Revealed: The astonishing secrets and techniques of the cartel individuals smugglers. Corrupt US border officers, how they REALLY smuggle ‘clients’ throughout the border – and why Trump is GOOD for the enterprise

While Donald Trump was being cheered to the rafters by American football fans at the Super Bowl in New Orleans last Sunday, another high-stakes game was quietly being played out 1,000 miles to the west on the Mexican border.

It involved just the sort of shady characters the President has vowed to hunt down in his war on illegal migration: an unscrupulous human trafficker and his two Nicaraguan clients, each of whom had agreed to pay him $30,000 (£24,000) for smuggling them into the United States.

This clandestine operation kicked off on Friday, February 7, two days before the big match, in the Mexican frontier city of Ciudad Juarez, whose ruthless cartels until recently made it the world’s murder capital.

The goal was to sneak the migrants across one of the bridges that spans the Rio Grande – evading the eagle eyes of immigration officers – and touch down in their end zone: El Paso, on the Texas side of the river.

As the Mexican trafficker, nicknamed Memo, told me this week when spilling the secrets of a business that has made him very wealthy, the first part of his plan went smoothly.

Alerted by a contact that two illegals would be landing at a nearby airport, he had collected them in his inconspicuously battered saloon car and given them falsified passports that had belonged to dead US citizens.

Then they had waited for a text from one of two corrupt US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who, so Memo claims, collude with him.

He says this bent agent, stationed at the immigration desk, can manoeuvre a facial recognition camera in the middle of the bridge, where the two countries meet, so that Memo and his charges are not filmed.

‘My guy can only do this for 10 or 20 seconds, so if he says you must pass by the camera at 10.30, it must be exactly 10.30, not 10.29 or 10.31,’ he rasps, a burly hustler straight from central casting with his crude humour, peaked leather cap, and shades.

When they reached passport control, another of the officers with whom Memo is ‘friendly’ waved them through, without checking their documents.

Now they were in El Paso. The final hurdle was to pass one of several internal immigration checkpoints on a highway inside the US.

Memo drove them there in a waiting rental car (stopping off for a McDonald’s) where, he claims, he placed them in the charge of a second corrupt CBP agent in his pay.

This man had fixed their transport to a small airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from which they vanished to who knows where, beginning their new life among the United States’s estimated 11.7 million illegal aliens.

After escorting his customers across the border, Memo usually returns to Mexico the same day, nodded back through immigration by his co-operative American amigos. Last weekend, though, he says he was tipped off that they had been replaced by zealous new CBP officers likely to make rigorous checks.

The word was, Memo says, that these ‘untouchables’ had been sent because, in a sector of the border where an astonishing 427,000 illegals crossed into the US in 2023, the old guard were failing to meet Trump’s target of turning back 1,000 every day.

It was here that the Super Bowl, America’s showpiece sporting occasion, came in rather handy.

Gauging that even the most zealous border officers would be glued to the game, along with more than a third of the US’s 345 million population, Memo laid low for two days until Sunday evening when the game kicked off.

Then, as the agents watched the action on their mobile phones, he sauntered past them untroubled. By now you may wonder why anyone embroiled in this scam would give up his secrets so readily.

Indeed, after the first of our meetings this week, I wondered whether he was for real. However, several sources in Juarez, including a Left-wing politician who knows Memo well, vouched for his authenticity. And corruption clearly exists within the US border force.

Last Saturday, FBI agents arrested CBP officer Manuel Perez Jr, 32, for allegedly facilitating people and drug trafficking over the Paso del Norte bridge between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. At least one other officer working there has reportedly been charged with similar offences in recent months.

Fancifully, we might think, Memo insists he is no criminal. Knocking back a tequila, he tells me he is providing a valuable service, both to America, which relies on migrants to do low-paid jobs, and to the migrants, who are seeking a better life.

The immorality of exploiting desperate people seems to escape him.

In the month since Trump took office and launched his crackdown, his fees have doubled because, he says, with thousands of troops deployed to the border to bolster surveillance and arrests, his task has become harder.

Added to which, the number of people willing to risk crossing into Trump’s new America, where Immigration and Customs squads are unceremoniously rounding up illegals, has greatly diminished. When Joe Biden was in office, this climate of fear didn’t exist.

‘It’s simple economics – supply and demand,’ he smiles, when I ask how he can justify bumping up his fees to an eyewatering $30,000. 

‘And I must split that equally with my two partners. Also, I provide a VIP service. I’m not one of these coyotes [cartel smugglers named after the prairie dogs who scavenge along the border]. I don’t run my customers through the desert at night or make them go through tunnels and wade through the river. I guarantee a successful, safe passage.’

