What It Costs to Be Smuggled
Across the U.S. Border
Bribes and shakedowns. Days in hideaways without food. For many fleeing violence in Central
America, this is what thousands of dollars gets them on the journey to the United States.
By NICHOLAS KULISH JUNE 30, 2018
MATAMOROS, Mexico — Shortly before dawn one Sunday last August, a driver in an S.U.V. picked up Christopher Cruz at a stash house in this border city near the Gulf of Mexico. The 22-year-old from El Salvador was glad to leave the one-story building, where smugglers kept bundles of cocaine and marijuana alongside their human cargo, but he was anxious about what lay ahead.
The driver deposited Mr. Cruz at an illegal crossing point on the edge of the Rio Grande. A smuggler took a smartphone photograph to confirm his identity and sent it using WhatsApp to a driver waiting to pick him up on the other side of the frontier when — if — he made it across.
The nearly 2,000-mile trip had already cost Mr. Cruz’s family more than $6,000 and brought him within sight of Brownsville, Tex. The remaining 500 miles to Houston — terrain prowled by the United States Border Patrol as well as the state and local police — would set them back another $6,500.
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggling-illegal-immigration-costs.html
