EL PASO, Texas – Migrants are increasingly becoming victims to kidnapping, extortion, ransoms and physical abuse in this border region, targeted by local gangs, working with major criminal organizations, the FBI said Monday.
The groups target each other’s stash houses to force recently arrived foreign nationals to call relatives here or in their home countries so they can send money to their new captors, according to Special-Agent-in Charge Jeffrey R. Downey.
Downey described the gangs as “a little bit of a hybrid … It is the same group that smuggles them across the border, but we are also seeing … that competitive organizations are also attempting to kidnap their victims, and bring them into their organization to extort family members out of money. So it’s a very complex operation that they’re running, but there are multiple organizations that are out there doing this.”
