by Frank Holmes, reporter
As President Joe Biden’s border officials promise to get tough on illegal crossings from Mexico, international drug cartels are laughing all the way to the bank.
While Americans struggle with spiking prices on food, gasoline, and other life basic needs caused by Bidenflation, human traffickers are thriving.
The Biden administration offers so little opposition to human smugglers, who bring illegal aliens from all over the world into the United States, that the syndicates have raised their prices and changed their entire business model, experts say.
“This administration has been a windfall for them,” former Border Patrol chief Ronald Vitiello told The Washington Times. “It’s completely changed their revenue stream.”
Human smugglers raked in $20 billion more money over the last 12 calendar months compared to the previous year, according to an analysis from The Washington Times.
In the last year, the number of illegal aliens nabbed at the border has more than quadrupled, while the prices desperate illegals from all over the world pay to enter the U.S. rose an estimated 20 percent per crossing.
Higher demand plus higher prices equals bigger profits for the cartels. Let’s break it down.
During the 2019 fiscal year—the last full year of the Trump administration—law enforcement officials apprehended 32,489 illegal aliens from Mexico; each one paid human smugglers an average of $7,500. Compare that to the first nine months of this fiscal year. After a few years of Biden’s incompetence, agents in two border sectors of Arizona caught 146,121 Mexicans, and the average pay-off to the coyotes soared to $9,000 a head.
Others from Guatemala reported paying well in excess of $10,000 a piece.
That’s chicken feed compared to some of the prices extorted by smugglers. A woman from China named Yanshua Su paid human traffickers $42,000 to get into the U.S. from her Communist homeland.
Just like other illegal transactions, the smugglers have to save 10 percent for the big guy: International drug cartels, which control the sector, skimmed off $2 billion of the take, the Times reported.
“Within a short time, on the watch of DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, that largely secure southern border was transformed into a chaotic, lawless, and dangerous frontier, with cartels and criminal smuggling organizations orchestrating illegal crossings of migrants with impunity,” said border expert Jessica Vaughan in congressional testimony.
It sounds like the cartels should name Joe Biden Salesman of the Year. But the Biden administration claims it’s fighting the illicit trade in human bodies, even while opening up the border.
Mayorkas told the House Judiciary Committee the Biden administration is “unrelenting in our attack against the cartels.”
But he refused to answer a question from Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., about whether cartle had “become strong or weaker on your watch.”
The Biden official also brushed off questions about whether narco-smugglers made more money before or after the 46th president took office, pleading, “I do not have that data.”
Biden claims his decision to let illegal aliens make an appointment on a phone app and show up at legal ports of entry cuts into the smugglers’ bottom line. But illegals still have to get to those ports—and the passages across Central America through Mexico leading there are controlled by international criminal gangs, who have cashed in.
Congressional testimony pinned the entire blame on Biden, Harris, and their henchmen.
The Biden-Harris administration created this chaos by letting the world know “the vast majority of illegal migrants would promptly be released from government custody and transported to their destination (often with government funds), despite low expectations that the migrants will comply with immigration proceedings or ever qualify to remain legally,” said Vaughan.
Biden halted the construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall, coordinated the passage of illegals into the U.S. with Mexican authorities, placed unaccompanied minors with adults who may not be relatives—and may be child pornographers—and practically ended all deportations of even the most hardened criminal aliens.
Thanks to Biden’s policies, “there is a near endless supply of paying customers willing to risk working with criminal organizations” to keep them moving northward.
Drugs are moving, too, with the cartels making more money from narcotics like deadly fentanyl than some Mexican states collect in taxes.
“The biggest winners under the Biden-Mayorkas policies are the criminal cartels and other transnational criminal organizations who are reaping profits on a nearly unimaginable scale,” Vaughan, who works with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), told the House Committee on Homeland Security.
It’s not that the Biden administration doesn’t know the problem. It’s so bad that Biden actually shut down the processing center for “migrants” who made appointments on the phone app, the CBP One center in Laredo, because they learned illegals were “being extorted for amounts in the range of $500 to $13,000” in order to get to their appointment, Vaughan told Congress.
Then, it got tired of holding up the flow of illegals and opened the flood gates again.
The Biden administration has flooded American cities with illegal aliens and flooded cartels’ bank accounts with cold, hard cash—dollars, pesos, and Chinese renminbis.
Biden has destroyed the lives of the women and children sold into sex slavery.
And he’s ended the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans who shot up illegal fentanyl, got smashed into by a driver drunk on tequila, or had their throat slashed by MS-13.
Would anyone be surprised if Hunter Biden found a way to funnel some of that money to The Big Guy?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”