A group of Honduran migrants are given identification wristbands by Mexican immigration officials upon their arrival in Mexico, Jan. 18, 2019.
Hundreds of colored plastic wristbands are scattered in the brush near Penitas, Texas, along the banks of the Rio Grande, a sign of what U.S. border officials say is the growing number of illegal border crossers entering the United States, which powerful drug cartels and smuggling groups use to track migrants to complete their payments.
According to Reuters 10, a witness said that these plastic wristbands are red, blue, green, white, some written in Spanish “arrival” or “entry”, the migrants crossed the river on a raft and then discarded it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesman Matthew Dyman said border patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley have encountered migrants wearing wristbands during several recent apprehensions within more than 34,000 square miles (88,000 square kilometers) of the border in southeast Texas.
The information on the wristbands represents a variety of data used by smuggling organizations, such as payment status or ties to smuggling organizations, Derman told Reuters.
Different smuggling techniques have emerged as Democratic President Joe Biden tries to reverse the restrictive immigration policies set by former President Trump.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, said the classification system illustrates the complexity of organized crime groups ferrying migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border.
They operate like a business, which means finding more customers and increasing efficiency, Brown said. Migrants pay thousands of dollars for the journey to the United States, and human smugglers must pay drug smuggler cartels to transport people through parts of Mexico.
“It’s a lucrative business, and they have to keep a close eye on who’s already paying.” “This could be a new way of tracking,” Brown said.
According to Brown, in 2019, as more Central Americans arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in express buses, smugglers repeatedly checked the migrants’ names and IDs before they got off the bus to make sure they had paid.
One migrant in Reynosa, one of Mexico’s most dangerous cities, showed Reuters a photo of himself wearing a purple wristband, though he declined to give his name for fear of retaliation.
He said he paid $500 to one of the criminal gangs after arriving in the city from Honduras a few months ago to ensure he had a purple wristband that would prevent him from being kidnapped or extorted. He said the criminal group controls the river, and once the migrants or their smugglers pay to cross it, they receive another wristband.
“That way we’re not in danger, neither we nor the ‘coyotes’ (border smugglers coyote) are in danger,” he said. He said.
A human smuggler, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the wristbands are a system for marking who pays to pass through cartel territory.
“They wear these (wristbands) so that there are no incidents of manslaughter,” he said.
In January, a group of migrants was massacred just 40 miles (70 kilometers) west of Reynosa, the largest city in the conflict-ridden northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. 12 local Mexican police officers were arrested in connection with the massacre.
As a result of Biden’s lax immigration policies, there has been a recent surge in border crossings between the U.S. and Mexico. in February, the U.S. government conducted nearly 100,000 apprehensions or expedited deportations of migrants at the southern border, the highest monthly record since June 2019, and a significant boost to smugglers.
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