The videos roll through tapping toks in flashes of 30 seconds.
Migrants pull in camouflage through dry desert site. Dune Buggies roar to the border barrier of the United States Mexico. Families with young children go through gaps in the wall. Helicopters, aircraft, yachts, tunnels and Jetskis assist with potential customers.
The videos posted by smugglers offer a simple promise: If you do not have a visa in the US, we trust. We will overcome you safely.
At a time when legal roads were cut to the US and criminal groups made money from migrant smuggling, apps on social media such as Tiktok became an essential tool for both smugglers and migrants. The videos – taken to cartoon -like extremes – provide a rare look in a long elusive industry and the narratives used by trade networks to promote migration north.
“With God’s help, we will continue to realize the dreams of foreigners. Safe trips without robbing our people, ”wrote one enterprising smuggler.
While President Donald Trump is increasing a suppression of border and migration levels to the US dip, 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 every town had its trusted smuggler.
“In this work, you have to switch tactics,” says a woman named Soary, part of a smuggling network that brought migrants from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso, Texas, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition that her family name would not be shared from the concerns that the authorities would detect. “Tiktok is going all over the world.”
Soary, 24, then started working in El Paso, where she was approached by a friend about a job. She would use her truck to pick up migrants who recently jumped the border. Despite the risks associated with collaboration with organizations, she said it earned her more than a single mom than her previous work that holds her expansion.
As she obtained more contacts on both sides of the border, she began to connect people from all over the Americas to a network of smugglers to sneak them across the borders and eventually in the US
Like many smugglers, she would take videos of migrants talking to the camera after crossing the border to send WhatsApp as evidence to loved ones that her clients came safely to their destination. Now she puts the cuts to tiktok.
Tiktok says the platform prohibits strict smuggling and reports such content to law enforcement.
The use of social media to facilitate migration started around 2017 and 2018, when activists built massive WhatsApp groups to coordinate the first major migrant karavans traveling from Central America to the US, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the George Mason University.
Later, smugglers began to infiltrate the chats and used the Choice Social Media app of the day and expanded to Facebook and Instagram.
Migrants also often began documenting their dangerous trips north and posted videos dragged through the jungle gap jungle gap that divided Colombia and Panama, and after being released by carving cartels.
In a 2023 study by the United Nations, it was reported that 64% of the migrants they questioned had access to a smartphone and the internet during their migration to the US
Around the time of the study release, when the use of the app began to rise, Correa-Cabrera said she was starting to see the smuggling ads on Tiktok.
“It’s a marketing strategy,” Correa-Cabrera said. “Everyone was on tapping, especially after the pandemic, and then it started to increase.”
Last year, the smuggler, the smuggler, said that she started publishing videos of migrants and families in the US with their faces covered and photos of the US border between the US and Mexico with messages such as: ‘We will pass you through Ciudad Juárez, no matter where you are. Fence jumps, pulls and with tunnel. Adults, children and the elderly. “
Hundreds of videos investigated by the AP contain thick wades of cash, people crossing the border fence, helicopters and aircraft presumably used by coyotes, smugglers who cut open cacti in the desert for migrants to drink and even lettuce with text that is “the American fields ready!”
The videos are often layered about heavy northern Mexican music with lyrics that were romantic about human traders. Videos are published by accounts with names referring to ‘safe intersection’, ‘USA destinations’, ‘fulfilling dreams’ or ‘polleros’, as smugglers are often mentioned.
Narrative shift based on the political environment and immigration policies in the US during the Biden Administration will advertise jobs to gain access to asylum applications through the CBP One app of the administration that Trump has terminated.
In the midst of Trump’s oppression, posts have shifted to expel the fear that migrants will be captured, which have been paid off promising US authorities. Smugglers haunted US authorities: One shows himself smoking that looks like marijuana is right in front of the boundary wall; Another even takes a stitch to Trump and refers to the president as a ‘high-stripped gringo’.
Remarks are filled with emojis of flags and baby chickens, a symbol that means migrant among smugglers, and other users who ask for prices and more information.
Cristina, who migrated because she struggled, ended in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, was one of the browsing in December after the person she had hired to smuggle her to the US, abandoned her and her partner in Ciudad Juárez.
“In a moment of desperation, I started searching for tiking and started to come up with the algorithm videos,” she said. “It took me half an hour” to find a smuggler.
After connection, smugglers and migrants regularly negotiate encrypted programs such as WhatsApp and Telegram, and do a careful dance to gain each other’s confidence. Cristina, who now lives in Phoenix, said she decided to trust Soary because she was a woman and posted videos of families, something the smuggler acknowledged was a tactic to gain migrants’ confidence.
Smugglers, migrants and authorities warn that such videos have been used to fraud migrants or in traps in a time when cartels are increasingly kidnapping and extortion to make up more money.
One smuggler, who asked to be identified only by his Tiktok name “The Corporation”, because of the fear that the authorities detect him, says other accounts will steal his videos from the migrant smuggling network
‘And there’s not much we can do legally. I mean, it’s not like we can report it, ‘he says laughingly.
In other cases, migrants say they have been forced to take the videos by traffickers, even if they did not arrive safely after their destinations.
The illegal advertisements have fueled concerns among international authorities such as the UN International Organization for Migration, which in a report warned about using the technology that “networks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and elusive, and thus 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 running through a tunnel below the border fence between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. But investigators will not provide more details.
Meanwhile, hundreds of accounts cross videos of border crossing, stacks of cash and migrants, faces covered with emojis, and promise that they have made it safe across the border.
“We keep crossing and we’re not afraid,” one wrote.
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Illustrations are based on hundreds of videos posted on Tiktok, investigated by the AP advertising to the US to the US. Videos are often fed with emojis, make daring promises of success and promise safe journey.
