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 News from Around the Americas | October 2007 
US, Mexican Officials Launch Effort Against Smugglers
 Associated Press
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| | Smugglers are believed to be charging migrants about $2,000 each for help getting across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. |
El Paso, Texas — U.S. Border Patrol officials and their Mexican law enforcement counterparts have launched a new effort to investigate and dismantle human smuggling organizations in the El Paso area.
This latest effort will be more proactive, with Mexican authorities using a two-year-old database of suspected human smugglers to help break up smuggling rings on both sides of the border, Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier said.
"Operation Lifeguard" is an expansion of previous efforts to that focused specifically on extraditing and prosecuting human smugglers, he said.
Socorro Cordova, a spokeswoman for the Mexican Consulate in El Paso, said the program is aimed at saving the lives of border crossers.
Twenty-five border crossers died in the Border Patrol's El Paso Sector, an area that includes two far West Texas counties and all of New Mexico, in the fiscal year that ended in September. Fourteen of those deaths were migrants who drowned in swift moving canals at the border in El Paso.
Mexican authorities are also launching a series of radio ads targeting would-be immigrants and urging them not to trust smugglers.
"We are telling them (migrants) not to trust smugglers," Cordova said. She added that the public service announcements will remind migrants that smugglers only care about immigrants' money, not their well being.
Smugglers are believed to be charging migrants about $2,000 each for help getting across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso. |
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