Following reports, the number of Chinese nationals crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are increasing and ties between Chinese criminals and drug cartels are coming to light.

In an interview with Federal Newswire, Sebastian Rotella, senior reporter at ProPublica, makes note of how Chinese organized crime organizations and Mexican drug cartels are working in tandem to launder the drug money made in the United States. There are also ties between the Chinese and Mexican criminal organizations working to smuggle drugs and people across the U.S.-Mexico border. There is also overlap between the cartels and Chinese businessmen.

Rotella also makes note of Xizhi Li, a Chinese-Mexican-American gangster who has ties to both the Chinese and Mexican criminal undergrounds, and has been involved in operations of smuggling Chinese migrants into the United States.

“This is going back to the late 80s, early 90s but smuggling of Chinese migrants through Cuba to Mexico and into the United States and through other routes,” Rotella said, when asked about Xizhi Li in an interview. “Using things like border tunnels and planes and things like that, he was quite involved in sophisticated and multiple forms of drug smuggling and people smuggling." 

The U.S.-Mexico border has been a point of entry for illegal Chinese immigrants for decades, usually being smuggled in by Chinese criminal organizations, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Officials and U.S. Border Patrol have reported an uptick in Chinese nationals crossing the southern border. So far this fiscal year, 1,667 Chinese nationals have been apprehended at the southern border, News Nation reported. The Rio Grande Valley region of Texas has the most apprehensions of Chinese migrants out of anywhere in the United States.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there were over 4,000 Chinese migrants who had encounters with border patrol officials after crossing the southern border illegally between October 2022 to February 2023, compared to just over 400 from the same time frame in 2021 to 2022, as reported by Voice of America.

Chinese migrants are granted asylum at a rate of 58%, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. This is much higher than the numbers from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where migrants are granted asylum at rates of around 9 to 11%.

Data from the Migration Policy Institute shows that as of 2019, about 390,000 Chinese immigrants in the United States were unauthorized, about 4% of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States.