() Mexican drug cartels are continuing to smuggle migrants into the United States illegally and are using social media and mobile apps to recruit drivers to transport these immigrants at a time when physical illegal border crossings have slowed considerably.
got an exclusive look at how the Texas Department of Public Safety is working to contend with smugglers and their targeting of sometimes unknowing Americans who are transporting migrants in exchange for a promise of easy money.
Exclusive video obtained by showed Texas DPS troopers arresting a man who drove more than 1,200 miles from Chicago to the Rio Grande Valley all to smuggle migrants in a tractor-trailer.
Texas DPS officials say the man is just one of many out-of-state drivers who are making their way to Texas to carry out this job once they answer cartel ads.
“We’ve seen ads, literally, business ads, the feed of a business ad on TikTok. We’ve also heard of Facebook Marketplace. Cartels are using different types of social media apps to target and try to get people to come, and they launch it as easy money,” Texas DPS Sgt. Guadalupe Casarez told .
Casarez told that once drivers jump at the chance to be paid to pick up passengers, smugglers then send the drivers coordinates, including GPS pins and step-by-step instructions often through WhatsApp which closes the deal.
Yet despite drivers thinking they are in for an easy payday, Texas DPS officials warn that U.S. residents who answer the ads risk being charged with a felony. Officials previously told that since 2021, more than 10,000 people have been arrested in connection with breaking Texas’s state smuggling laws.
Smugglers are also targeting rideshare drivers who are already on the road, Texas DPS officials tell . Casarez said that the cartels are using rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft to send drivers to pick up migrants at the border.
Like with many of those who answer ads, they are unaware of what they are getting themselves into. The activity is keeping troopers busy along the border despite a relatively low amount of migrant activity at the border since the Trump administration has cracked down on illegal crossings.
“It’s more of an investigative work that we have to figure out; does this driver know what they’re actually doing or (think) they’re just working for Uber?” Casarez told . “So a lot of it has to do with getting our investigators on it, figuring out going through the phones with consent, and figuring out if there’s a paper trail. There’s text messages going back and forth between these cartels.”
In a statement to Uber, the ride-share company said that the safety of its drivers is a priority and that the company has safeguards built into the mobile app to verify trip status, to connect with a live agent or to cancel a trip at any time.
In addition to keeping state troopers busy, the smugglers’ push to recruit drivers is also adding more business for local attorneys who get called after drivers are arrested.
San Antonio defense attorney Mary Pietrazek has heard countless similar stories. Pietrazek has represented over 500 individuals in human smuggling cases since Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star was implemented in 2021. Since then, Abbott has signed Senate Bill 4 into law, which bumped the maximum sentence for human smuggling to 10 years.
“They don’t think at first that they’re doing anything wrong because when you think of smuggling, you think of putting someone in the back trunk of your car and smuggling across the border,” Pietrazek told in April. “They think, well, (the person) is already in the country, and so they don’t think they’re breaking the law. But they are.”
