The videos roll through TikTok in 30-second flashes. Migrants trek in camouflage through dry desert terrain. Dune buggies roar up to the United States-Mexico border barrier. Families with young children pass through gaps in the wall. Helicopters, planes, yachts, tunnels and jet skis stand by for potential customers. Laced with emojis, the videos posted by smugglers offer a simple promise: If you don’t have a visa in the U.S., trust us. We’ll get you over safely. At a time when legal pathways to the U.S. have been slashed and criminal groups are raking in money from migrant smuggling, social media apps like TikTok have become an essential tool for smugglers and migrants alike. The videos — taken to cartoonish extremes — offer a rare look inside a long elusive industry and the narratives used by trafficking networks to fuel migration north. “With God’s help, we’re going to continue working to fulfill the dreams of foreigners. Safe travels without robbing our people,” wrote one enterprising smuggler. As President Donald Trump begins to ramp up a crackdown at the border and migration levels to the U.S. dip, smugglers say new technologies allow networks to be more agile in the face of challenges, and expand their reach to new customers — a far cry from the old days when each village had its trusted smuggler. “In this line of work, you have to switch tactics,” said a woman named Soary, part of a smuggling network bringing migrants from Ciudad Juarez to El Paso, Texas, who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition that her last name would not be shared out of concern that authorities would track her down. “TikTok goes all over the world.” Soary, 24, began working in smuggling when she was 19, living in El Paso, where she was approached by a friend about a job. She would use her truck to pick up migrants who had recently jumped the border. Despite the risks involved with working with trafficking organizations, she said it earned her more as a single mother than her previous job putting in hair extensions. As she gained more contacts on both sides of the border, she began connecting people from across the Americas with a network of smugglers to sneak them across borders and eventually into the U.S. Like many smugglers, she would take videos of migrants speaking to the camera after crossing the border to send over WhatsApp as evidence to loved ones that her clients had gotten to their destination safely. Now she posts those clips to TikTok. TikTok says the platform strictly prohibits human smuggling and reports such content to law enforcement. The use of social media 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 U.S., according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University focused on the migrant smuggling industry. Later, smugglers began to infiltrate those chats and use the choice social media app of the day, expanding to Facebook and Instagram. Migrants, too, began to document their often perilous voyages north, posting videos trekking through the jungles of the Darien Gap dividing Colombia and Panama, and after being released by extorting cartels. A 2023 study by the United Nations […]