Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said in an Aug. 9 tweet that current border policies "continue to enable the Mexican cartels." The cartels control who enters the country and are even taking advantage of the CBP One app, Green said.
“No one goes across our southern border without approval and a remittance to the drug cartels,” Green said. "[The cartels] are making around $13-14 billion a year charging fees for human trafficking,” he said in a video he posted in his tweet. “In the case of Chinese nationals, it’s $50,000 a person."
“The actions of Secretary Mayorkas continue to enable the Mexican cartels," Green said.
Mexico is allowing those with an appointment on the CBP One app to pass through to the U.S. almost as if CPB One were temporary transit visas, the Washington Examiner said. However, the newspaper said, cartels have taken over the app and are charging to allow immigrants to make an appointment from anywhere in the world, not just the northern Mexico geofence the app has set up.
Cartels offer immigrants a service that gives them access to the CPB One app through a virtual private network (VPN), the Examiner said. A VPN redirects a device's internet connection through a private network, allowing the user to declare a location at any server the VPN owns, effectively masking the user's location and making it impossible for the app to determine whether the individual is actually in northern Mexico, the newspaper said.
Chad Wolf, former acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, blames the CBP app for increases in border crossings, he told the Washington Examiner. "As the administration continues to put these 'legal pathways' into place, that's music to the cartel's ears."
Cartels have been promoting their new VPNs on social media publicly in Mexico and make $3,000 to $50,000 depending on the distance traveled by the border-crossing person, the Examiner said. The CBP app may be a part of the 30% increase in encounters that were seen in July, up from May and June, since it has given new hope to migrants from outside Mexico, the story said.
Fees charged by cartels to migrants attempting to cross the border can vary from $4,000 to $20,000, a George Mason University professor, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an expert on smuggling at George Mason University, told the New York Times.
The story said a man named Teófilo Valencia said he had taken out a loan against the family home to pay smugglers $10,000 for each of his two sons' transport. They were found deceased in the back of an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio in June, along with 51 other victims, the news story said.
Many migrants continue to be "in debt to the cartel" even after successfully entering the U.S. and take years to pay off the fees, Yuma County, AZ, Supervisor Jonathan Lines told Fox News.
Surveillance cameras captured images of individuals believed to be cartel gunmen, moving through underbrush on Aug. 5, armed with rifles and wearing body armor, in the Fronton region of the southern border of Texas, an Aug. 8 Fox News article said.
The Fox article, citing law enforcement insiders, said cameras in the Fronton region captured images of three men on Saturday evening, seen traversing through the underbrush while armed with rifles and wearing body armor. Border Patrol agents and the Border Patrol's BORTAC tactical unit were sent to the site but didn't find anyone, Fox said.
The United States-Mexico border situation is viewed as a "crisis" by 39% of Americans, while 33% see it as a "major problem," 22% perceive it as a "minor problem," and 5% consider it "not a problem," a July 14 Gallup poll said.
