Tiktok an instrument in the game of cat and mouse between smugglers and migrant authorities

Mexico City – Videos roll through Tiktok in 30-second flashes.

The migrants travel in camouflage on dry desert. Dune Buggies screams to the border barrier in the United States. Families with young children go through the gaps in the wall. Helicopters, planes, yachts, tunnels and jet skis are for potential customers.

Lacit with Emoji, the videos posted by smugglers offer a simple promise: if you do not have a visa in the US, you trust us. We will pass you safe.

In a period when the legal ways to the US were reduced and criminal groups get money from migrants, socializing applications such as Tiktok have become an essential tool for smugglers and migrants alike. The videos?

“With the help of God, we will continue to work to fulfill the dreams of foreigners. It travels safely without robbing our people, ”wrote an entrepreneurial smuggler.

While President Donald Trump begins to increase a repression at the border and migration until the US sinking, the smugglers say that the new technologies allow the networks to be more agile in the face of the challenges and to extend their coverage to new customers – a cry away from the old days when each village had a smuggling.

“In this work line, you have to change tactics,” said a woman named Soary, part of a smuggling network that brings migrants from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso, Texas, who spoke with the Associated Press on the condition that her first name is not shared by the concern that the authorities will follow her. “Tiktok goes all over the world.”

Sary, 24 years old, began to work in smuggling when she was 19, living in El Paso, where she was addressed by a friend about a job. She would use the truck to pick up the migrants who recently jumped on the border. Despite the risks involved in collaboration with traffic organizations, she said she had earned more than a mother alone than her previous job, putting hair extensions.

As he won several contacts on both sides of the border, he began to connect people from all over America with a network of smugglers to slip over the borders and finally in the USA

Like many smugglers, she would make migrant videos talking to the camera after crossing the border to send WhatsApp as proof to their loved ones that her customers have reached the destination safely. Now post those clips on Tiktok.

Tiktok says the platform strictly prohibits human smuggling and reports such content to law enforcement.

The use of social networks to facilitate migration took off around 2017 and 2018, when activists built massive WhatsApp groups to coordinate the first major migrant caravans traveling from Central America to the US, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason’s University, focused on the smuggling industry.

Subsequently, smugglers began to infiltrate those chats and use the Choice Social Media application, extending on Facebook and Instagram.

Also, the migrants began to document their often dangerous trips to the north, posting videos that passed through the Darien Gap jungle that divided Colombia and Panama and after they were released by extorting the cartels.

A 2023 United Nations study reported that 64% of the migrants they interviewed had access to a smart phone and internet during their migration in the USA

Around the time of launching the study, as the use of the application began to grow, that Correa-Cabrera said that he began to see that the smuggling ads are rising on Tiktok.

“It is a marketing strategy,” said Correa-Cabrera. “Everyone was on Tiktok, especially after pandemic, and then began to multiply.”

Last year, Soary, the smuggler, said she started publishing videos with migrants and families in the US, with covered faces and photos with the US-Mexico border with messages like: “We will go through Ciudad Juáz, no matter where you are. Jumping fence, hiking and tunnel. Adults, children and the elderly. “

Hundreds of videos examined by AP with thick cash features, the people who cross the border fence at night, helicopters and supposed planes used by the coyotes, smugglers cutting open cacti in the desert for migrants to drink from and even text salad “American fields are ready!”

Videos are often stratified on heavy music in the northern Mexican, with lyrics that romantically get rid of being traffickers. Videos are published by accounts with names that allude to “Crossing safe”, “US destinations”, “Dreamsing Dreams” or “Polleros”, as smugglers are often called.

The narratives change on the basis of the political environment and the US immigration policies during the Biden administration, the positions would advertise for migrants to be access to asylum applications through the CBP application of the administration, which Trump has completed.

Against Trump’s repression, posts have changed in despair of fears that migrants will be captured, promising American authorities have been paid. The young smugglers opened the American authorities: one is shown to smoking what seems to be marijuana right in front of the border wall; Another one even takes a trump jab, referring to the president as a “high level”.

The comments are punctuated with children’s emoji and chickens for children, a symbol that means migrant among smuggling and other users who require prices and more information.

Cristina, who migrated because she struggled to meet in the Mexican state Zacatecas, was among those who paraded in December, after the person she hired to smit in the USA abandoned her and her partner in Ciudad Juárez.

“In a moment of despair, I started looking for Tiktok and, well, with the videos of the algorithm they started to appear,” she said. “It took me half an hour” to find a smuggler.

After connecting, smugglers and migrants often negotiate on encrypted applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram, taking a careful dance to gain mutual trust. Cristina, who now lives in Phoenix, said she decided to trust Sary because she was a woman and posted families videos, which the smuggler acknowledged was a tactic to win the confidence of the migrants.

Smugglers, migrants and authorities warn that such videos have been used to deceive migrants or to attract them in traps at a time when the cards use more and more abduction and extort as a means of rake in more money.

A smuggler, who asked to be identified only by his name by Tiktok “The Corporation” because of the fear of authorities who followed him down, said that other accounts will steal the videos of his migrant smuggling network who tell the camera that they have reached safely in the USA.

“And we can’t do too much. I mean, it’s not like we could report them, “he said.

In other cases, migrants say they were forced by traffickers to make the videos, even if they did not reach their destinations.

The illicit advertisements have fueled concern among international authorities, such as the International UN Migration Organization, which warned in a report on the use of technology that “networks are becoming more sophisticated and evasive, thus causing government authorities to approach new non-traditional forms of this crime.

In February, a Mexican prosecutor also confirmed that he is investigating a network of advertising passes through a tunnel that takes place under the border fence between Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. But investigators would not give more details.

Meanwhile, hundreds of accounts post videos with trucks that cross the border, with cash stacks and migrants, faces covered with emoji, promising that they have made it safely across the border.

“We continue to cross and we are not scared,” one wrote.

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The illustrations are based on hundreds of videos posted on Tiktok examined by the water that advertises in the US to migrants. Videos are often lace with emoji, make a successful promises and promise travel safely.