AUSTIN — As a humanitarian crisis unravels at the Texas-Mexico border, President Joe Biden’s decisions are actually prosperous for one group of people—human traffickers.
“Is business booming right now? Does it pay well?” reporter Pedro Ultreras asked a trafficker.
“It does, given the situation with the people,” he replied.
Spanish TV Network Univision recently aired an interview between their reporter and two unidentified human traffickers, commonly called “coyotes,” on the banks of the Rio Grande River in South Texas. The network said the two young men built a “highly profitable business” illegally trafficking people into the country.
“In all honesty, there are way too many people. Believe me,” the other trafficker said. “With the benefits your new president is now granting, the people found the courage to come.”
The interview comes after Biden has been implementing policies the past two months to allow more illegal immigrants—including cartel members, sex traffickers, and criminals—into the country.
On his inauguration day, Biden signed an executive order halting nearly all deportations (later deemed unlawful by a federal judge) and has since taken other actions to dismantle President Donald Trump’s border protections, including ending his Migrant Protection Protocols.
Biden’s decisions opened a flood of illegal immigration into the country. Just in February, Customs and Border Protection announced it encountered more than 100,000 migrants at the border, with Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas saying recently that border crossings were on track to be the highest they have been in 20 years.
Reports have also estimated more than 39,000 illegal immigrants have entered the country and have not been apprehended so far this year.
“Trafficking is a multibillion-dollar industry,” former Tucson Border Patrol chief Roy Villareal told Fox News. “A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings. Some are essentially indentured servants, and they’re working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt.”
According to estimates from Customs and Border Protection, cartels raked in a total of $411.5 million just in February from trafficking Central American and Mexican women, children, and families across the U.S.-Mexico border. That averages out to more than $14 million per day during the month.
“Biden’s immigration agenda swings the door wide open to allow already-deported, armed child-raping illegal aliens from Mexico onto Texas soil,” tweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently. Paxton has been active over the past two months, suing the Biden administration for their “unlawful and perilous” immigration decisions and saying Biden’s actions are “far worse than ‘kids in cages.’”
Paxton added that illegal immigration is costing Texas taxpayers nearly $1 billion every year.
“We’ve seen what happens when you don’t secure the border…the negative consequences affect children, #Texas, and the rest of the country,” Paxton’s office tweeted recently. “And yet, for some reason the Biden administration wants to repeat all of that.”
Biden also unprecedentedly banned media from accessing the situation at the border, a decision that sparked a wildfire of public backlash and one he began backtracking just this week.
“There is a disaster on the border of Joe Biden’s creation because he halted construction of the wall, brought back catch and release, and ended the Remain in Mexico policy,” tweeted U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz Thursday, adding the disaster is a humanitarian, health, and national security crisis.
“Enough is enough,” said Cruz. “We need to address the border crisis.”
