Among the thousands of migrants that have illegally crossed the U.S. southern border are Venezuela’s “worst criminals” and a record number of Indians who are seeking asylum in the States.
Citing multiple sources, DailyMail.com reports, “Henchmen for Venezuela’s dictator and many of the South American country’s worst criminals have crossed over the US border and are now causing chaos in major American cities, including Dallas, Miami and Chicago.”
The outlet describes “Villa Dallas,” a Venezuelan neighborhood in Dallas, as a scene of “mayhem.”
“For months, once peaceful apartment complexes have been the scene of illegal street races, beatings, shootings and extortion attempts,” it reports.
Videos of the violence in the neighborhood — complete with the apparent sounds of gunfire — have been posted to social media sites.
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“A lot of these people are criminals from the (Nicholas) Maduro regime,” Miami lawyer Rolando Vazquez told DailyMail.com. “Some are ex-security forces. They are professional criminals or part of criminal organizations.”
“At least 334,914 Venezuelan citizens have crossed into the US in fiscal year 2023, according to US Customs and Border Protection statistics,” the outlet reports. “In the month of September alone, 72,352 Venezuelans were encountered at US international crossings– making citizens from the South American country the largest nationality arrested for illegally entering the US. For the first time ever, Mexican citizens were replaced as the top nationality along the border.”
According to Vazquez, criminal Venezuelan migrants are extorting Venezuelan migrants across the States, particularly those business owners who are perceived to have “deep pockets.”
“They want to do the same thing here that they used to do in Venezuela,” Vazquez said.
He notes that some of the violent Venezuelans are members of Venezuelan state-run militia known as the “Collectivos.”
“The government-backed gangs run Venezuelan towns, demanding bribes, taking personal items from homes simply because they want to, and killing or attacking citizens at the request of Maduro, who was indicted by the US government in 2020 for narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges,” DailyMail.com explains.
“The same people so many migrants left Venezuela to escape from are now here,” Vazquez said. “They’re the ones who attacked people for their political beliefs, and they are now in the US. They’re doing Maduro’s dirty work, and it’s not just Dallas. It’s Miami; it’s Chicago.”
Meanwhile, according to The Wall Street Journal, “Roughly 42,000 migrants from India have crossed the southern border illegally during the fiscal year starting last October through September, according to data compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That is more than double the number from the same period the prior year, when crossings by Indians hit a historic high.”
And they aren’t just coming in from Mexico.
The outlet reports, “An additional 1,600 have crossed from the northern border illegally—four times the number who crossed in the last three years combined.”
The reason for the mass migrations stems, at least in part, from “Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies,” The Journal reports.
Videos celebrating the “success stories” of those who endured the trip and made it across the border are making the social media rounds, encouraging more to risk the trip.
“There has also been an influx of smugglers masquerading as travel agents across villages, especially in the northern states of Punjab and Haryana,” according to The Journal.
(Video: YouTube)
“Since 2007, the total number of illegal border crossings by Indians in a fiscal year has exceeded 5,000 only four times,” The Journal notes. “Indians nearly all turn themselves in to Border Patrol, rather than being arrested while evading capture, because they want to ask for asylum in the U.S.”
Warnings from Modi of a Sikh separatist movement revival in India are prompting many to leave.
“Earlier this year, his government restricted communication across Punjab and made dozens of arrests as it launched a manhunt for an activist who has advocated for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan,” The Journal explains.
And, while economic reasons aren’t enough to qualify the migrants for asylum, the scarcity of well-paying jobs in India is making many desperate to leave.
“In many cases, they sell everything they own to pay smugglers, who now operate on a much more global and professionalized scale across the world,” according to The Journal.
Most of the Indian migrants are crossing into the States through Arizona.
The Journal explains:
Roughly 80% of the migrants from India are single adults, and most are coming through Arizona after taking what are coming to be known as “donkey flights” via countries that don’t require visas for Indian nationals or that have an easier process for obtaining travel visas. A coming Bollywood movie, titled “Dunki,” which will feature India’s biggest movie star, Shah Rukh Khan, centers on this illegal method of immigration.
Some have died during the journey, including Gurupreet Kaur, a 6-year-old girl from Punjab who perished in the Arizona desert in 2019. Two sets of families of four from Gujarat also died crossing the northern border in the past two years.
Nonprofits in border communities in Arizona that help migrants are having to adapt to the uptick in Indian migrants. Diego Piña Lopez, director of Casa Alitas, said his shelter has had to rethink dietary restrictions and consider religious and cultural differences, given the large number of Indian migrants they are now seeing.
“It used to be an annual thing that in the summers we would see small pockets of people coming from India,” Lopez said. “Now we are seeing people from India almost every day.”