Held for Ransom in Animal Pens, Migrants Face Mass Kidnappings as U.S. and Mexico Ramp Up Enforcement

by Emily Green

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

TAPACHULA, Mexico — It was Jan. 17 when Nevy de Zelada, a migrant from Guatemala, and her family were walking on the edge of a four-lane highway in southern Mexico in blistering, 100-degree heat. It was the first leg of their journey to the United States, where they hoped to seek asylum. Her 21-year-old son was pushing her paraplegic husband in his manual wheelchair, and the family’s beloved dog was nestled on her husband’s lap. Earlier that day, they had crossed the river that divides Guatemala from Mexico on a rickety raft. But her husband’s condition made traveling difficult — he had been shot by gang members — and for now they just wanted to reach the closest city, a place 20 miles north of Mexico’s southern border where they could seek shelter and food.

Then, in broad daylight, a four-door truck sped by and slammed to a halt, blocking the family’s path. “Where are you going? I will help you get there,” one of three men inside yelled. But it wasn’t really a question. Their faces were covered with bandanas, except for their eyes. They wore bulletproof vests with a picture of a Mexican flag and a skull. The men got out of the truck and pointed guns at the family. “You can get in the car the easy way or the hard way,” one said. Zelada, crying, her ankles swollen and clothes soaked with sweat, didn’t try to fight. She and her nephew, son and daughter-in-law squeezed into the truck’s back seat after helping Zelada’s husband into the front. She estimates they drove for 45 minutes, mostly on isolated dirt roads, until they stopped at an abandoned ranch scattered with luxury cars and dozens of terrified migrants locked up in a large pen made for livestock.

“The first thing that came to my mind was my son,” Zelada said. “I had a life — my home, my children — but my son is just starting.

“I said to God, ‘Lord, please help us. Help us get out of here.’”

Mexico has long been known as a dangerous transit country for migrants because of the threat of cartel violence and extortion from immigration agents and police. But through interviews with more than 70 migrants over seven months this year, as well as U.S. and Mexican officials, ProPublica found that a new phase of mass kidnapping for profit has emerged at the country’s southern border that is different in character and scale than what has happened in the past, underscoring how effective Mexican cartels are in adapting their strategies to exploit new policies from Washington.

Along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, organized gangs affiliated with drug cartels have created an industrial-size extortion racket that involves kidnapping large numbers of migrants as soon as they set foot in the country. It is a volume business, one that its victims rarely denounce because of the relatively small ransom amounts and distrust of Mexican authorities. Immigrant advocates and church leaders say the criminal groups have created a virtual dragnet that makes kidnapping the rule rather than the exception.

Immigration has become a top issue for U.S. voters ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election — and a political liability for the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. In December 2023, amid a record number of border crossings, the Biden-Harris administration sent a delegation to Mexico to push the Mexican government to drastically ramp up immigration enforcement, according to a high-ranking Mexican official with knowledge of the talks.

Mexico’s foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the negotiations.

In the months following the December negotiations, Mexico dramatically decreased the number of humanitarian visas it issued to asylum-seekers, which many used to transit the country on the way to the U.S. border, according to government data. Authorities also increased the number of checkpoints to detain more migrants, immigrant rights activists said.

This year through September, Mexican authorities reported a record 925,000 apprehensions, a number that likely includes people caught more than once and many who were only briefly detained.

But Mexico deports just a tiny fraction of the migrants it encounters — less than 2% of total encounters this year resulted in deportations, according to Mexican government data. Limited resources and court decisions restricting Mexico’s right to detain families has hampered the Mexican government’s ability to carry out wide scale returns of migrants to their home countries.

So instead, Mexican authorities are forcibly busing tens of thousands of migrants to southern Mexico, far from the U.S. border, and leaving them there. During the first nine months of this year, Mexico bused over 60,000 migrants from other parts of Mexico to the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, more than in all of 2023 and close to double the number bused there in 2022, according to an analysis of Mexican government data. The analysis did not include people bused from those two southern states to elsewhere in Mexico. The data was first reported by Reuters.

With the busing, migrants are circled around inside Mexican territory in a merry-go-round strategy that forces them to repeatedly pay off immigration agents, kidnappers and smugglers.

Migrants walk along a highway in southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) Migrants pass a checkpoint on a highway in southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

It’s “designed to deter migrants by making it harder and even more expensive to get through Mexico,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank, of the busing practice. But the result, he said, “gives organized crime groups a second bite at the apple to extort migrants.”

