Mexico City-Videos go through Tiktok in 30 seconds flashes.
Migrants walk in camouflage through the dry desert terrain. Dune Buggies roars to the border barrier of the United States-Mexico. Families with young children go through the holes on the wall. Helicopters, airplanes, yachts, tunnels and water motorcycles for potential customers.
Both with emojis, the videos published by smugglers offer a simple promise: if it does not have a visa in the United States, trust us. We will take you safely.
At a time when legal roads to the United States have been cut and criminal groups are raising money from migrant smuggling, social networks such as Tiktok have become an essential tool for smuggers and migrants alike. The videos, taken to the extremes of the cartoons, offer a rare appearance within a long data industry and the stories used by traffic networks to combine northern migration.
“With the help of God, we will continue working to fulfill the dreams of foreigners. Safe trips without stealing our people, ”wrote an entrepreneurial smuggler.
As President Donald Trump begins to increase repression at border levels and migration to the United States Hall, smugglers say that new technologies allow networks to be more agile in the face of challenges and expand their reach to new clients, far from the old days when each town had their trust smuggler.
“In this line of work, you have to change tactics,” said a woman named Soary, part of a smuggling network that brings to the migrants of Ciudad Juárez in El Paso, Texas, who spoke with the press associated with the condition that her last name would not be shared by concern that the authorities track her. “Tiktok goes all over the world.”
Soary, 24, began working in smuggling when he was 19, living in El Paso, where a friend approached her on a job. She would wear her truck to collect migrants who had recently jumped the border. Despite the risks involved with work with trafficking organizations, he said he earned him more as a single mother than his previous work putting hair extensions.
As he earned more contacts on both sides of the border, he began connecting people of all the Americas with a network of smugglers to slip through the borders and finally to the United States.
Like many smuggers, she would take videos of migrants who talked to the camera after crossing the border to send WhatsApp as evidence to the loved ones that her clients had reached her destination safely. Now publish those clips to Tiktok.
Tiktok says the platform strictly prohibits human smuggling and informs the police.
The use of social networks to facilitate migration took off around 2017 and 2018, when activists built massive WhatsApp groups to coordinate the first important migrant caravans that travel from Central America to the United States, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a teacher in the migrant smuggling industry of the George Mason University.
Later, the smuggers began to infiltrate those chats and use the application of social networks of day choice, expanding to Facebook and Instagram.
Migrants also began to document their often dangerous trips to the north, publishing videos that walk through the jungles of Darien Gap Divising Colombia and Panama, and after being released by the posters.
A 2023 study conducted by the United Nations reported that 64% of the migrants they interviewed had access to a smartphone and the Internet during their migration to the United States.
Around the moment of the study of the study, when the use of the application began to fly, that Correa-Cabrera said that he began to see the smuggling ads in Tiktok.
“It’s a marketing strategy,” said Correa-Cabrera. “Everyone was on Tiktok, particularly after pandemic, and then began to multiply.”
Last year, Soary, the smuggler, said he began publishing videos of migrants and families in the US. With his faces covered and photos of the border between the United States and Mexico with messages such as: “We will pass him through Ciudad Juárez, regardless of where he is. Jump of the fence, walks and tunnel. Adults, children and the elderly. “
Hundreds of videos examined by the AP have thick cash bundles, people who cross the border fence at night, helicopters and airplanes supposedly used by coyotes, smugglers cut open cactus in the desert so that migrants drink and even lettuce crops with text that read “The US fields are ready!”
The videos are often placed in layers on the heavy music of the North Mexican with lyrics that romantically shave on being traffickers. The videos are published by accounts with names that allude to the “safe crossing”, “US destinations.”, “Dreams fulfilled” or “polleros”, as the smugglers are often called.
The narratives change based on the political environment and the immigration policies in the United States during the Biden administration, the positions would announce that migrants would access asylum applications through the CBP One application of the administration, which Trump ended.
Amid Trump’s repression, publications have changed to dissipate fears that migrants will be captured, promising that US authorities have been paid. The smuggers openly make fun of the US authorities: one is shown by smoking what seems to be marijuana right in front of the border wall; Another even takes a blow to Trump, referring to the president as a “high -level gringo.”
The comments are dotted with emojis of flags and chickens, a symbol that means migrant between the smugglers and other users who ask for prices and more information.
Cristina, who emigrated because she fought to reach the end of the month in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, was among those who were traveling in December after the person she had hired to pass her from smuggling to the United States, she left her already her partner in Ciudad Juarez.
“In a moment of despair, I started looking at Tiktok and, well, with algorithm videos they began to appear,” he said. “I took half an hour” to find a smuggler.
After connecting, smugglers and migrants often negotiate in encrypted applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, making a careful dance to gain the confidence of the other. Cristina, who now lives in Phoenix, said she decided to trust Soary because she was a woman and published videos of families, something that the smuggler admitted that she was a tactic to gain the confidence of migrants.
Smuggers, migrants and authorities warn that such videos have been used to cheat migrants or attract them to traps at a time when posters increasingly use kidnapping and extortion as a means to raise more money.
A smuggler, who asked to be identified only by his name Tiktok “The Corporation” due to the fear that the authorities will track him.
“And there is not much that we can legally do. I mean, it’s not that we can inform them, ”he said with a smile.
In other cases, migrants say that traffickers forced them to take the videos even if they have not arrived safely to their destinations.
Illicit announcements have promoted concern among international authorities such as the International UN Migration Organization, which warned in a report on the use of technology that “networks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and evasive, challenging government authorities to address new non -traditional forms of this crime.”
In February, a Mexican prosecutor also confirmed to the AP that they were investigating a network of accounts advertising crosses through a tunnel that extends under the border fence between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. But researchers would not provide more details.
Meanwhile, hundreds of accounts publish videos of trucks that cross the border, cash batteries and migrants, faces covered with emojis, promising that they did it safely through the border.
“We continue crossing and we are not afraid,” one wrote.
