Where to Look for Human Smuggling at the Southern Border

Why it's important that the feds, not the states, control of the border

Operation Lone Star, Texas’s own state-level border enforcement effort, began shortly after President Trump left office. One of the key players is Matt Michelsen, who has been covered here previously. His company has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of state contracts. It has been suggested by the Texas Observer this week that one of the GOP governors standing with Governor Abbott in his dispute with the Biden administration, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, may have been riding on a private jet owned by Michelsen’s company:

On Sunday, 13 Republican governors flocked to Eagle Pass to stand in support of Governor Greg Abbott’s border security showdown with the feds. It appears one of them may have hitched a ride on a private jet owned by an Austin contractor that has cashed in on the taxpayer windfall generated by Operation Lone Star. 

Early Sunday morning, a private plane owned by Gothams LLC flew from Austin-Bergstrom Airport to Nashville—where Tennessee Governor Bill Lee resides—and then flew down to Maverick County’s airport, touching down just before noon, according to the flight tracking website Flightaware. Governor Lee was among the attendees of Abbott’s Eagle Pass border event, which included a state police briefing and a press conference that began shortly before 3 p.m. 

There are a lot of drawbacks to border security being this insane bonanza involving many different foreign interests and corrupt contractors, and it’s more or less only the feds that can clean it up. Texas has its own border wall fund, which has received tens of millions from a Mellon heir:

An out-of-state billionaire who has previously bankrolled attempts to defend controversial immigration laws is responsible for nearly all the donations to Gov. Greg Abbott’s $54 million border wall fund.

A member of one of America’s richest family dynasties, Timothy Mellon, contributed nearly 98% of the fund’s total donations when he donated $53.1 million in stock to the state in August, according to public records. Mellon is the 79-year-old Wyoming-based grandson of banking tycoon and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

But back to Michelsen for a second. As we’ve been over, he was deeply involved in the Curative COVID fraud, and has also worked with Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, and the hedge fund manager John Burbank.

One of the problems here is that Republicans are still willing to work with a guy whose fraudulent COVID tests cost the country billions, and maybe a fair number of lives. Again, these people claim to take national security seriously, but many of their security tech companies have serious foreign influence issues, and Michelsen is of course no exception.

What this suggests about the venture capital industry, including DCVC where Michelsen was a partner, and which was just the subject of a House report this past week, is that it is heavily Chinese. It’s an open question the extent to which DCVC is simply a Chinese front, the entire back office is Chinese. This is now well on the radar of Congress, and Rep. Mike Gallagher announcing his resignation at the end of the term today suggests some weirdness going on.

But the relevant thing here is according to government sources, Michelsen was a go-between for Facebook and Rebekah Mercer in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This was reported in the New York Times:

Ms. Mercer’s intermediary with Facebook was Matthew Michelsen, a tech entrepreneur and investor based in San Diego, who lists his employer as GothamAlpha, a consulting firm. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has also advised major Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook and Palantir, a data-mining firm and intelligence contractor.

Mr. Michelsen’s meeting came on March 20, the day after Facebook announced that Cambridge had agreed to let it audit the firm’s computer servers. Mr. Michelsen met informally with a Facebook acquaintance who was accompanied by a Facebook lawyer, according to a person briefed on the meeting, and both Cambridge Analytica and the Mercers were discussed. The person discussed the meeting on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it publicly. No immediate actions were taken as a result of Mr. Michelsen’s outreach.

Given the Mercers’ Russian issues—Parler’s servers were located there—what this suggests is that there may have been an attempt by the Russians to get their hands on large swaths of Facebook data. There is also an extent to which they do not share the vision for moving American foreign policy forward—the Mercers are huge backers of John Bolton.

The way to look at this as a general matter is that all borders are arbitrage opportunities. That’s not a case for abolishing them altogether, but it’s a reason to pay close attention to people who want to control who gets to cross.

