Cartels turn to social media to lure Americans into human smuggling as Texas enforces stricter laws

(Credit: Tara Anand for The Texas Tribune)

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Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.

When Justin Persinger met the woman at a grocery store, he was broke and sleeping on a friend’s couch in San Antonio. After some flirting, she asked if he would be interested in making a little extra money by giving some people a ride down by the border in Eagle Pass, Persinger’s lawyers said.

The woman told Persinger he’d earn about $1,000, and he agreed, hoping it would help his chances of scoring a date with her. And the cash wouldn’t hurt.

But when Persinger made the 2 ½-hour drive to the border, a state trooper was hiding out nearby. He was arrested.

Persinger is among thousands of people who have been charged with human smuggling since Texas began an all-out effort called Operation Lone Star to control its border with Mexico nearly four years ago. While elected officials say they are targeting the Mexican cartels who run smuggling and drug trafficking empires, most of those charged in Texas are American citizens — and smuggling arrests ballooned by about 1,150% after the state began its border crackdown.

The people they’re arresting are often lured into becoming human smugglers by vague posts seeking drivers for thousands of dollars on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to eight defense attorneys, three prosecutors and four people arrested for smuggling.

People who answer such an ad get instructions from an anonymous person — who does not tell the prospective driver they’ll be committing a crime — through the messaging app WhatsApp, the lawyers and convicted smugglers said.

They’re told to drive to specific spots on the Texas side of the U.S.-Mexico border, pick up a group of strangers and drive them to a drop off point in large Texas cities like Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. They’re instructed to send the unknown person messages along the way to confirm key milestones in the journey — like arriving at the initial destination and when the migrants get into the vehicle.

“We have Uber, we have Lyft, we have a lot of these different services where normal everyday citizens are drivers,” said Mary Pietrazek, a San Antonio defense attorney who’s represented nearly 500 people arrested under the state’s human smuggling law. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility for somebody to want a driver.”

Texas’ human smuggling law has been in the books for a quarter century, but over the last decade the state Legislature has repeatedly broadened it and made the punishment more extreme. People convicted under federal human smuggling law face on average about 15 months in prison. Last year, state lawmakers imposed a mandatory 10-year minimum sentence on anyone convicted under the Texas law.

The law has raised alarm among attorneys, criminal justice reformers and immigrants’ rights advocates who say it has overwhelmed local justice systems, caught up people who are far from hardened criminals and morphed into an unconstitutionally vague statute that gives state police a fishing license to look for undocumented migrants.

“This state-led immigration enforcement system is really trying to make so many aspects of our lives [criminal],” said Priscilla Olivarez, of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which along with other organizations published a paper claiming that the state smuggling law is “fueling a mass incarceration crisis.”

Texas law enforcement made 1,400 human smuggling arrests the year before Gov. Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in early 2021. By 2022, the number had exploded to 17,500.

A Tribune review of arrests made by the Texas Department of Public Safety — whose troopers have flooded the border under Operation Lone Star — shows that about half of the people arrested by troopers for smuggling each of the last three years were younger than 27. Teens younger than 18 accounted for roughly 6% of arrests each year.

In interviews, lawyers said some smugglers were a bit skeptical of the task they were asked to complete, but did not fully understand that they were being asked to illegally smuggle people since they wouldn’t be transporting anyone across the border.

Persinger was 33 when he stopped in Texas in the spring of 2023 during a cross-country trip from North Carolina to California, where he lived at the time. His father had just died and left him some belongings — including a car. Persinger, a musician who had always struggled earning money, met up with a friend in San Antonio where the two were going to record a few songs. He said he planned to stay for about a month.

When he met the attractive woman at the store, he said he was surprised when she started flirting with him. When she offered Persinger the driving gig — which included gas money — he said he wasn’t suspicious. He said he had done his share of hitchhiking around the country and could relate to someone needing a ride. Persinger declined to share certain details of the encounter because he feared retaliation from the woman who "ruined" his life, he said through his lawyer.

Justin Persinger was a musician traveling across Texas when he said he met a woman in a bar who offered him a chance to earn some money giving some people a ride. (Credit: Courtesy of Justin Persinger)

“Sometimes, that ride never comes,” Persinger, now 34, said in an interview this summer at the Maverick County Jail. “I didn’t know of the term ‘border crisis’ ‘til I was about to go to trial.”

“Where my drivers at?”: Criminals recruit on social media

Two men wearing camouflage sit in the back seat of an SUV in the photo posted on an Instagram story. The caption reads:

“The routes been green

fuck that 9-5 an come work

guaranteed pay

guaranteed pick up.”

