From Mexico’s southern border to its northern checkpoints, migrants describe a system in which movement itself has become monetised. Criminal groups, smugglers, and in some cases state officials extract payment at nearly every stage of the journey, turning transit into a chain of transactions and vulnerability into currency
Maria believed reaching Mexico would offer safety; instead, she entered a route where almost every step carried a cost.
At bus stations, roadside stops, and migration checkpoints, the question was rarely whether she would be stopped, but who would demand money next.
“The police are not always trustworthy, and money dictates survival,” she said. “If you can’t pay, your possessions, or worse, can be taken. Every bus ride, every checkpoint, is a risk.”
Her experience reflects a pattern documented by migrants, humanitarian organisations, and researchers across Mexico: extortion is not incidental to the journey north, but embedded within it.
Fabienne Cabaret, director of the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic State of Law, described it as a system that operates through repetition rather than exception.
“Extortion has become almost normalised along the migration route,” she said. “Migrants face it multiple times: police, migration officers, traffickers. It is part of the kit.”
Interviews conducted for this investigation, alongside reports from human rights organisations and official data, suggest that migrants moving through Mexico are exposed to repeated demands for payment from a range of actors, including criminal organisations, smugglers, municipal police, migration authorities, and security forces. What emerges is a parallel economy built around human mobility, in which each stage of movement carries a price.
The consequences extend beyond financial loss. Researchers and humanitarian workers described a system in which protection and predation often overlap, and where survival frequently depends on the ability to pay.
For migrants like Maria, extortion is not an occasional abuse encountered along the way; it is a recurring condition of the route itself.
How Enforcement Reshaped the Route
Over the past decade, migration through Mexico has been reshaped by increasingly restrictive enforcement policies in both Mexico and the United States. Research from the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, in collaboration with FM4 Paso Libre and El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, showed that border control strategies have prioritised deterrence and detention over protection, expanding enforcement across the country rather than concentrating it at the border.
As enforcement intensified, migration routes shifted. Traditional corridors became more dangerous or more heavily monitored, pushing migrants into remote areas where criminal groups exert greater control and where state presence is inconsistent or predatory.
Detention data reflected this escalation. In the mid-2010s, migrant detentions rose sharply across Mexico, including in southern states such as Chiapas, signalling the expansion of interior enforcement far beyond the US border.
In parallel, US policy shifts have further constrained legal pathways. Measures such as expanded deportations, the suspension of asylum processing mechanisms like CBP One, and the reinstatement of “Remain in Mexico” have contributed to a growing population of people stranded on Mexican territory while awaiting resolution of their cases.
Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, has become one of the clearest expressions of this transformation. Once a transit point, it now serves as a bottleneck, where migrants can remain for months while their asylum claims are processed.
Applications for refugee status in Mexico can take three to five months or longer, during which applicants are often required to remain in the region where they filed their claim. For many, this creates a condition of enforced immobility: neither able to move north nor willing or able to return home.
A Cuban migrant in Tapachula described the shift in expectations: “We are working here and managing little by little. Some of us are thinking of staying in Mexico for a few years.”
A Honduran mother travelling with her daughter said the uncertainty of US policy had changed her calculations entirely. “Right now, Mexico seems like the best option. Going back is not possible.”
What emerges is not only a corridor of movement, but a system of containment, one that produces both stagnation and exposure to risk.
Violence as Business
As routes shift into more isolated terrain, organised criminal groups have consolidated control over key stretches of the journey. In southern Mexico, particularly along Chiapas’ coastal highways and near border crossings such as Ciudad Hidalgo, migrants reported exposure to kidnapping, extortion, sexual violence, and forced recruitment.
Data from the Missing Migrants Project recorded thousands of deaths and disappearances along migration routes across the region over the past decade. Mexico’s broader crisis of disappearances, with more than 100,000 people officially registered as missing, deepens the risk for migrants whose cases often go unrecorded or unresolved.
