Migrants are being offered “complete packages” to the US border with Mexico by “pseudo-legitimate” travel agencies sprouting up in Senegal, according to a US Customs and Border Protection official.
The travel agencies are run out of Senegal’s capital city of Dakar and tout visa-free travel to Europe, and then to Mexico. Once in North America, customers are connected to a smuggling organization that will help them cross the southern US border illegally, according to the US official.
“They sell complete packages to connect them to a smuggling organization that will then facilitate their movement up to the border,” the official said.
CBP is “working with partners throughout the hemisphere and around the world to really make sure that we are bolstering people’s access to protections in the right ways and taking action to prevent people from trying to exploit different travel mechanisms.”
The smuggling organizations have built out a large bus line in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, sending dozens of buses a day to random spots along the US-Mexico border to “facilitate migration,” according to the official.
“These smugglers are recklessly putting migrants into harm’s way: in remote locations across the border, onto the tops of trains, or into the waters of the Rio Grande,” acting CBP Commissioner Troy Miller said in a statement released last week.
“We continue to go after the smugglers and are implementing new measures to impose consequences on transportation companies including bus and van lines used by smuggling organizations and nefarious actors to move migrants through northern Mexico and to our southwest border,” he added. “CBP and our federal partners need additional funding from Congress so that we can continue to effectuate consequences for those who do not use the established pathways.”
Arrests of migrants from countries such as Senegal, Mauritania, China and India entering via Mexico ballooned to 214,000 during the 2023 fiscal year, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. The staggering amount was triple the number of migrant “encounters” from Asia and Africa in fiscal year 2022, which was 70,000, according to CBP statistics.
Senegalese people accounted for more than 9,000 arrests in Tucson, Ariz., from Oct. 1 to Dec. 9, where agents have encountered migrants from about four dozen Eastern hemisphere countries.
The agency reported last week that Border Patrol agents encountered nearly a quarter of a million migrants (242,418) at the southern border just in November — up from October’s 240,986 recorded encounters.
Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.) accused the Biden administration on Tuesday of using Border Patrol agents like “travel agents,” rather than having them stem the flow of migrants.
“We have brave men and women of Border Patrol who are down there, ready, willing and able who want to enforce our laws, who want to fight for our country, and instead as you point out, they’re being assigned tasks like passing out blankets and working as travel agents to just bring people into this country,” Lee said during an interview on Fox News.
The head of the CBP noted last week that encounter levels across the southwest border are “presenting a serious challenge to the men and women of CBP.”
“To meet this challenge, we are using all available resources to ensure the safety and security of our agents and officers, and the migrants who are often misled and victimized by the transnational criminal organizations,” Miller said.