Mexican law enforcement is looking for new tunnels crossing into the United States after finding a "sophisticated" structure earlier this year and spotting videos of alleged cartel members touting the existence of another one. Concretely, they are focusing on the Juarez-El Paso area.
Members of Chihuahua state police teamed up with Mexico's National Guard to dig in an area close to the Rio Grande and near Juarez's City Hall. Initially they seemed to find a structure, but it later turned out to be a drainage ditch that had not been registered, according to Border Report. U.S. officials were also present during the search.
Officers were also seen using steel rods to search for tunnels further east, close to where the tunnel was found in January. That structure stretched for over a quarter of a mile and has already been filled from both sides. It was described as "sophisticated" by former Border Patrol Chief Victor Manjarrez Jr., who said it was likely used to "bring people from China, from Southeast Asia or Europe that can pay $25,000 to $30,000 to be smuggled to the United States."
"If you go for volume, it becomes a risk because someone could talk. This isn't for the economic migrant you normally see here," said the former official, who worked as chief agent in Arizona and West Texas.
The former agent had anticipated the possibility that there were other cross-border tunnels that had not been discovered yet. "Most tunnels are discovered by human intelligence (...) somebody gets caught, somebody talks, you start looking," he said.
Officials have continued looking especially after the surfacing of social media posts from smugglers promoting it. The publications have been taken down after Juarez outlets reported on them.
"Our cyber security team came upon these videos where (smugglers) apparently are promoting a new tunnel. A line of investigation has been opened to determine the date the video was recorded and a possible location," said the Chihuahua state police chief of staff Luis Aguirre.
A former DEA agent said that cross-border smuggling tunnels are usually hidden underneath seemingly legal storefronts or warehouses, making them hard to detect and destroy.
Michael Brown, who was a senior special agent at the DEA, told Fox News Digital that even though most illegal drugs enter the country through vehicles crossing the southern border, some cargo goes through tunnels.
"They (the cartels) move hundreds of kilos out and build a warehouse over the tunnel," Brown told the outlet. He added that they are usually "hard to identify" in border towns like Eagle Pass or Brownsville, in Texas.
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