Before US immigration authorities detained him and took his son, the Honduran migrant said he spent three days in the hands of armed men who identified themselves as members of the Gulf Cartel.To get more America News, you can visit shine news official website.
Christian, who did not want his full name used, said he was traveling to the US border with his 7-year-old last month when the men stopped a bus full of migrants in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The demanded $300 from each family.
"They told us if we didn't pay that they were going to kill us," recalled Christian, who said he was freed three days later after relatives wired money to his captors.
"There were 30 of us. There was another building next to where we were being held and they said there were even more people there."
President Donald Trump has said that he wants immigration policy that secures the border. But his aggressive policy has instead resulted in organized crime groups preying on droves of desperate asylum seekers who have been turned away by US authorities, according to people familiar with the smuggling operations.
Experts said the administration's now-reversed policy of prosecuting parents who cross the border illegally -- thus separating children from their families -- and the elimination of domestic violence and gang violence as grounds for asylum is having another result: Further strengthening ties between human smugglers, other organized crime groups and corrupt local law enforcement along the border.
"Ironically, these policies that claim to be trying to clamp down and secure the border and stop smuggling and stop traffickers... actually empower the traffickers, the cartels, the smugglers," says Michelle Brané, director of the Migrant Rights and Justice program at the Women's Refugee Commission.
Christian and his son eventually reached the US, where immigration authorities detained them and separated him from his son in mid June. He said he was held at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas, where he claims he went nearly two weeks without word of his son's whereabouts. After a month in detention, he was released and reunited with the boy. He has a court date next month.
But the trauma of the journey to America started days before he crossed the Rio Grande.
Christian said he had fled the violence of his homeland but was then detained by men who said they were part of the Gulf Cartel, which has an extensive transnational network in Central and South America. They repeatedly threatened the more than two dozen migrants who slept on the floor of a house in Mexico. The migrants came from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. The youngest was about 12 months old. While organized crime groups along the border have long preyed on US-bound migrants, experts said the administration's immigration policy has increased the desperation of those migrants, as well as the demand for smugglers and the cost for their services.
That desperation increased after nearly 3,000 children were separated from their parents as a result of the White House's now-reversed zero tolerance immigration policy, according to experts and advocates.
The cost for clandestine passage into the US for migrants from Central America has soared from $6,000 to $8,000 a couple of years ago to about $12,000 today, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and an expert on organized crime and immigration.
The Wall