The busing strategy is also sending migrants back to a region that is increasingly violent, where they face threats not just from organized crime but from authorities. In October, Mexican soldiers opened fire on a tractor trailer just north of Tapachula, killing six migrants, including at least one from Egypt. Mexican authorities vowed to investigate the killings. The uptick in violence coincides with a pitched battle between the Sinaloa cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel for control of migrant-, drug- and gun-smuggling routes in southern Mexico, sending the homicide rate soaring in the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco, according to security experts and Mexican government data.

A trip to Mexico’s southern border earlier this year provided a glimpse of how brazen organized crime has become — and how easy it is to make money off migrants. ProPublica interviewed 35 migrants in eight families who were kidnapped trying to make their way over the 20-mile stretch from Ciudad Hidalgo, which borders Guatemala, to Tapachula, the closest nearby city. ProPublica interviewed another 16 migrants in Mexico City who were kidnapped along the same stretch. The victims were from Central America, Venezuela and Colombia and included mothers traveling with babies, elderly people and large families.

A migrant woman shows a photo of the stamp that kidnappers gave her after she paid to be released. She was kidnapped shortly after entering Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

They told nearly identical stories of being ambushed, often by bus and taxi drivers who turned them over to armed men on an abandoned ranch with fighting cocks, where they were ordered to pay a ransom for their freedom. Migrants who weren’t carrying cash, or who weren’t carrying enough of it, were given Wi-Fi and a Mexican bank account number so that they could call their families and ask them to cover the ransom. The kidnapping is so widespread and open that migrants walk around Tapachula with stamps of a bird on their forearms as a sign that they paid the ransom. Many refer to the kidnapping ranch they were brought to as the “gallinero,” or chicken coop.

The mass kidnappings in southern Mexico started in mid-2023 and began picking up by the end of that year, according to immigrant rights activists monitoring the situation. By 2024 — after Mexico and the U.S. entered into the agreement to stop migrants from reaching the U.S. border — nearly every migrant who attempted to cross into Mexico through Ciudad Hidalgo without a smuggler was kidnapped and held on an isolated ranch, they said.

U.S. officials have indicated that they’re aware of the extent of the dangers migrants face in Mexico but they say they cannot interfere with how or whether the government there protects them. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior administration official, said in a Spanish-language call with reporters in July that it is “impossible” for migrants traveling by “illegal means” to the U.S. border to arrive without “passing through the cartels’ hands.”

Still, senior U.S. and Mexican officials credit the busing and stepped-up enforcement cooperation between the two governments — coupled with new restrictions on asylum put in place by the Biden administration — with contributing to the dramatic decline in migrants illegally crossing the U.S.’ southwest border. Migrant apprehensions by U.S. Border Patrol have fallen 78%, from around 250,000 in December 2023 to nearly 54,000 in September 2024, U.S. data shows.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said the “administration’s coordination and collaboration with Mexico is incredibly strong, built on mutual respect, shared interests, and common goals.”

A spokesperson for the Mexican president’s office referred questions to the Interior Department, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Mexico’s national immigration agency said that it does not receive any economic support from the U.S. for the busing operation and referred questions about the kidnappings to Chiapas’ state prosecutor, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Enrique Vidal Olascoaga, director of the Fray Matías de Córdova human rights center in Tapachula, said that in September Mexican authorities raided and closed down one of the principal kidnapping ranches in the region. But, he said, others continue to operate, and migrants are still regularly kidnapped and extorted trying to reach Tapachula.

A young girl holds a dove at a basketball court where migrants shelter in the town of Huixtla, Chiapas. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) First image: Children play at a park in Tapachula, Chiapas, the first city many migrants arrive at in Mexico. Second image: Sisters from El Salvador show the sandals they wear while they walk for miles in an effort to leave southern Mexico. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica) Ransom in Bulk

Trapped at the ranch on that January day, Zelada worried she’d made a fatal mistake. Her family wasn’t wealthy, but back in Guatemala, her husband had sold bananas out of a truck and they had never wanted for “a plate of beans,” she said. Then, in October 2021, members from the powerful street gang Barrio 18 attacked her husband because he couldn’t pay the gang’s extortion fees, shooting him and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Still, the family stayed — until gang members started harassing her 19-year-old daughter. Zelada’s family scraped together money for her daughter to travel with a smuggler to the U.S. on her own while the rest of the family fled two months later. Zelada didn’t think traveling through Mexico could be any more dangerous than the life they’d left behind.

But as Zelada and her family found themselves held hostage on the abandoned ranch hours after entering Mexico, she questioned their decision to make the risky journey north. Most of the migrants on the ranch were Spanish speaking, but a handful of others appeared to be from China, and she saw the kidnappers using a translation app on their cellphones to communicate with them, she said. One guard told them that if they turned over all their cash, they would be released to continue on their way. Zelada and her relatives gathered all the money they had brought with them — $2,700 — and handed it over.