Humanitarian organisations argued that the scale of disappearance reflected not only criminal violence but also structural impunity and limited forensic capacity. The closure of national identification mechanisms in recent years has further complicated efforts to identify remains and investigate cases.
For migrants, this means that disappearance is often not an exceptional outcome but a known risk along the route north.
Criminal organisations are not the only actors involved.
Reported abuses include extortion, arbitrary detention, theft of documents, physical violence, and sexual assault. For migrants, this overlap between criminal and state actors created a landscape in which the sources of threat are not always distinguishable.
When Authorities Become Part of the Threat
Extortion along the migration route does not operate as a series of isolated incidents, but as a structured economy of extraction that follows migrants across jurisdictions and stages of movement.
“Extortion has become almost normalized along the migration route,” said Fabienne Cabaret, director of the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic State of Law, who has documented patterns of violence across Mexico’s migration corridors.
The structure, she added, is designed around vulnerability. Migrants often leave their countries without understanding how many times they will be stopped or by whom. “They don’t have the full picture before leaving,” she added.
Payments are rarely fixed; they are situational, shaped by geography, perceived vulnerability, group size, and urgency.
Cabaret describes what she calls “extortion express,” where migrants are stopped at checkpoints or during brief encounters and given minutes to pay whatever cash they have on hand. In other cases, payments accumulate across multiple stops, transport routes, and intermediaries.
Demands can range from small payments, often around 200 to 500 pesos per person (8 to 21 pounds), to higher sums depending on perceived capacity to pay and the number of people being transported.
Along more complex routes, especially where migrants move through multiple jurisdictions or rely on coordinated transport, cumulative costs escalate dramatically.
Ten years ago, the journey from origin countries to the United States was estimated to be around $4,000; today, Cabaret and other analysts place that figure between $10,000 and $15,000, with some routes reaching significantly higher depending on terrain and enforcement intensity.
“The more you pay, the more likely you are to cross,” she said, underscoring how payment itself becomes a mechanism of survival rather than protection.
Refusal is rarely viable, as migrants who cannot pay report detention, violence, deportation, or transfer into the control of other actors who continue the extraction cycle. Smugglers themselves may abandon migrants mid-route when payments fail, leaving them exposed to higher-risk environments.
Cabaret also situates this within a broader architecture of violence in which state and non-state actors are not always distinguishable in practice. “State violence has always been in practice because the immigration sector is one of the most corrupt in Mexico,” she said, pointing to structural conditions that allow extortion to persist.
Stephanie Brewer, director for Mexico at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), described a continuum of interaction between state and non-state actors, ranging from tolerance to collusion. “Criminal groups and authorities know that they can extort migrants with no chances of accountability,” she said.
According to Brewer, enforcement policies in both Mexico and the United States have intensified these dynamics by concentrating vulnerable populations within Mexico. As legal pathways narrow, migrants become more dependent on informal systems of movement, increasing exposure to exploitation at every stage.
“Every step costs money,” she said, “whether that’s police, National Guard, or criminal organisations.”
The Ciudad Juárez detention centre fire in 2023, in which 40 men died, further exposed the risks within institutional settings. Survivors reported being asked to pay for basic necessities while detained, 500 pesos, equal to 21 pounds, for water. Several officials were later implicated in the incident.
In this context, extortion is not external to the migration system. It is embedded within it.
Human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, have repeatedly documented similar patterns across Mexico’s migration routes.
Their reporting describes migrants being stopped at checkpoints, threatened with detention, and forced to pay bribes in exchange for passage.
The 2025 World Report stated that migrants and asylum seekers are “routinely targeted by criminal groups and Mexican officials for serious abuses, including sexual assault, armed robbery, kidnapping, and extortion.”
These findings align with field testimonies that describe a cycle in which extortion is embedded within every stage of movement.