Another post shows a stack of money with the caption, “Where my drivers at.”

Another depicts a screenshot of a map with the caption: "Whoever tryna make 10k at 6 am, hit me guaranteed hit.”

It was a post similar to these — shared with The Texas Tribune by a lawyer — that arrived in Nathan Perrow’s social media app inbox.

A few months after graduating from high school in 2021, Perrow received a vague message through Snapchat asking if he could give a person and their friends a ride for $1,200. They’d also cover his gas to and from the border.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” Perrow, of Houston, told a Texas House committee last fall during a hearing about proposed changes to the smuggling law. “I just thought I was going to give them a ride and I was going to get paid.”

But when he arrived at the destination he’d been given in Del Rio, he said no one was there. Then a state trooper’s flashing lights appeared behind him. Perrow was charged with six counts of human smuggling because troopers found six migrants near the location where they stopped him, he said. “Never interacted with them, but they were there,” Perrow told lawmakers.

Perrow could not be reached for comment by the Tribune.

The drive may appear simple, but it requires getting past U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints on all major highways and a plethora of law enforcement agencies, including Border Patrol, watching for suspicious vehicles. Past the checkpoints and farther inland, immigration enforcement is less prevalent.

“What's being asked [in social media ads] doesn't seem particularly bad behavior — it's picking someone up and driving them somewhere else,” said Jack Winfrey, a lawyer with the RioGrande Public Defender’s office.

Sylvia Delgado, who has represented 171 people accused of human smuggling, said most of her clients shared a variation of the same story: They were looking for a way to make money when they received a solicitation on WhatsApp along the lines of, “Hey, do you wanna make make a bunch of money by just giving somebody a ride? Just call this number and we'll give you somebody that needs transport,” she said.

“That's generally how it happens,” Delgado said. “Doesn't say, ‘Oh, and that’s illegal so be careful.’ It doesn’t warn them of the dangers.”

Pietrazek, the San Antonio lawyer, said she’s had clients who first received money for gas, as much as $300 sent digitally over apps like CashApp, like a “carrot dangling in front of them” with a promise to be paid for the job once it’s complete.

“It's probably about the time that people get into their car and they smell like brush and they have mud on their boots, and they don't speak English — that's when it probably hits them,” she said.

How Texas has ramped up criminal penalties for smuggling

They called it the “coyote bill.”

Lawmakers in 1999 wanted to go after coyotes — the Spanish slang for human smugglers, who preyed on migrants by squeezing them for money and often putting them at risk of dying during long journeys across rough and isolated terrain, recalled Norma Chávez, a Democratic state representative from El Paso who wrote the bill.

The law — formally added to the penal code as “unlawful transport” — passed without much opposition. It created a state jail felony, punishable by up to two years in prison, for transporting someone for money in a way that is designed to hide them from authorities and “creates a substantial likelihood” the person could get hurt.

“I was ahead of the curve,” Chávez said in a recent interview. “I recognized that we need to also go after those who use this for profit.”

But migration across the world was beginning to change in ways that are still unfolding.

The federal government ramped up national security efforts after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — including along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a George Mason University professor who studies smuggling. The government doubled down on border enforcement efforts, adding thousands of new Border Patrol agents, spending big on surveillance technology and starting a border wall that remains incomplete.

The border crackdown didn’t stop migrants fleeing poverty, criminal violence or political repression from coming and trying to cross. But as the crossing became more difficult, human smuggling mutated into a global billion-dollar behemoth that has become a major source of profit for organized criminal organizations, Correa-Cabrera said.

“If people could apply for a working visa and could come here instead of paying $12,000 to a smuggler, they would pay the fees to the U.S. government. But that’s not possible,” Correa-Cabrera added. “This is a very hypocritical system.”

As human smuggling became bigger and more profitable, Texas lawmakers in 2011 increased the law to a third-degree felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Four years later, they added a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, if the smuggled person risked injury during transport or was younger than 18, and a first-degree felony punishable by up to 99 years if the smuggled person was injured or became a sexual assault victim.

In the spring of 2021, three months after President Joe Biden took office, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, the sprawling border crackdown that has cost taxpayers more than $11 billion to date.

Soon, Texas state troopers began arresting migrants along the southern border, mostly for criminal trespassing on private property. National Guard soldiers patrolled the banks along the Rio Grande with long guns.

At the state Capitol, lawmakers again took up the human smuggling law and allowed prosecution even if prosecutors couldn’t prove a driver was going to be paid.

By then, Texas police were beginning to surpass federal authorities in arresting and prosecuting people for human smuggling.

