Investigation reveals 19,000 migrant smuggling trips in Mexico in the last 5 years

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) counts 19,000 migrants who crossed Mexico camouflaged in cargo trucks between 2018 and 2023, during part of the six-year term of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to a report released this Thursday.

This is revealed in the report ‘From Chiapas to Tamaulipas, a new database maps thousands of dangerous trips made by migrants throughout Mexico in trailer trucks’, prepared in collaboration with the television program Noticias Telemundo and the Latin American Center for Journalist Investigation (CLIP), among other organizations.

“The reporters also created a database listing more than 170 trucks that transported migrants and that were inspected, detained, accidented or abandoned between 2018 and 2023″, breaks down the article.

In this period, “about 19,000 people, including more than 3,200 minors, were traveling in the trucks” iidentified thanks, mainly, to public reports, news in the media and reports from a support group.

However, the ICIJ adds that, due to the “variant quality of the information” and the late official records, the Mexican Government began to count cases in 2022, “the data only reveal a small portion of this human smuggling.”

The report features the testimony of people who survived a trip of this nature to reach the border with the United States, as well as defenders of the rights of migrants and officials of the Mexican Government.

According to these figures, 111 migrants among those identified died due to exposure to high temperatures or lack of oxygen.

The organization exposes cases that illustrate this reality: in March 2019, a trailer with 80 migrants inside overturned in the southern state of Chiapas, causing the death of 23 of them, and, in 2022, the authorities rescued an abandoned truck in the state of Coahuila (north) with 64 people inside, who did not have access to water or ventilation.

In this sense, the ICIJ warns that Organized crime operates “with impunity,” even though the freight transportation industry should be “heavily regulated.”

“Today, it is estimated that the smuggling business generates billions of dollars a year for the cartels,” he denounces.

Mexico, a “vertical border”

The report defines Mexico as a “vertical border,” in the words of the director of the Institute for Women in Migration, Gretchen Kuhner, since immigration inspections not only occur at entry points to the country, but “can happen anywhere”.

“In 2022, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation declared this practice unconstitutional after three racially discriminated against indigenous brothers sued, but this did not stop the phenomenon,” the text adds.

For Kuhner, this is one of the reasons that leads migrants to seek other “clandestine” ways to travel, which also allows organized crime that traffics people to “flourish” because it offers them to “dodge” immigration controls.

The push towards “dangerous and often deadly” ways of migrating was also favored by the “toughening” of the immigration policies of the Mexican Government, headed by López Obrador since 2018, in response to “pressure” from the United States.

Although at first The current authorities were characterized by “granting thousands of humanitarian visas” to migrants, the trend was quickly reversed.

“He (López Obrador) soon changed course under pressure from the (Donald) Trump administration, which threatened to increase tariffs on Mexican imports,” he laments.

Keep reading:

• Democratic congressmen push for the so-called DACA for workers so that undocumented immigrants can report abuses
• They seek to protect workers who suffer retaliation for reporting abuses
• Undocumented workers ask to extend protections for victims of labor abuse