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When a Legend Airlines Airbus A 340 landed at San Salvador airport on July 15 after an 18-hour flight from the United Arab Emirates, its crew quickly realized something was wrong.
Salvadoran officials refused to connect the jet bridge to allow the roughly 300 passengers, all Indian nationals, to disembark, according to three former crew members on the flight who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Several passengers told the cabin crew they planned to travel onward to Mexico and cross the border there illegally into the U.S., one crew member said. Others said they were going on vacation to the Mexican border city of Tijuana, another crew member said.
Salvadorean officials were already on high alert when the flight landed. Several months earlier, U.S. and Salvadoran authorities had noticed an unusual pattern of charter aircraft landing in El Salvador carrying primarily Indian nationals.
The planes were arriving full and leaving empty, a U.S. official said.
And some passengers claiming to be tourists brought only a backpack for weeks-long trips. U.S. authorities later discovered that nearly all of the charter passengers disembarking in San Salvador had crossed the border into the U.S., the official said.
Such charter flights represent a new phase of illegal immigration to the U.S., five U.S. officials said in interviews with Reuters. Increasingly, they said, migrants from outside Latin America are paying smuggling networks hefty fees for travel packages that can include airline tickets – on charter and commercial airlines – to fly to Central America and then bus rides and hotel stays en route to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You have certain charter transportation companies charging extortion-level prices to prey on and profit from vulnerable migrants and facilitating irregular migration to the United States,” Eric Jacobstein, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere, told Reuters.
Jacobstein declined to comment on Legend or identify specific companies.
Liliana Bakayoko, a Paris-based attorney representing Legend since December, said the Romanian charter airline has not been accused of wrongdoing by any authorities. She added that she was unaware of the July flight and said the airline was basically like a “taxi driver.”
The record number of migrant arrests at the southwest U.S. border, which topped more than 2 million last fiscal year, has emerged as a major vulnerability for Democratic President Joe Biden in November’s presidential elections, with opinion polls showing more Americans trust Republican former President Donald Trump’s hardline approach to immigration.
Migrants from outside the Americas caught at the US border
On June 4, Biden – trailing in the polls in key battleground states – announced executive actions to deny access to asylum and quickly deport migrants or turn them back to Mexico if crossings surpass a certain threshold. It remains unclear how the policy will work in practice for migrants from faraway countries, which account for a growing share of illegal migration.
About 9% of irregular crossings at the U.S. border in the 2023 fiscal year involved migrants from outside Latin America, or about 188,000 people, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data. A decade ago, people from outside the Americas accounted for barely 1% of irregular arrivals.
The Biden administration attributes the historic levels of migration to global economic and political instability. Trump has blamed the high border crossings on Biden’s policies.
Indian nationals were the largest single group from outside the Americas encountered at the border last year, comprising about 42,000 arrivals. Migrants from 15 West African countries accounted for another 39,700, with most from Senegal and Mauritania.
The Biden administration has been working with some regional governments as well as travel companies to curb the flow of migrants.
In March, it began revoking U.S. visas for owners and executives of charter airlines and other companies thought to be facilitating smuggling. The State Department’s Jacobstein declined to name individuals or companies affected or how many had faced restrictions. Reuters was unable to independently establish which companies had been targeted.
In May, the administration warned commercial airlines to be on the lookout for passengers who might be intending to migrate illegally to the U.S. Apprehensions on the border in April fell 48% from December, U.S. government data show, which U.S. officials attribute in part to tougher enforcement by Mexico.
El Salvador’s Vice President Felix Ulloa said in an interview that his government has “permanent, constant, and effective” collaboration with the U.S. to fight irregular migration. The introduction of visa requirements and $1,000 transit fees on citizens of India and many African nations last October has “drastically reduced” the number of migrants transiting through San Salvador, he said.
But as some routes for illegal migration get squeezed, others open up.
Reuters and Columbia Journalism Investigations, the university’s postgraduate reporting program, traced two new intercontinental migrant smuggling routes. The reporting for this story draws from previously unreported aviation data, border figures obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and close to 100 interviews with government officials, police, airline employees, smugglers, travel agents and migrants in nine countries.
One route starts in West Africa, with migrants paying up to $10,000 for multi-stop commercial flights to Nicaragua, before continuing by land to the U.S.
The second, serving migrants from India, offers charter flights to Central America and overland transfers to the U.S. border for between 6 million ($72,000) and 8 million rupees ($96,000) per person – in many instances with full payment due after arrival in the U.S, according to Indian court documents and K.T. Kamariya, a deputy superintendent of police in the western Indian state of Gujarat investigating illegal migration.
The new routes via Central America avoid the visa requirements for migrants flying directly into Mexico. They also skip the dangerous northward trek across the jungle region between Colombia and Panama, known as the Darien Gap, that migrants face after arriving in some countries in South America with lax visa regimes.
Blas Nuñez-Neto, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for Border and Immigration Policy, singled out Nicaragua as the new entry point for many migrants. President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla and Cold War adversary of the United States, has been called out by Washington for authoritarianism following crackdowns on internal protests and opposition groups.
“Nicaragua has really, I think, unfortunately been weaponizing these flows,” Nuñez-Neto said in an interview. “It’s difficult when you have a government in the region that has essentially thrown its doors open and allows anybody from anywhere in the world to fly directly in exchange for a cash payment.”
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