Mexico: smugglers use bracelets to track migrants as they cross US border

Along the banks of the Rio Grande in the scrubby grassland near Penitas, south-east Texas, hundreds of colored plastic wristbands ripped off by migrants litter the ground, signs of what US border officials say is a growing trend among powerful drug cartels and smugglers to track people paying to cross unlawfully into the United States.

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The plastic bands – red, blue, green, white – some labeled “arrivals” or “entries” in Spanish, are discarded after migrants cross the river on makeshift rafts, according to a Reuters witness. Their use has not been widely reported before.

Some migrants are trying to evade border agents, others are mostly Central American families, or young children traveling without parents who turn themselves in to officials, often to seek asylum protections because of dangers in their home countries.

Border patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which spans more than 34,000 sq miles along Texas-Mexico border, have recently encountered immigrants wearing the bracelets during several apprehensions, said Matthew Dyman, a spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

The “information on the bracelets represents a multitude of data that is used by smuggling organizations, such as payment status or affiliation with smuggling groups”, Dyman told Reuters.

The differing smuggling techniques come as Joe Biden’s administration has sought to reverse restrictive immigration polices set up by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But a recent jump in border crossings has Republicans warning loudly and repeatedly that the easing of hardline policies will lead to an immigration crisis.

US border agents carried out nearly 100,000 apprehensions or rapid expulsions of migrants at the US-Mexico border in February, the highest monthly total since mid-2019.

The categorization system using wristbands illustrates the sophistication of organized criminal groups ferrying people across the border, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, the director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Washington DC-based bipartisan policy center

“They run it like a business,” said Cardinal Brown, which means “finding more patrons and looking for efficiencies”.

Migrants can pay thousands of dollars for the journey to the US and human smugglers have to pay off drug cartels to move people through parts of Mexico where they lay claim to territory.

“This is a money-making operation and they have to pay close attention to who has paid,” she said. “This may be a new way to keep track.”

Criminal groups operating in northern Mexico, however, have long used systems to log which migrants have already paid for the right to be in gang-controlled territory, as well as for the right to cross the border into the United States, migration experts said.

When increased numbers of Central Americans were arriving at the border on express buses in 2019, smugglers kept tabs on them by double checking “the names and IDs of migrants before they got off the bus to make sure they had paid,” Cardinal Brown said.

A migrant in Reynosa – one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico, across the border from McAllen, Texas – who declined to give his name for fear of retaliation, showed Reuters a picture of a purple wristband he was wearing.

He said he paid $500 to one of the criminal groups in the city after he arrived a few months ago from Honduras to secure the purple bracelet to protect against kidnapping or extortion.

He said once migrants or their smugglers have paid for the right to cross the river, which is also controlled by criminal groups, they receive another bracelet.

“This way we’re not in danger, neither us nor the coyote,” he said, using the Spanish word for smuggler.

One human smuggler who spoke on conditions of anonymity, confirmed the bracelets were a system to designate who has paid for the right to transit through cartel territory.

“They are putting these (bracelets) on so there aren’t killings by mistake,” he said.

Migrants and smugglers say it’s a system required by the cartels that control waterfront territory in the conflict-ridden state of border-adjacent Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

In January, a group of migrants was massacred in Tamaulipas state just 40 miles west of Reynosa. Twelve police officers have been arrested in connection with the killings.