Criminal cartels that are trafficking families, women, children and single adults over the southern border earned as much as $14 million a day in February, according to a report on Monday.
“Trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry,” former Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal, who retired in December after 30 years with the agency told Fox News.
“A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings. Some are essentially indentured servants and they’re working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt,” he said.
The report said, according to smuggling fee revenues estimated by the Customs and Border Patrol, traffickers made a total of $411.5 million in February taking people from Mexico and Central American countries to the US border – which amounts to an average of $14.6 million for each day in February.
Fees to smuggle children or a family to the US can run as high as $5,000 and as much at $9,000 for a single adult, the report said.
That sum doesn’t account for the high price American taxpayers have to pay for the government to handle the surge of migrants at the border.
Based on 2019 figures compiled by Health and Human Services, that cost is now topping $5 million a day.
And last week, the Biden administration awarded a $86 million contract for hotel rooms to house 1,200 migrant families because the rush at the border is overwhelming Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, Fox News said.
Further costs will be tied to overtime and hotel costs for the hundreds of immigration officials reassigned to Texas from other areas.
“The Biden Administration has been an abject failure when it comes to ensuring the safety of unaccompanied minors who cross our border,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbot said in a statement. “President Biden’s refusal to address the border crisis is not only enabling criminal actors like human traffickers and smugglers, but it is exposing innocent unaccompanied children to illness and potentially unsafe living conditions.”