Why So Few Cases Are Reported
Despite the scale of abuse, formal reporting remains rare.
For many migrants, the decision not to denounce is not rooted in ignorance but in calculation. Engaging authorities can increase risk rather than reduce it, particularly when those same institutions are implicated in abuse.
Cabaret explained that legal invisibility is central to this dynamic. “The migrant is not recognised, so he cannot report or denounce.”
Time is also a factor. For those in transit, stopping to report can mean losing the only viable opportunity to continue the journey.
This is compounded by fear of deportation and detention, especially among those whose legal status is uncertain or unprocessed.
Testimonies collected for this investigation highlighted the same logic repeatedly: survival depends on movement, not accountability.
Families described sending relatives north without anticipating the scale or repetition of coercion along the route. Children are among the most vulnerable, with documented cases of abandonment during crossings when smugglers prioritise continuation over safety.
One family said, “If I knew, I would have never sent my daughter. I never imagined all this would happen, and my kid would be at risk.”
When asked what they believed would have happened instead, the answer reflected a broader pattern seen across interviews: migration is often imagined as a single passage toward reunification, not a sequence of repeated encounters with coercion.
In another case, Nina travelled with her mother and uncle in a group from Paraguay, part of a common migration pattern aimed at reuniting with her father in the United States; but along routes like these, families described constant uncertainty over who could be trusted, and at what point protection turns into exploitation.
The vulnerability intensifies for children. One account describes two children found alone in the desert, an infant and a child around one and a half years old, abandoned mid-route.
In another case, children were left behind at the Río Bravo crossing, as, in these situations, survival decisions are made in seconds, by smugglers who prioritise continuation of the route over protection. As one anonymous testimony put it bluntly: “If a trafficker has to abandon a child, they leave them.”
In some cases, migrants who witness violence are later deported, eliminating their ability to participate in investigations. Brewer noted that this creates a structural gap in accountability, where testimony is removed from the jurisdiction in which it would be relevant.
Families faced with kidnapping or threats of execution must choose between paying ransom and risking the death of a relative. “They usually pay,” Cabaret noted, because refusal carries immediate and irreversible consequences.
Stephanie Brewer added that this silence is structurally produced by enforcement policy itself. Migrants, she explained, are more likely to fear authorities than criminal groups because state actors control detention, deportation, and legal status. Reporting an abuse can therefore accelerate the very outcome they are trying to avoid.
Silence, in this context, is not absence but rather a form of adaptation.
Right to Reply
The Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) stated that its Ethics Committee recorded several complaints in recent years involving allegations, including abuse of authority and extortion. It said investigations are handled by internal oversight bodies within the Ministry of the Interior, and that reporting mechanisms are available for migrants.
State-level authorities and security institutions contacted for this investigation referred responsibility to other agencies or stated that the matters did not fall within their remit.
This pattern of referral across institutions reflected a broader fragmentation in accountability pathways, where responsibility is dispersed rather than clearly located.
In December 2025, a video circulating online appeared to show migration officials requesting payments from migrants at a border crossing in Matamoros. As a response, the government removed the agents involved and opened an investigation.
Authorities also pointed to existing complaint mechanisms and anti-corruption frameworks within migration institutions.
Conclusion
The findings in this investigation suggest that extortion is not a peripheral feature of migration through Mexico, but an embedded structure that shapes how movement itself functions.
Across checkpoints, transport routes, detention spaces, and informal crossings, migrants describe repeated demands for payment imposed by a range of actors whose roles often overlap in practice. These interactions are not isolated incidents but part of a broader system in which vulnerability is repeatedly converted into value.
As enforcement policies intensify and legal pathways narrow, movement does not stop. It becomes more fragmented, more expensive, and more dependent on informal systems of control.
Maria still remembers the question that followed her across Mexico: Who will demand money next?
The evidence gathered for this investigation suggested that, for many migrants, the answer is rarely predictable, but what is predictable is the system itself.
