The US-Mexico border: packs of 'dog drones' against the 'TikTok office'
The US authorities have built a wall parallel to the existing one to contain the avalanche of immigrants that has caused the extinction of Title 42. The last hours of the controversial health regulation, used since 2020 by the administration of Donald Trump to expel emigrants, has generated an effect that is difficult to quantify: in Mexico they calculate that around 150,000 remained near the border, between Tijuana and Matamoros, more than 3,000 kilometers to the east.
The US administration, according to The New York Times, stretches the figure to the 600,000 that are already in the neighboring country and those that are to come, with the Darién jungle, between Colombia and Panama, exceeding 1,000 walkers daily, the majority Venezuelans. The Central American corridor is also bustling with those desperately seeking the “American dream.”
Halfway along the border is Ciudad Juárez, the epicenter of the current migration crisis, inflated by national ills and the side effects of the pandemic.. On the US side, the wall that separates the two countries was reinforced in recent hours with a double barbed wire fence to keep those who had posted themselves on foot from the great fence.
Just one more action within an enormous deployment of police and military forces: to the more than 20,000 agents of the Customs and Border Protection Office (CBP), they have joined the 1,500 marines and soldiers on surveillance tasks and the 450 men of elite texan national guard. Texan Governor Gregg Abbott also ordered the famous Black Hawks to fly over an area that already has drones to monitor migrants and heat sensors on the wall that capture eyes and hands.
The latest addition is the “robot dogs”, new “migratory agents” that seem to have escaped from a science fiction movie. The US administration developed these “dog drones” to support CBP in this inhospitable desert territory.
“We have passed through Gate 42, someone opened it. We were hundreds, including children and even pregnant women.. we started to run. We took refuge in a nearby Catholic church. They recommended that we turn ourselves in and we did so.. But they have expelled us,” one of the Venezuelan migrants described to EL MUNDO, who prefers not to give his identity in case the wheel of fortune gives him a chance again.. For the moment, he is satisfied with being deported to Panama and from there to near Maracaibo, his homeland, from which some twenty friends and relatives left on March 3.
“Despite the high technology deployed by the US authorities, the border is very permeable, also in the mountains. Immigration intermediaries have an incredible and diversified organization. We have detected the use of 12-year-old children, who live in neighborhoods such as Lomas de Poleo, Anapa and Ribera del Bravo. They are very agile, they know the paths and the little holes in the wall.. They serve as guides”, reveals to EL MUNDO Emilio Alfredo López, doctor in Emigration Studies from the University of Texas.
On this side, the hopes and dreams of emigrants are conjured together with another display, also enormous, that of human trafficking networks, with the feared drug cartels behind the scenes.. “They are asking us for 2,000 dollars to pass,” a Venezuelan bricklayer told this newspaper, who remains camped a few meters from the processing center of the National Institute of Migration of Mexico, in whose facilities a fire broke out in March that ended their lives. of 40 people.
An aerial view of US border officials at the San Ysidro crossing on Wednesday.
They call it the Express Consulate on TikTok and Facebook, the virtual “office” of coyotes and “polleros” that constantly changes accounts. “Crosses” are offered anywhere, even though they seem predestined to the worst of failures due to grammatical errors, they manage to convince those who have funds thanks to families or those who pledge their lives to follow the path. Sexual exploitation is another of the threats, which are constantly warned by the two administrations.
The rates range from the 2,000 dollars announced by the Venezuelan migrant to 12,000 with transfer included to the required US city, although at the foot of the wall they assure that when night comes and the opportunity appears, it is enough to pay a few hundred dollars.. The traffickers take a few minutes to respond to the calls of the emigrants to start the business.
“Let's go for the American dream”, with ranchera included, reads on the Mexican cell phone of a group waiting in the shade of a tree. The video library includes scenes of the fire at the migrant center that killed 40 of them and the savage attack on 18 Venezuelans in Bronwsville, which killed eight of them.
“In order to win, you have to lose,” another rancher sings as a wad of $100 bills, supposedly the price of “a better life,” falls one by one to the ground.
“You don't see them, but they are powerful, they are everywhere,” says Rafael Briceño, seven months in search of the US, to EL MUNDO. Everyone talks about them but hardly anyone uses the word cartel. In Ciudad Juárez, which has also received 3,000 Mexican soldiers so far this year to reinforce the plaza, the local cartel, the one from Sinaloa and the one from Jalisco Nueva Generación are fighting for control of the city that years ago monopolized world front pages for the wave of femicides and that Arturo Pérez Reverte has recovered in recent months in Revolution to narrate the adventures of the Spanish engineer Martín Garret with the hosts of Pancho Villa.