Human smugglers who work for foreign criminal organizations use social media platforms such as TikTok to lure or trick immigrants into paying them thousands of dollars per person to get to the U.S. southern border.
Immigrants are quick to put their lives in the hands of cartels and their affiliates, who are eager to profit off of unsuspecting people in desperate situations and see the humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere as a chance to rake in money.
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Smugglers across South and Central America, as well as Mexico, share videos that claim to show the trek they can lead customers through on their journey to the United States.
"The TikTok platform is used to promote the 'services' offered by human traffickers through short videos. These videos showcase successful cases of irregular border crossings and captivating images aimed at capturing the attention of individuals seeking to migrate irregularly with the assistance of a third party," according to a report by the U.N. International Organization for Migration.
Smugglers, as well as immigrants who pay to be smuggled, post to social media with pictures and videos of the journey. They include hashtags on posts to appeal to and draw in others who may want to make the same journey and reach out to the smuggler.
Immigrants who crossed the border illegally have shared with the Washington Examiner that they used social media to connect with people who could help them get across.
USA Today reported that the hashtag #Darien, the name of the jungle immigrants in South America would walk through to get to Central America, had been viewed more than 1 billion times on TikTok.
The ads have not gone ignored, stirring up such interest that both the Trump and Biden administrations have waged their own social media campaigns in an attempt to dissuade immigrants from trusting information in TikTok videos.
But the U.S. government's attempts to warn and deter foreigners from traveling to the U.S. have proven largely unsuccessful, as indicated by the historically high number of people apprehended illegally crossing the southern border over the past two years.
In early 2021, the Biden administration launched its own ad campaign and played tens of thousands of radio ads in Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in Spanish, Portuguese, and six indigenous languages. The ads played on 33 radio stations and told listeners that the U.S. border was not open, as Republicans claimed it was following President Joe Biden's rescinding staunch immigration policies.
The State Department said at the time that "data shows mobile is the dominant source of media consumption in the region," and digital ads placed on Facebook and Instagram reached more than 26 million people since Inauguration Day.
In 2022, the Biden administration put out new ads to deter people from migrating to the U.S.
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However, former Trump administration officials who dealt with border and immigration issues told the Washington Examiner that the government's attempt to out-perform cartels on social media had failed.
Trump administration officials, including Trump's former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, told the Washington Examiner last year that until immigrants outside the U.S. stop hearing from family members and friends who crossed the border and were allowed to remain in the country, the smugglers' ads on TikTok will remain more convincing than anything the U.S. government claims.