Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Meanwhile On the U.S. - Mexican Border: Cartels Resort To Wristband System To Keep Track Of The People They Are Smuggling

 "Hey, blue wristband, see? I paid for a VIP all-access pass, what's this 'you're sending me to Montana' crap?"

From Borderland Beat (also on blogroll at right), March 26:

Mexican Cartels Use Wristband System to Bring Order to Business

A shoe is seen surrounded by wristbands discarded by asylum seeking migrants from Central America along the banks of the Rio Grande river where migrants entered the United States from Mexico, in Penitas, Texas, U.S. (source: Reuters)

A mass-migration surge along the U.S. southern border has so overwhelmed Mexican cartel-associated smugglers that they are requiring their customers to wear numbered, colored, and labeled wristbands to denote payment and help them manage their swelling human inventory.

"It's an inventory system," a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official confirmed. "They're all over the place."

The plastic bands - red, blue, green, white - some labeled “arrivals” or “entries” in Spanish, are discarded after migrants cross the river on makeshift rafts, according to a Reuters witness. Their use has not been widely reported before.

Some migrants are trying to evade border agents, others are mostly Central American families or young children traveling without parents who turn themselves into officials, often to seek asylum....

....MORE  

And in other Montana news, the state's junior U.S. Senator said:

"There is a flood of Mexican meth, Mexican heroin, Mexican fentanyl. Twenty years ago in Montana, meth was homemade. It was homegrown. And you had purity levels less than 30 percent. Today the meth that is getting into Montana is Mexican cartel."

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