Perhaps so. However, in the next rasping breath, Memo, now aged 73, boasts of making many millions during his 50-year trafficking career, which began when he learned the ropes from his father, aged 12. His earnings have bought him two restaurants, one in Juarez, the other in Puerto Vallarta – the Pacific coast resort where Richard Burton fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor – as well as two boats moored there.

They have also paid for his children to be expensively educated in America; bought lavish gifts for his younger girlfriends; and, he says, provided his ex-wife with ‘everything she wants’.

That Trump’s crackdown is further lining smugglers’ profits is, we might think, something of an irony. The fact that resourceful characters such as Memo are still exploiting the system with relative ease must also be cause for concern.

Yet according to border control officers I met this week, Trump’s hardline strategy is already taking effect.

According to Landon Hutchens, a spokesman for US Customs and Border Protection, illegal migrant arrests in the El Paso sector peaked in 2023 at 2,700 every day. Now fewer than 100 are apprehended.

Nonetheless, the cartels haven’t gone away. As we spoke, at a notorious smuggling point where a 30ft steel border fence abruptly ends, allowing migrants to scramble into the state of New Mexico over Mount Cristo Rey, our every move was monitored by a watchman and relayed to gang bosses.

We were in Anapra, a shantytown just west of Ciudad Juarez known to be controlled by a particularly violent cartel known as La Empresa (Spanish for ‘The Company’) whose murder victims are sometimes sacrificed to Santa Muerte, the personification of death herself.

A glass-fronted shrine to this sinister Latin American cult deity, adorned with elaborately dressed skeleton statues, is built into the wall of a cartel house beside the border fence.

Some of the most vicious cartel members are women. Last year, in a raid on an El Paso motel room being used as a stash house for drugs and weapons, the FBI arrested illegal Mexican migrant Michelle Angelica Pineda, 22, the alleged queen of a gang that cut the hearts out of dismembered victims and offered them as a sacrifice to La Santa Muerte. She was deported to Mexico and is now awaiting trial for at least five murders.

In recent days, the wide-open stretch of desert through which La Empresa has for decades been smuggling people into America has been plugged by X-shaped steel barriers like those used to stop tanks during the D-Day landings. The US officers who patrol the border gave me a chilling insight into the gang’s operation, which also involves moving drugs and weapons across the border, and the trafficking of women for sex.

When migrant families can’t pay their debts, females and even children are often put to work in brothels, CBP spokesman Hutchens told me.

As a result, Mexico is the world capital of sex-trafficking, he said. Other victims of this vile trade have been found decapitated or partially dissolved in acid baths.

‘The American dream, as everybody calls it, has become a nightmare (for many illegal migrants),’ agrees border patrol agent Claudio Herrera, a Mexican by birth who migrated to the US through the legal channel.

Last year, he says, his unit rescued 980 illegals, many of whom had been dumped just across the border by the unscrupulous cartels and abandoned to their fate in a desert home to rattlesnakes and mountain lions.

Some the border agents saved from drowning as they tried to swim across irrigation canals with a powerful downward pull designed to maintain the flow of water. But in the El Paso section alone, 176 people died trying to make the crossing, the majority from dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Others who were picked up reported having been raped and robbed after paying fees for their passage.

Another sickening cartel tactic is to tell parents to scrawl contact details on their infant children’s clothes or bare tummies, then send them across the border alone – assuring them that minors are well-treated by the US authorities and lying that they will be permitted to join them.

‘We find two and three-year-olds with just basic information written on their shirt or skin. They don’t even know how to talk, and of course they feel afraid,’ says Herrera. ‘That hurts us. Why would you put your child in this position?’

Though the smuggler who told me his story, Memo, insists he operates independently of the cartels, and has no truck with their ruthless methods, the officers dismiss this claim.

‘He can say he’s a businessman. That’s his opinion. That’s his prerogative,’ said US border patrol agent Orlando Marrero-Rubio. ‘But in this area, nobody works for themselves. Nobody is a freelancer. They all belong to and pay their fees to the cartel.’

Another flaw in Memo’s ‘good guy’ claim is that he can have no idea what becomes of his customers after he drops them in America. As Hutchens says, illegals are often exploited by bosses in the US who treat them badly and pay them a pittance, leaving them in thrall to the traffickers. ‘It’s a very thin line between human smuggling, forced labour, debt bondage, and sex trafficking,’ says Hutchens.

‘In Texas we have a saying – putting lipstick on a pig. That’s what this guy [Memo] is doing. He has obviously admitted to exploiting these illegal migrants. He doesn’t care what happens to them on the other side.

