.png)
This kid is something else:
David, you need an education:
AGUACATAN, Guatemala —
These are lean times for Hugo and others in his time-honored profession. He hasn’t worked regularly in weeks and is back in college studying accounting, which he took up after ditching criminal science as unsuitable considering his full-time gig. “It’s just too hard to do the job right now,” said Hugo, who makes his living as a people smuggler, or coyote, guiding migrants on the often-perilous journey from Guatemala through Mexico to the U.S. border. A crackdown by Mexican authorities — acting at the insistence of President Trump — has dramatically reduced the flow of Central American migrants this summer.
When a Freightliner tractor-trailer pulled up to a US Border Patrol checkpoint just north of Laredo, Texas, the agent working the lane thought he recognized the driver as a person of interest. A record check revealed the passenger had two active warrants for arrest on charges of cocaine sales and assault.
The driver and his passenger told agents they were the only two onboard. But the Border Patrol scanned the locked trailer with an X-ray device. The officer noticed “silhouettes” he thought resembled humans, according to a criminal complaint dated May 28. He found 18 people, all undocumented.
While the discovery wasn’t in itself particularly unusual, their cases shed further light on the prices people are willing to pay for safe passage into the United States.
Prices vary “according to how you want to cross when you get to the border,” Wallie Mason, a California immigration attorney whose clients who have entered the country this way, told Quartz. “People pay according to how far the coyotes take them, and in what manner. Also, what the coyotes think they can get from the individual customer.”
ALTAR, Sonora, Mexico – The Santa Maria pharmacy in the northern Mexico smuggling town of Altar is often a last stop for migrants before they embark on the dangerous trek across the Sonoran desert into Arizona.
Here they buy caffeine pills, electrolyte packets and other supplies they will need for the trip. And pharmacist Maria Jaime Peña said women often come in with a common question.
“What can I do in case I’m raped, and I don’t want to get pregnant?,” Peña repeated in Spanish from behind the counter. “What can I use?”
Peña recommends an injection for 48 pesos, or less than $4, that protects women from pregnancy for a month. In Mexico, women can buy these products without a prescription.
Peña said sometimes it is the guides — also called coyotes — who advise their female clients to go on birth control. That was the case for Maria Salinas, a petite 43-year-old who recently tried crossing with her 18-year-old daughter.
Salinas said at first she was confused when a guide at the start of the trip offered her and other women pills he said would prevent pregnancy. Later, it made more sense.
Once Salinas started walking with the group, she couldn’t keep up. One coyote said he’d help – on one condition.
“If I gave him my daughter, then he’d wait for me,” Salinas said. Meaning, if she let him have sex with her daughter. She refused, and he abandoned them. They only survived because they found Border Patrol.
“It’s awful,” Salinas said about making this trip as a woman. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
And when a woman is raped in remote stretches of the border region, it almost always goes unpunished. Almost always.
There. How is cracking down on for-profit human smuggling, which also leads to sexual assault of women paying coyotes to come here, a bad thing?
Thank you President Trump for helping out these people “out of business. Oh, and David....
I ask El Lobo about the terrible reputation coyotes have in the media.
"We specialize in smuggling young kids — 13 and below," he explains. "The youngest we've smuggled was 2 years old. We have to make sure nothing happens to them, that they eat, that they're protected and they arrive well."
They do smuggle children.....