This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the success of a wide-scale operation in Guatemala that resulted in the arrest of many traffickers and the rescue of many migrants.
According to HSI, the HSI division of ICE and local police in three districts of Guatemala executed 20 arrest warrants and 54 search warrants.
During the operation, twenty-four Guatemalans were arrested on allegations of human smuggling, and more than one hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash and other contraband were recovered. ICE also said that they rescued 70 illegal immigrants from Guatemala City hotels. These people were from Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Venezuela.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that the enforcement actions implemented against callous smuggling gangs that prey on vulnerable victims are unprecedented in their scope and magnitude. This raid by Homeland Security Investigations exemplifies the tens of thousands of steps we have taken. We are collaborating with other federal agencies and, most critically, expanding our overseas alliances.
Seven of the 24 detained individuals were police officers; according to ICE, they assisted in the smuggling, and the internal affairs branch of the Guatemalan police force is presently investigating.
According to the acting director of ICE, human smuggling is a “horrific crime,” and the agency “will continue to use every available resource to bring perpetrators to justice.”
In contrast to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, HSI began investigating Guatemalan smuggling networks the year prior. As a result of this move, further hotel-connecting networks were made public.
Crime syndicates and cartels operating across the border area and Central America are primarily responsible for the more than 2,3 million migrant encounters in the previous fiscal year.
The Biden administration’s border policy includes tackling the “root causes” of migration in the Americas. As part of this strategy, the government has been vigorously combating human smuggling, bragging on many occasions this year of an anti-smuggling operation that resulted in the arrest of thousands of individuals and the dismantling of over 5,000 distinct smuggling networks.
A few weeks ago, the Biden administration announced an enhanced migratory partnership with Mexico, and now ICE is promoting an operation.
More checkpoints will be established, the two nations will collaborate on anti-people-smuggling operations, and manpower and equipment will be increased.
According to officials, transnational criminal organizations use stash houses and staging areas to move migrants across Mexico and into the United States. As a result of this endeavor, the two nations will communicate this information more openly.
As part of this endeavor, there will be a substantial increase in Title 42 removals of Venezuelan nationals, whose numbers have soared in recent months but who had not been removed under the Trump administration order because Mexico refused to accept them.