‘Human smuggling is a multi-billion dollar business for the cartels. But a lot of these migrants pay thousands of dollars to be smuggled over, only to find themselves taken into custody, or sent back to their own countries, with nothing to show for themselves but pain and sorrow.’

The merciless cartels operate all along the US-Mexican border, which stretches 1,954 miles from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico (or the Gulf of America, as Trump has preposterously renamed it).

Hutchens says that they pose ‘a greater threat to national security than ISIS or Al Qaeda [because] they kill more Americans on US soil’. That is why, he explains, they have been designated as terrorist organisations.

The most notorious, the Sinaloa cartel, is flooding US cities with fentanyl, a drug 100 times more powerful than heroin, made in Mexican ‘kitchens’ using chemicals shipped in from China. If Mexico is to avoid punitive trade tariffs, Trump insists its government must stop the flow.

It will be an enormous task. This mafia has turned their home state of Sinaloa, in the northwest of Mexico, into one of the most dangerous places in Latin America, kidnapping and extorting outsiders and murdering soldiers attempting to hunt them down.

In a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juarez run by a Methodist minister, Jose and Joselin Enriques, a young Ecuadorian couple who travelled 3,000 miles to the border with their two-year-old daughter Scarlett, are hoping for a better life in America. They told me how they had been stopped at a fake roadblock mounted by Sinaloa gang members posing as police officers who severely beat Jose and stole all their savings.

En route to the border, they had secured an appointment with US immigration officers using a US customs and border patrol app and hoped to plead their case for asylum. That meeting had been scheduled for January 21.

The previous day, however, Trump took office and ordered the app to be disconnected. So now Jose, 21, his 19-year-old wife and their daughter are in limbo.

Many might say they were foolish to leave Ecuador with no guarantee of entering the US.

But their days in the hostel are numbered, and watching them sit forlornly on their bunkbeds, it was impossible not to pity them. These are precisely the sort of desperate people the cartels prey upon.

The scale of Trump’s migration war becomes apparent when you visit the vast border, with its 50 official crossing points. Beside it, the small boats crisis in the English Channel seems relatively trifling.

At the beginning of his first term, Trump famously pledged to build a ‘big, beautiful wall’ for which Mexico would pay.

When he reluctantly left office in January 2021, he claimed to have erected barriers stretching for nearly 500 miles – about a quarter of the border’s length, a project which cost America billions and caused a bitter political impasse that had temporarily shut down the Washington government.

However, many of those barriers were not new – they were existing ones that had been reinforced and heightened. Nor are they made of bricks, as Trump’s declaration suggested.

They are fences, made either from steel bars, between 18ft and 30ft high, which cost a colossal $20million (£16million) per mile to mount, or wire mesh, through which human-sized holes have been cut with relative ease.

But in many places, there are no barriers, and I could wander back and forth between the two countries. I’d probably have been arrested if I’d walked very far into America.

Though Trump is deploying 5,000 extra troops to the border, they can’t be everywhere.

Evidently alarmed by Trump’s threat of tariffs, Mexico’s Left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum has also sent 10,000 National Guards to her side of the line.

For many years, the multitudes of Mexicans who cross into El Paso each day to work, shop, and go to school were seldom checked. Inevitably, some never returned.

But this week, I watched black-masked Mexican soldiers frisk pedestrians and flag down drivers at machine-gun point to search their vehicles and sweep them with metal detectors.

‘It’s part of the new strategy agreed between our president and Mr Trump for us to look for fentanyl and illegal migrants,’ a young corporal told me earnestly. 

‘Everything is more intense now Trump’s here, and I think that is how it should be. For a long time Mexico, to our shame, allowed our criminals to have it easy. I’m glad we are trying to fix it.’

In this edgy city, at least, they seem to be doing just that. Had I visited Juarez a few months ago, locals tell me, I would have seen many people wading across the shallow, polluted Rio Grande and trying to scale the fence.

However, the only would-be interlopers I saw this week were three young men who crept along a railway track leading to El Paso but, seeing the impossibility of surmounting the barrier across it, quickly retreated.

Whether or not Trump’s tough stance will seal this untamed frontier remains to be seen.

But as he awaits his next big payday, Memo is convinced nothing will end the trade that has brought misery to millions and made him rich.

‘Migration is all about money for everybody involved, and it will never stop,’ he says.

Chuckling, he adds: ‘It doesn’t matter how high Trump makes his wall, the Mexicans will just find an even longer ladder.’

Or, in Memo’s case, pay the right people to look the other way – and stroll across the bridge.