The feds charged 5,046 people under the federal smuggling law in 2021 — 3,471 in Texas. The same year, Texas police arrested 7,755 people under the state smuggling law.

That gap has only widened. In the 2022 fiscal year, federal law enforcement charged 2,745 people with human smuggling in Texas. Meanwhile, Texas law enforcement made roughly 17,592 smuggling arrests that year.

And while Texas lawmakers have steadily increased prison time for offenders, those charged under the federal law were likely to receive far less prison time.

The most recent revision of the state smuggling law, passed by the Legislature a year ago, is perhaps the broadest. It added the 10-year minimum sentence and prohibits transporting a person with the intent of concealing them from police.

It includes no mention of the passenger’s immigration status — which means police could legally stop, question and arrest someone suspected of concealing a passenger even if they’re a U.S. citizen.

El Paso Public Defender Kelli Childress, whose office has nearly 400 smuggling cases, posed a scenario: If she were to give her father a ride and her car has tinted windows and she drives away from an officer, she could be arrested on suspicion of smuggling her own father.

“That's an absolute absurd outcome, but that's the way the law is written,” Childress said. “If the law was not intended to target a certain population, why is that all we're seeing?”

Border prosecutors say smuggling cases are already clogging their court dockets and the mandatory minimum sentence means more defendants are likely to take their chances with a jury trial. Few cases filed under the new law, which took effect in February, have reached a final conclusion.

The number of state criminal cases filed in border counties has increased 286% since 2020, from 7,350 to 28,366 last year, according to the Border Prosecution Unit, a collective of 17 border district attorney’s offices from El Paso to Brownsville. Most of those are smuggling cases, said Tonya Spaeth Ahlschwede, the unit’s chair.

She said those cases are piling up, which strains county courts that don’t have enough personnel — from prosecutors to court reporters to interpreters — to keep up.

“We only have so many people at a time to be in the courtroom to handle these cases,” Ahlschwede said.

Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, who supports the mandatory minimum sentence, agreed that local courts are unprepared for the crush of cases and will need more courtrooms, judges and support personnel.

“You have to apply that deterrent for it to have results,” Smith said. “If you don't enforce a law, people don't follow it.”

Arrested near the border

One night in May 2023, Persinger stopped his father’s Hyundai, still bearing North Carolina plates, off Route 57 outside of Eagle Pass. About a quarter mile away sat a trooper in his SUV with all its lights off, watching the vehicle in an area “known for a high volume of human smuggling,” the officer later wrote. The road is one of three out of Eagle Pass.

After seeing several people emerge from the brush and jump into the Hyundai, the trooper pulled Persinger over, according to a probable cause affidavit. One “undocumented alien” ran off immediately and was followed by two more, despite the trooper’s orders to “stop and show hands,” he wrote.

Persinger remained still in the driver’s seat. He agreed to talk to the trooper, telling the officer about the woman he’d met at the grocery story and that he was offered money to pick up four people. Later, he showed the trooper the instructions on his phone explaining how, where and when to do just that, Persinger’s lawyers said.

The trooper arrested Persinger. He had been arrested before, according to online court records, for low-level crimes like public intoxication, lying on a sidewalk and having an open container of alcohol in public.

Persinger was shocked. He told the trooper he thought he had stumbled upon a work opportunity — and that he was attracted to the woman.

“I was just like, what about Uber drivers or taxis, private charters — things of that nature,” Persinger later wrote to the Tribune. “Never thought I could end up in this situation for allegedly giving some people a ride from point A to point B.”

Amrutha Jindal oversees indigent defense appointments for Operation Lone Star arrests as the director of Lone Star Defenders. To her, Persinger’s case highlighted some of the worst aspects of the state’s human smuggling arrests: Police are grabbing low-hanging fruit — who will under the new law face a mandatory 10 years in prison — but don’t appear interested in investigating the bigger fish connected to the drug cartels.

“It doesn't really make sense,” Jindal said. “For those people to get slapped with a 10-year sentence, it's shocking — and most of these young people have no idea.”

In a Maverick County courthouse, the trooper who arrested Persinger testified at trial earlier this year that he never called any of the numbers that were on Persinger’s phone for directions, Persinger’s lawyers recounted. Nor did he search the names of the people affiliated with the phone numbers.

The trooper did not testify that Persinger tried to hide the people in the car.

A jury found Persinger guilty. Prosecutors wanted a 10-year prison sentence. Since he was charged before the 10-year minimum took effect, his lawyers asked for three years.

The jury gave him four years.

Uriel J. García contributed to this story.

This story is part of a collaboration with FRONTLINE, the PBS series, through its Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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