'Gotaways' pay cartels $5,000 to enter U.S. via holes cut in border wall

FPI / May 17, 2023

Mexican cartels are cutting holes in the border wall large enough for adults to pass through. They charge $5,000 a pop to go through the holes and many migrants successfully make it through as "gotaways" into the U.S. interior, a reporter who saw them up close and personal said.

While driving along the border wall 15 miles from cartel-infested Juarez, Mexico that was erected during the George W. Bush presidency, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration studies noted that he "couldn’t help but notice an unending series of scars all along the parallel steel-mesh length of border wall."

"At intervals of about every foot of this old wall segment for several miles, at about knee to ankle level, cartel human smugglers had cut out square segments of the steel mesh on the Mexican side big enough for adults to pass through," Bensman reported for the New York Post on May 15.

Bensman spoke to a young cartel “go-fer” in Juarez who said the La Linea cartel charges $5,000 a head to immigrants to go through the holes into the United States "and will beat anyone who tries without paying."

Those who go through the holes are no doubt among the estimated 1.7 million immigrant "gotaways" who have avoided Border Patrol to enter the U.S. on Joe Biden's watch.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s public affairs division "gives us an idea of the kind of people who are caught evading detection: murderers, child rapists, violent gang members, and sex offenders of all sorts," Bensman noted.

"Another expected driver of the anticipated runner-gotaway spike through El Paso Sector is the fact Border Patrol agents have been shifted off the front lines to process asylum seekers."

Bensman even came face-to-face with cartel members escorting migrants through the fence holes.

"While I was photographing one of the holes up close, two La Linea cartel men armed with AR-15s pulled up in an SUV loaded with immigrants to use it," Bensman wrote. "Oops, I smiled, disarmingly, caught red-handed at the very hole they intended to use, offering to leave right away and praying they wouldn’t open fire. 'No problemo!' the passenger-side one said, smiling. He waved goodbye, signaled the driver to hit the gas, and drove a hundred yards further on, where they offloaded six immigrants whom I saw run straight to yet another hole and disappear through it."

While most migrants currently crossing the border immediately turn themselves in to Border Patrol for processing on Team Biden's fast-tracked conveyor belt to America's interior, those with U.S. criminal histories or warrants find other ways, like the holes.

“Those are all the scumbags,” former ICE Commissioner Mark A. Morgan told Bensman. “These are the people who know they’re not able to qualify” for Biden’s various entry programs.

Bensman went on to add: "The Biden administration hasn’t said a word about any of this yet. But in a sign that it fears the worst, last week it very quietly began reinforcing the cut-up fence along the Anapra San Jeronimo Highway where I found all the holes."

Free Press International
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