Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).This week, it was announced that a large operation in Guatemala had resulted in a number of arrests as well as rescues of migrants being smuggled into the country by transnational criminal groups.
ICE stated that Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of ICE, had executed the Guatemalan operation with local authorities. It carried out 20 arrest warrants as well as 54 search warrants in three areas of Guatemala.
Two dozen Guatemalans were detained for human smuggling. Also, $150,000 in contraband was seized. ICE announced that 70 migrants were rescued from Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Salvador, and Salvador from different hotels. Guatemala City.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Secretary, stated that the enforcement actions taken against vicious smuggling groups that prey on vulnerable people are unprecedented in scope and scale. “This arrest by our Homeland Security Investigations represents a strong example of the many actions we have taken. Our efforts are in partnership and increased collaboration with foreign partners.
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Of the 24 arrested, seven were Guatemalan cops who ICE said facilitated the smuggling and were investigated by Guatemala’s police internal affairs unit.
Tae Johnson, acting director at ICE, described human smuggling as an “abhorrent offense” and said that agency will continue to use all resources available to bring perpetrators of the crime to justice.
HSI, which is separate from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, had launched a similar operation last year into Guatemalan smuggling networks. This operation exposed multiple networks that were operating in different hotels.
More than 2.3 million migrants encountered each other at the The southern borderLast fiscal year, and a lot of it is facilitated through criminal organizations and cartels operating along the border and throughout Central America.
ICE agents are arrested in Revere on September 25, 2019, by Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald. (Staff Photo by Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald. (Photo by Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images.
Biden’s administration has adopted a border strategy that targets “root causes” of migration in the hemisphere. It has made repeated claims about an anti-smuggling operation that resulted this year in over 5,000 arrests and thousands of human smuggling cases being stopped.
This announcement of the ICE operation follows a few weeks in which the Biden administration has announced increased cooperation. Mexico on migration.
The large-scale border enforcement campaignWe will see increased cooperation between the countries and more checks in human smuggling operations. There will also be an increase in personnel and resources.
Officials indicated that the campaign would encourage greater information sharing between both countries regarding how transnational criminal groups use staging and stash locations to transport migrants through Mexico and into America.
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This operation will be accompanied by a controversial expansion to Title 42 removals in order to include Venezuelan nationals. Their numbers have increased dramatically over the past months, but they were not previously removed under Trump’s Trump-era order because Mexico refused to take them.
