How open borders fed cartel ‘extermination camp’ horrors

 “Extermination sites” with human remains, crematoria and cast-off shoes and clothing evoke images of the Third Reich. 

But the latest one wasn’t discovered decades ago in Nazi-occupied Europe; it was found in rural Mexico, allegedly run by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) as a recruiting and training center for unwilling participants in a war fueled by illicit narcotics and abetted by open US borders.

For the past four years, millions of illegal migrants poured into the United States and were released into US cities and towns under Biden administration policies, encouraging millions more to follow.

Those who complained about the surge and the costs it imposed on Americans — higher taxes, strained medical resources and increasingly crowded classrooms — were castigated as “heartless” or worse, “xenophobic.”  

Most news coverage focused only on migrants’ hardships after they arrived in this country and struggled to find food, shelter and medical care in a new and unfamiliar land — the better to draw cash from the public fisc to fund such services and the “nonprofits” that provided them.  

Shamefully, few outlets ever discussed the horrors of the illicit trek those migrants made to this country, drawn by what they correctly saw as an “invitation” by a Biden White House that loosened or simply eliminated common-sense restrictions implemented during the first Trump administration.  

Which is strange, because those horrors, many deliberately inflicted on the migrants by the very smugglers they foolishly trusted to bring them here safely, have long been well-documented.  

In February 2024,  Doctors Without Borders published a report detailing what it termed as a “shocking increase in sexual violence” in the Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, which had become a highway for transcontinental US-bound migrants. 

If you haven’t heard about it, don’t feel bad — the findings were functionally ignored here.  

Sexual predation is just one of the many underreported hells and harms inherent in the multibillion-dollar human-smuggling industry that mushroomed in the fertile soil of our open border.

That brings us to the cartels.  

CJNG is just one of several operating in Mexico. Each reaps mind-boggling profits feeding Americans’ hunger for street narcotics. 

But drug trafficking is only a segment of the cartels’ many criminal enterprises.  

As migrants are brought north, they cross through areas cartels deem to be their “territories” — broad swaths and narrow strips of land, both at Mexico’s borders and in its interior, that they fight one another and the government to control.  

To pass through these fiefdoms, cartels charge smugglers a “tax” of anywhere between a few hundred to several thousand dollars per migrant. The cost is passed along to the migrants themselves. 

In December 2023, the House Homeland Security Committee estimated cartels made $13 billion off migrants in 2021 alone. The number of illegal entrants — and the cartels’ proceeds — only rose thereafter.  

The cartels use that money to enhance their operations, buying new and bigger weapons, expanding their drug labs — and running camps like the one uncovered outside Guadalajara two weeks back.

Cartel work is dangerous, and those organizations need hundreds of new “soldiers” per week to fill their vacant ranks.  

If they can’t find enough volunteers, they dragoon the unwilling. Those who resist or fail to perform aren’t just mustered out; they’re eliminated.  

Hence the ovens and the remains.

Now that Trump has shut off the migrant spigot, cartels will try to boost fentanyl sales to recoup their loss of “tax” income from the human traffickers.

That will put them in the cross-hairs of the administration’s anti-drug efforts. Designating the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” has given the US Defense, Treasury and Justice Departments new powers to bring to the fight.  

Spurred by tariff threats, Mexico has already added 10,000 more troops to patrol its side of the border. 

Cartel bosses are survivors, but their costs are quickly mounting.

Meanwhile, any criticism of President Trump’s border policies must be tempered with this understanding: Illegal immigration puts migrants themselves in mortal peril, even as it feeds cartels that dole out death — both on American streets, and in extermination camps in rural Mexico.

That’s truly heartless.

Andrew Arthur is the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.      

https://nypost.com/2025/03/23/opinion/how-open-borders-fed-cartel-extermination-camp-horrors/