The sun has barely set when Mexican traffickers inflate their boat, load 15 migrants on board, yelling at the children to stop crying, and then row in a frenzy across the Rio Grande, landing on US soil in just a few minutes.
The same scene has been playing out almost daily for two months, sometimes right through the night. In the first half hour of darkness on Sunday, four inflatable boats with about 50 undocumented immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala arrived in Roma, Texas, almost simultaneously.
US agents from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) often converse and even exchange shouted jokes with smugglers on the Mexican side of the river, but do not try to stop them if they do not set foot on US soil.
Photo: AFP
When the migrants arrive — at times in the hundreds, and many of them minors traveling alone — there are sometimes no agents left on the river banks to process them.
The CBP agents instead stop them nearly 1km away, at the end of a sandy trail that leads to the town of 11,000 in the Rio Grande Valley. Most migrants surrender voluntarily in the hopes of being granted asylum in the US.
“Tell the agents not to hit my boat; we’re bringing children, the river is deep, we have already taken off their vests, they should pay attention,” shouted “Chuchi,” a 25-year-old trafficker as he paddled over to the US side, where there were at least five other punctured inflatable boats already on the sand or in thick bushes.
Photo: AFP
“Every day” there is a lot of work, “Chuchi” said from his boat.
“We have kids, just like you” and the work pays well, he said.
“It’s better to work here than get involved in crime, isn’t it?” said his partner, another pollero, as human traffickers are known in Mexico.
When reminded that trafficking people is also a crime, he shrugged.
“I have to support myself,” he said. “I also have children; six US citizen children.”
He did not give his name, and said that he is afraid of being caught.
A life vest had gotten caught in the reeds a few feet from the US riverbank, and he did not dare get off the boat to retrieve it.
“I can get off for it, but where is the migra?” he said, using the Mexican phrase for the border agents.
The polleros generally work in conjunction with drug cartels and in Miguel Aleman, the dangerous Mexican town facing Roma, the Gulf and Northeast cartels are active, Roma police chief Ivan Garza Jr said.
The cartels often clash and bursts of automatic rifles can be heard on the US side of the border.
The trafficker on the river said that he works “for someone,” but did not specify who.
Nearly 100,000 undocumented immigrants, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, were detained by the CBP last month, a level not seen since the arrival of large caravans in 2019.
Most were deported, said US President Joe Biden’s administration, but in contrast to the policy of former US president Donald Trump, minors who travel alone and many families are not being expelled.
At dusk on Saturday evening, a CBP agent yelled a warning across the river to a smuggler not to cross with his migrants at that spot, because he would be stopped by the Texas state police.
“So where do you want them?” the shirtless pollero shouted back, in a moment of ironic banter.
The CBP agent responded in kind, showing where they could land.
“I’m not that keen,” replied the trafficker across the river, and lit a cigarette.
“Do you want to smoke marijuana?” he shouted back.
“When I retire,” said the CBP agent in Spanish.
One of the recently disembarked migrants is Dani, a 42-year-old from Honduras who is traveling with his six-year-old daughter Daniela. He had already made the same trip two weeks ago, to exactly the same place, but he was deported four days later by bus to Mexico.
Now he is trying again, with financial help from his sister who lives in New Orleans.
“My salary in Honduras was not enough to support my family,” he said as he walked from the river to surrender to the CBP and apply for asylum.
No migrant wants to say how much the polleros charge.
Among the new arrivals are two Guatemalan sisters, aged seven and 13, who traveled alone for 15 days and are seeking to be reunited with their father in Virginia.
“My mother is ill and can no longer take care of us. She is hospitalized,” said Heidi, the older sister. “I am happy that I am going to see my father. I don’t remember him. He left Guatemala when I was just born.”
A CBP agent asked the seven-year-old to remove the chain around her neck and put it in a plastic bag: All valuables and identifying documents are collected and returned to them when they are released.
The little girl cannot take it off, so the agent pulls out a huge knife and cuts it off.
“This job sucks,” he said.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS