At 20 years old, Francisco Rojas Hernández had worked as a
coyote
smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States for the last two years of his life.
He now had a plan to "make real money."
He "came on," he said, one day when he was introduced to a US Marine looking to make a little extra money.
Until recently, his job had been to drive and pick up migrants where he was directed at a point near the border and drop them off hundreds of miles inland.
He earned a few hundred dollars for each trip.
But now he was going to take it upon himself to recruit others like him.
"That's where the real money is made," he
said from prison in an interview with the Vice News website.
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That day he discovered that the infantrymen or
marines
were the "ideal" smugglers, because they were "well presented", "they were obedient" and nobody suspected them.
The man he hired to take the migrants from point A to point B soon referred him to more marines, all young men in their 20s from the Camp Pendleton naval base.
Camp Pendleton is the largest naval base in California.
The recruits who enlist there to serve in the Navy are
young and earn little,
about $26,000 a year (less than California's minimum wage).
In contrast, they can earn around $500 per migrant smuggling trip, which is attractive to many.
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When Byron Law learned that one of his Pendleton colleagues had made $1,000 in one night transporting undocumented migrants, he didn't think twice.
Migrants pay between $11,000 and $14,000 for coyotes to help them cross from their home communities in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and more recently also Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil, to the United States.
The journey is dangerous and they must cross several countries on their way, including Mexico.
To get through, they often have to pay a fee to criminal groups that control parts of Mexican territory.
Rojas, the son of Mexican immigrants born in San Diego, California, told the aforementioned outlet that he could earn about 5,000 dollars for each migrant he successfully smuggled into the United States, minus the 500 dollars for the driver who took them.
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Desperate to find a better life in the United States, migrants are increasingly willing to pay more money to escape extreme poverty and violence in their home communities.
It is estimated that in the year 2000 hiring a
coyote
cost about 2,000 dollars.
Five years ago the sum was about $6,000 or $7,000.
The anti-immigrant measures of recent Administrations have not only made access across the border more difficult, where more fences and obstacles have been built to prevent passage and Border Patrol patrols and technology have been expanded, but also restricted legal pathways to immigrate to the country, creating a bottleneck with decades-long waiting lists for a chance to enter the country legally.
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The result has been a considerable increase in illegal crossings in recent years.
In fiscal year 2021 (September 2020 to October 2021), authorities recorded more than 1.7 million unauthorized migrant encounters at the border with Mexico, a record number.
Rojas said there came a time when he was coordinating multiple smuggling operations in one day, employing more than a dozen Marines from the Pendleton base.
In a week he could earn up to $20,000
, he told Vice News.
It all came crashing down one morning in July 2019, however, when a Border Patrol agent on the lookout for migrants attempting to cross illegally spotted the black BMW car in which Law and another naval base colleague, David Salazar-Quintero.
The officer saw something suspicious: The BMW had gone off the road in the middle of nowhere and had returned a few minutes later only to make a U-turn and go back the way it had come.
It is as shocking as it is disturbing to think that there were literally thousands of dollars of cartel money flowing through Camp Pendleton"
military prosecutor of the law case
When he detained them, none denied what they were doing, including the two migrants who confessed to having entered the country irregularly.
The arrest of the
Marines
revealed a human trafficking network within the military organization that had been sent to the border precisely to help with patrol tasks, which caused a scandal.
"Right under the nose of not only his commanders, but military and federal law enforcement agencies, he planned, coordinated and executed the transportation of illegal aliens and the distribution of drugs for his financial gain," said the military prosecutor who handled the Law and Salazar-Quintero case.
"It is as shocking as it is disturbing to think that there were literally thousands of dollars of cartel money flowing through Camp Pendleton," he added.
The Marines arrest 16 Marines suspected of smuggling migrants at Camp Pendleton, California, on July 25, 2019. Marine Corps Public Relations
Although the military authorities arrested 16
marines
in July 2019 who were suspected of having participated in the smuggling of migrants organized by Rojas, only two could be formally charged, those who had already admitted their guilt, because a judge considered that the due process rights of others when they paraded them in front of the rest of their company as a reprimand.
The case is illustrative of how widespread the migrant smuggling networks are in the United States
, since they increasingly include more citizens (more than 71% of those arrested for this type of crime, according to data from the Sentencing Commission), many of which also belong to the armed forces or law enforcement agencies, although those figures are not broken out.
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Law was sentenced to 18 months in prison and Salazar-Quintero to 12 months.
Both have publicly apologized for their role in the human smuggling scheme.
Rojas received a 10-month sentence in federal court in exchange for cooperating with authorities to tell them everything he knew.
"I loved the amount of money it brought me. But just as it came, the money left," Rojas told the quoted newspaper.
"In my family, in my children, in their mother, in marijuana, in luxurious events, hotels, expensive restaurants, casinos. I was barely 20 years old and I knew I wanted to do something legal with that money, but it completely blinded me." , he added.