There have been sporadic reports of Russians increasingly getting involved in human trafficking rackets across the U.S.-Mexico border, and there was a new high of Russian-speaking border crossers last year. Here’s one:

Russian-speaking smuggling networks are highly agile, with members linked by linguistic and cultural ties, and spanning several continents. Facilitators in Mexico who speak Russian exploit their knowledge of the local context and contacts with coyotes to attract new clients. However, they do not act in a vacuum. Mexican drug cartels are also significant players in the migrant smuggling business, either organizing smuggling operations themselves or charging a passage fee from independent coyotes. These migrant flows occur within established border crossing networks, as Russian-speaking facilitators buy services from Mexican coyotes as opposed to conducting independent smuggling operations.

How the end of COVID-19 restrictions on foot crossings into the US will affect the dynamics of migrant flows remains to be seen. However, the influx of Russian-speaking migrants, and of many other nationalities who had been turned away under the Title 42 provisions, is likely to stimulate criminal markets at the US–Mexico border.

The way the L.A. Times has framed some of these is that these border-crossers are Russians who declined to fight in Ukraine, and thus it’s bad for them to be turned away. Other than the prima facie case that they are here rather than there, there isn’t much evidence for that. There are very good reasons to consider those asylum claims cautiously.

The Russians are also highly supportive of that sort of swaggering Texas go-it-alone spirit, and have heavily boosted the Texas Nationalist Movement. It’s not so much that the Texas Nationalist Movement is in any danger of successfully causing Texas to secede—it’s a tiny group—it’s that by putting that concept in people’s minds, it shapes the way they think about these conflicts.

This crazy patchwork by which the U.S. attempts to achieve border security is useful to no one so much as human smugglers. Where the data companies and spyware come in here is, if you can track people, you get to decide who gets to cross—it may even be possible, for instance, for the Russians or Israelis to put pressure on the cartels in their own interests. It suggests, in other words, that Russians and Israelis have a hand in human trafficking rackets at the border. For that reason, it’s somewhat problematic that the big conservative site most hawkish on immigration, Breitbart, is so very Israeli. They’re going to miss big parts of this.

Another thing to think about is how Russians think about Jews. Specifically, how Vladimir Putin thinks about Jews. Many of the oligarchs around Putin are Jewish, but there is a certain Russian attitude toward Jews that has not entirely abated and there are reasons to believe Putin shares. Among the thinkers that have received a post-Soviet rehabilitation is Lev Gumilev, who is widely considered to be antisemitic, which is probably fair: he did more or less view Jews as a parasitical force on the Russian state. But he did also see them as providing important connective tissue between ethnic Slavs and the Turkic peoples that make up a substantial minority of the Russian population, basically mediating that relationship. So you look at, for instance, Central Asian Turks like these Kyrgyz asylum seekers crossing the southern border, after starting their journey in Russia, and wonder what this is all about:

The exact number of Kyrgyz migrants who have entered the United States from Mexico is unknown because many of them, including Aisalkyn, hold Russian passports. They often start their journeys in Russia, paying private Russian companies to take them to Mexico via several countries.

"We flew from [the Russian city of] Sochi to Istanbul, then to Cancun in Mexico, then went to Tijuana and Mexicali," Aisalkyn said. "In Tijuana, [the traffickers] demanded $2,000 per adult and $800 per child to help us cross the [U.S.] border. We tried many times. We tried by foot and twice by car. On our 17th failed attempt, Border Patrol officers seized our vehicle."

You can sort of see the shadow of that structure here: Russians working with Israelis to move Turks. The reason to be concerned about that is the Central Asian Turkic peoples are potentially one of the useful bulwarks against both China and Russia. It’s troubling to see that.

In America we tend to look at migration with the Ellis Island lens, give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But the political uses of migration have been well understood for centuries in Central Asia—Erdogan himself has used migrants as a bargaining chip in negotiations. And the Chinese and Russians have every reason to want to push Turkic and Mongolic peoples out. That’s why we should be concerned about Chinese, Russian, and Israeli imbrecations with border security contractors, tech companies, and big data.

All of this is just far beyond the ability of a state government to sort out, even if it weren’t as corrupted as Greg Abbott’s is.