"The reality is that the vast majority of the people that Mexico encounters [on its southern border] that are extra-continental will eventually end up on our border," a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official told Reuters this week. The Reuters article confirmed the Syrian nationals reported at the Mexican border with Laredo last year by Breitbart Texas's Brandon Darby and Ildefonso Ortiz are part of this growing pattern of illegal migration. Just a few days after that, Darby and this writer broke the news of six men from Pakistan and Afghanistan being arrested about sixteen miles inside the United States in Arizona. Those men were quickly snatched up from the Border Patrol's custody by the FBI. Shortly after that, five more Syrian Nationals were detained at the Laredo port of entry.
Since that time, the federal government has been largely silent on the numbers of what they call "Special Interest Aliens" (SIA) being captured in Texas and other border states. The new information obtained by Reuters shows that 6,342 SIAs were apprehended at Mexico's southern border. That number is up significantly from a 2015 total of 4,261 SIAs. Only 1,831 were reported for all of 2014 when Breitbart Texas' Brandon Darby reported a leaked intelligence document from CBP official showing countries from all over the world were exploiting the porous southern border between the United States and Mexico. Most of those SIA tend to enter the U.S. through Texas.
That document revealed large numbers of illegal aliens being apprehended in the United States from China, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, North Africa, and other Middle Eastern countries.
Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Arizona, U.S. June 18, 2014.
The problem is so large in Mexico, officials have set up a detention camp in Tapachula, near Mexico's southern border with Guatemala. CBP officials have been training the Mexican immigration officials on interview techniques. They have also been using U.S. databases to investigate the background of these immigrants to Mexico, Reuters reported.
"The Tapachula area is along a permeable border. DHS (Department of Homeland Security) views it as one of the areas where a terrorist group that wants to do harm on U.S. soil would be most likely to come in," Adam Isacson, a security and border policy analyst at The Washington Office on Latin America, a non-profit human rights advocacy group, told Reuters.
These CBP officials have been stationed in southern Mexico since last October according to the documents obtained by Reuters. The operation is similar to a program set up on Panama by CBP earlier this year.
ON FOOT IN THE JUNGLE
The apprehension documents from the Tapachula center show how migrants are willing and able to pay thousands of dollars to obtain flights and fake passports and then make grueling journeys on buses, boats and on foot.
It was not clear how many of those apprehended at the center were deported, claimed asylum or simply released.
Several of the 14 migrants -- in testimony given from May 18-23 this year -- said they paid more than $10,000 to smugglers, walked for days through jungles, and were temporarily detained by various countries before being stopped in Tapachula.
Six of the men -- who included Pakistanis, Syrians and Afghans-- had obtained fake passports, claiming to be from Israel, Morocco, Belgium or Britain.
In Panama, several of the men said they were kept in a migration detention camp for about a month. From Panama, the migrants described traveling in larger groups, sometimes as many as 50 men.
One Pakistani national -- whose identity U.S. officials asked not to be revealed because he is still under investigation -- told U.S. and Mexican officials that he paid a smuggler in Pakistan $9,000 to be smuggled to Brazil where he received a fake Belgian passport.
In Brazil, he paid $4,000 to a woman to be taken on bus, boat and on foot through across Colombia and into Panama.
He said he was detained in Panama but then released. From there, a smuggler from Lebanon took the man and 35 other migrants of different nationalities to Honduras, where he said he was robbed of all of his belongings.
His family wired him more money from Pakistan and the man was able to pay $40 to be smuggled into Guatemala. He paid $5 to be taken by raft into Mexico. There he got a taxi, which was halted by authorities who took him to the Tapachula center.
http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2016/08/18/thousands-middle-eastern-illegal-immigrants-busted-forged-papers-border/