Isabel, a Colombian woman who agreed to be identified only by her middle name, said that as soon as she crossed Mexico’s southern border in May with her husband and two young children — a 3-year-old and an 11-month-old — two motorcycle taxi drivers offered to take her family to Tapachula. She realized they’d been tricked when the drivers approached a dilapidated ranch. She tried to run, but gunmen forced her back. The guards used two-way radios to communicate with one another and monitored the hostages’ phones for any signs they were trying to take photos, she said. She and her family were fed rice twice a day for three days while she waited for her mother-in-law in Venezuela to scrounge together the ransom demanded by the kidnappers.

Most migrants said the kidnappers had a set rate: $75 per person, half-price for kids under 10. But the exact price depended on the day, the circumstances and the victims’ nationality — Cubans and Haitians were charged more because it is assumed they have family in the U.S., and Chinese migrants were also quoted a higher price because they tend to have more money, according to immigrant activists who work in the region. Still, the kidnappings in southern Mexico are a volume business. By charging even relatively small amounts of money and moving migrants through as quickly as possible, the criminal groups make enormous profits with little risk.

Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest working in southern Mexico, has been alarmed by the new phenomenon of mass kidnappings. (Fred Ramos for ProPublica)

Heyman Vázquez, a Catholic priest who works in Ciudad Hidalgo, along the Guatemalan border, said criminal groups in southern Mexico have gone so far as to set up checkpoints along the main highway in an effort to identify migrants. “The authorities are involved,” he said about the kidnappings, adding that there’s a blurry line between the authorities charged with protecting migrants and the cartels exploiting them. “You never know who you’re talking to,” he said.

The Mexican government didn’t respond to requests for comment on allegations that organized crime has set up checkpoints along the highway in southern Mexico or that kidnappers may be collaborating with officials.

Migrants crossing Mexico have long faced horrific acts of violence in their efforts to reach the U.S., mostly in northern Mexico. In 2022, 12 Mexican police officers were charged with murdering 16 Guatemalan migrants, including one who was identified as working with the smugglers, whose bodies were found shot and incinerated south of the U.S. border.

No one knows exactly how much money Mexican criminal groups make off of migration, including smuggling and kidnapping. According to a 2021 congressional statement from the acting director of Homeland Security Investigations, U.S.-bound human smuggling and related criminal activities produce an estimated $2 billion to $6 billion in yearly revenue. But most officials believe those profits have surged as the numbers of migrants passing through Mexico soared in recent years — a record 2.5 million people arrived at the southern U.S.border in fiscal year 2023.

Dana Graber Ladek, chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration in Mexico, said cartels see migrants purely as “opportunities to make money at a very grand scale.” She said because of this, some of the migrants that the organization has encountered in Mexico describe the country as a “second jungle” after the dangerous stretch of rainforest, called the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama that has become a major thoroughfare for migrants trying to reach the U.S.

Nature is one of the main threats in the Darién Gap, she said. “In Mexico,” she said, “the main threat is people.”

The dozens of migrants who spoke to ProPublica after being abducted in southern Mexico said that in most cases, after paying the ransom, the kidnappers arranged for them to be driven to Tapachula. They said they were squeezed into sedans — sometimes 10 or more people in a car — and dropped at a corner store near one of the city’s main plazas.The kidnappers told them the stamp on their forearm would protect them from being kidnapped again in the Tapachula area. But that protection lasted only as long as they stayed in town.

After handing over all their money, Zelada’s family was held at the ranch for less than half an hour, she estimates. Still, she said, “it felt like an eternity.”

She and her family then spent two months trying to apply for asylum in Mexico before giving up and joining a group of around 2,000 other migrants walking north as part of a caravan. From March through July, Zelada and her family walked more than a thousand miles through sweltering summer days, sleeping outside in parks and beside train tracks, until they were finally able to cross into the U.S. using a U.S. government mobile app called CBP One. They are currently living in South Carolina while they apply for asylum.

But for other migrants, the kidnapping in southern Mexico derailed their lives. Jennifer, a 23-year-old Honduran woman who asked to be identified only by her first name, said that her daughters, ages 4 and 5, were traumatized after being held at gunpoint for four hours in a livestock pen. When kidnappers dropped the three of them off in Tapachula after paying the ransom, they found a spot at a migrant shelter. But she and her children are too terrified to leave. Seven months later, they are still living in the shelter. Smugglers have offered to ferry the family to the U.S. border, but she doesn’t have enough money to pay. They are scared to move forward on their own for fear of being kidnapped again, but also can’t fathom returning to Honduras. “You can’t trust anyone,” she said.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Emily Green.