20th Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum – Human Trafficking/Illicit Finance

To continue the discussion, Mr. Joseph Humire begins by talking about how he normally talks about how terrorism and illicit finance, but over time he has come to realize that human trafficking is not at all just a humanitarian issue. He delves into the fact that there are more than 1.7 million encounters and apprehensions at the Southern Border this year. A new record to date. Then he proposes the numbers that there are nearly 7,000 border encounters a day – 4x the capacity of border facilities.

After introducing the border situation, Mr. Humire brings the issue of the “Special Interest Alien” (SIA) to the table. He defines them as irregular migrants travelling from all parts of the world, specifically from 35 countries that have a “high density of terrorists.” Especially over the past 4 years, there has been a surge in these people, much coming from Latin America. In fact, says Mr. Humire, in 2020 US law enforcement arrested 66 human-smuggling facilitators, and he also cited that these facilitators make over 10-15k per migrant, which equals about $350 m a year.

Mr. Humire continues to cite a case study from Venezuela. He lays out how the country operates the largest humanitarian crisis on the Western Hemisphere.

SIMA contact facilitators.

For $5k, they issue a new passport to migrant sand send them to Mexico.

Next, SIMA contacts state airplanes and sets up the flights

Migrants connect to facilitators in Mexico, who bring them across border.

New, illegal passports are shipped to an address for the immigrants to pick up.

Mr. Humire then touches on the convergence of international terrorist organizations and trans-continental criminal organizations. Just as Ms. Bradley said that human trafficking was the intersection of all issues, Mr. Humire says that human smugglers themselves now serve as the logistical centerpiece, as terrorist and criminal organizations align due to logistics. Terrorists have a political motive, and criminals have a financial motive. In the end, they all, though, are what Mr. Humire calls the “Three F’s”: financers, fixers, and facilitators. Lastly, Mr. Humire offers some solutions: the USA should potentially insert Venezuela onto that list of interest for the DHS. Also, Humire just thinks that more time should be spent on issues such as these.