Human Smugglers Are Thriving Under Trump
In his quest to build a border wall, President Donald Trump has warned of jobs stolen from American workers, suburbs terrorized by criminal aliens, and desperate migrant caravans headed north. Lately, though, he has found a favorite new target in the “ruthless coyotes” and “vicious cartels” that smuggle migrants into the United States. “Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate—it is actually very cruel,” Trump said in his State of the Union address. “Smugglers use migrant children as human pawns to exploit our laws and gain access to our country.”
Yet Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies have made America’s historically weak anti-smuggling efforts even weaker. Over the past two years, as smuggling networks have thrived, the Department of Homeland Security has shifted money and manpower away from more complex investigations to support the administration’s all-out push to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants here illegally. Hundreds of agents have been temporarily reassigned to low-level enforcement tasks, such as checking businesses for undocumented workers or locating foreigners who overstayed their visas. Some investigators’ travel has been curtailed, officials said; others have lost funds to pay informants.
In the first full fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, the number of new human-smuggling cases launched by Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dropped from 3,920 to 1,671, a decline of almost 60 percent. Even more than in the past, the agency has focused its anti-smuggling efforts on low-level “coyotes” caught in the act of sneaking migrants into the country or transporting them inside the United States, current and former officials said. The Human Smuggling Cell, a special-intelligence unit set up within ICE to support more ambitious migrant-smuggling efforts, has dwindled to less than half the staff it had in 2016.
[Read: How Trump radicalized ICE]
Some far-reaching investigations continue, with intermittent help from intelligence agencies and coordination with foreign governments. But those cases are heavily concentrated on a tiny fraction of illegal immigration from Middle Eastern and South Asian nations where Islamist terrorist groups have a presence. Absent a link to terrorism, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have shown little interest in combatting smuggling networks, despite their growing sophistication and links to drug-trafficking organizations.
“The emphasis on low-level enforcement is detracting from the mission of going after the smuggling rings,” a former senior HSI official, John Connolly, said in an interview. “It’s like focusing on drug users and small-time dealers instead of the cartels and the drug lords.”
Since the establishment of HSI, its work against migrant smuggling has also had to compete with the disparate other responsibilities the agency inherited from the old U.S. Customs Service—from cybersecurity and child pornography to drug seizures at the border. Current and former HSI officials at all levels of the agency said it has never dedicated adequate resources to investigate the larger and more
