As U.S. control of the border has strengthened since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it has become harder for people to cross illegally. That has spawned a boom in hostage-taking as smuggling cartels have realized that they can extort money from illegal immigrants' families in the United States, many of whom wire the ransom instead of risking their own deportation by contacting police.
'Better to Be Deported Alive Than to Be Dead' For undocumented residents, a call demanding ransom for a kidnapped loved one can lead to an equally fear-inducing call to federal immigration authorities, by Josh White and Dagny Salas, August 23, 2009.
Of course it's the Washington Post, so there's a lot of polically correct wittering about how illegals ("undocumented people") are afraid to call the police (although nothing seems to happen to them) etc etc. But what the story really shows is that even minimally better border enforcement is reducing the smuggling industry to cannibalistic chaos:
Juana, whose brother also survived because of her phone call to authorities, said he has no desire to try to come back into the United States because "he's scared now even to think about it."
One aspect particularly interested me:
"They said terrible things," Valdez-Navas [a rescued victim] said in Spanish from El Salvador. "I worried a lot. I cried a lot. I didn't eat. They said if they didn't get the money, they would take out our organs and sell them..."
Organ-trafficking was an unexpected key component in the current New Jersey corruption/ money laundering scandal, which also featured Israeli immigrants.
My guess: coerced organ-harvesting may well flourishing in the lawless hell created by forrty years of bipartisan indifference to immigration enforcement.
Do an expose on that, MSM!
