Texas Border Business
By Stephanie Leutert
From the STRAUSS Center for International Security and Law from the University of Texas, Austin.
Every day, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers send individuals into Mexican border cities, including the city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, across the border from Laredo, Texas. These individuals leave the United States through deportations, Title 42 expulsions via the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) COVID-19 order, or as part of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which sends people to Mexico to wait during their U.S. immigration proceedings.
Immediately upon entering Nuevo Laredo, these individuals are at high risk for kidnapping and serve as a source of income for organized crime. Migrant kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo are not a new phenomenon. For more than a decade, organized crime in the city has made migrant kidnapping a component of its income generating activities. Members of organized crime kidnap both migrants traveling north for a chance to enter the United States and people sent back to the city. However, recent U.S. policies that return individuals and families to Nuevo Laredo—such as MPP and Title 42—have added new, lucrative populations for the criminal activity.
This report focuses on migrant kidnappings in Nuevo Laredo due to the crime’s high frequency and its systematic nature. Migrant kidnappings are largely concentrated in a few sites around the city, and kidnappings follow a similar modus operandi. In fact, the practice is so common that members of organized crime in Nuevo Laredo allegedly refer to migrant kidnappings as “passing through the office.”1 Migrant kidnappings also commonly take place in other cities along the U.S.-Mexico border, but none follow quite the same systematic pattern as in Nuevo Laredo.
The report from the Strauss Center of the University of Texas at Austin identified that only in Nuevo Laredo the ransoms demanded of relatives of migrants, mainly Central Americans, are between 7,000 and 10,000 dollars.
“With each new US policy to send people back to Nuevo Laredo,” the report explains, “there is a new migrant population that is at risk of being kidnapped.
“The Northeast Cartel has strict control of the kidnappings of migrants in Nuevo Laredo,” he adds.
Since December 2018, the United States has applied migrant return policies such as “Stay in Mexico” and “Title 42”.
The report, by Stephanie Leutert, director of the Strauss Center’s Initiative for Mexico and Central America, was based on 154 cases documented by civil organizations between 2018 and 2021.
The return of asylum-seeking migrants by the United States and the inability of Mexico to prevent their kidnappings boosts the profits of criminal groups, such as the Northeast Cartel (CDN) in Nuevo Laredo.
Download the report here:
