and several other immigrants were delivered to the trailer in Carrizo Springs.
Before long, Mr. Ferrera’s stepfather received a call demanding an additional $3,500. He said he had no more money.
The calls became frequent and threatening, Mr. Pena recalls in an interview; the smugglers let him hear the sound of his uncle’s screams and moans as a hammer came down on his fingers.
Mr. Pena managed to transfer $2,000 via Western Union, he said, but when the captors realized they could not collect the money because it was Sunday, they intensified their attacks.
Mr. Pena called 911.
According to the testimony of one of the agents, Jonathan Bonds, law enforcement agents found Mr. Ferrera in the trailer “heavily, severely physically injured, with a lot of blood all over him, lying on a couch.”
Another migrant, stripped down to his underwear, was writhing in pain, his bare hand up, in the front bedroom. In the back bedroom, the agents encountered a nude woman, another immigrant, who had just been raped by a smuggler who emerged naked from the bathroom.
The owner of the house, Eduardo Rocha Sr., who went by Lalo and was identified as the head of the smuggling ring, was arrested along with several others, including his son, Eduardo Rocha Jr. The youngest Mr. Rocha testified that their cell was connected. with the Los Zetas cartel and that over two years he had sent hundreds of immigrants to the United States and collected hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Elder Mr. Rocha was sentenced to life in prison. His son and the man who had carried out most of the physical abuse received sentences of 15 and 20 years.
Mr. Ferrera testified at their trial. As a crime victim who had assisted law enforcement, he was allowed to remain in the United States. But his new life had come at a cost, which he displayed when he raised his right arm to the jury, the fingers now lifeless. “This is how my hand ended up,” he said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed to research.
