How To Survive a Migrant Kidnapping

Victor Celaya should not have made it out alive. Gang members in his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, wrongly accused him of ratting them out to the police. They told Celaya he had 24 hours to live. Immediately, Celaya began planning his escape to the United States, the only place he could be sure the gang’s network could not reach. His wife said she would not let him go alone; their two young daughters would stay behind with grandparents. Carrying two small backpacks, they drove away from everything they knew on their red motorcycle.

Celaya says he owes his life to preparation. Before leaving Honduras, he erased all contacts from his phone and learned his family members’ numbers by heart. He cut a small hole and hid a copy of the motorcycle key and $100 inside the lining of his shoe. When he and his wife reached the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, a group of armed men in black uniforms stopped them at a roadblock, led them into a truck and blindfolded them. “At first, I thought they were police,” Celaya said. 

After a 45-minute car ride, they were unloaded into a shack where Celaya endured five days of beatings as the men continued to demand that he contact his family and ask them to wire him $20,000. “Where was I going to get $20,000?” Celaya said. He refused; his phone was empty. 

The kidnappers, Celaya said, were sloppy. The operation consisted of just a few men with a ranch; he suspected they were novices at kidnapping. Celaya and his wife believed they would be killed, but one day, their captors let his blindfold slip while beating him. Celaya could see that there was no one guarding the shack and no padlock on the door. The next time he heard the kidnappers’ trucks drive away, he used friction to untie the ropes binding his hands, and the couple escaped. Miraculously, their motorcycle was parked just a few yards away. Celaya’s carefully placed spare key was still there.  

As incredible as it may sound, Celaya’s story has become typical of the migrant experience. Over the past year, both the Biden and Trump administrations have asked the Mexican government, as part of broader negotiations, to crack down on the number of migrants traveling up through Mexico to the U.S. border. Under Biden, the United States government asked Mexico to increase arrests of migrants; this year, President Donald Trump required Mexico to prove it was preventing migrants from reaching the border in order to avoid tariffs. Both administrations have relied on Mexico to take in thousands of citizens of third countries who are denied entry into the United States. 

At the same time, the U.S. government has effectively hobbled the asylum system, trapping migrants inside Mexico with little means to support themselves. These migrants are then faced with the threat of Mexican immigration agents, stationed at ubiquitous checkpoints, ready to detain thousands who are not carrying the necessary paperwork. In Mexico, detention of migrants rose by over 200% in early 2024, compared to the previous year. Now, under Trump, thousands of migrants from all over Latin America and the world have been deported into Mexico instead of to their home countries. 

Desperate to avoid Mexican immigration agents, migrants have become easy targets for organized crime operatives looking for simple cash payouts. Rampant corruption has created an environment in which nearly every migrant who passes through Mexico can expect to be kidnapped for ransom at some point on their journey, often more than once. Kidnapping has become so pervasive that for several months in late 2024, the Mexican government began offering migrants free bus transport from cities in Southern Mexico to spots along the northern border. 

Unfortunately, the program has been exploited by criminal groups and corrupt immigration officers who kidnap hundreds of people by offering them scam bus rides. Paulino Martínez Reza, a lawyer for the Cafemin migrant shelter in Mexico City, recalls one day in November when a man arrived at the facility dressed in a Mexican National Immigration Institute uniform, offering to bring migrants on a bus to the border. Although Martínez warned the shelter residents that he thought the man was a scammer, over 50 desperate people boarded the bus anyway. None of them made it to the border.

“In everything that’s happening in these migration flows, criminality is at really high levels right now,” he said. “At least 85% of people [in the shelter] have been kidnapped. We try to combat misinformation spread on social media by criminal actors, but there’s just too much incentive.”

Kidnapping can take many forms. Some kidnapping operations consist of just a few men stopping migrants on the highway or at points along train lines. Others involve already established organized crime networks with armies behind them — entire battalions of corrupt police, military or national guard members working out of safehouses packed with dozens of detainees. Some migrants are kidnapped for an afternoon, others for a month, and some are never seen again.

Martínez says it’s virtually impossible to find out what happened to a migrant that goes missing. Often their family — in Venezuela, Haiti or Guatemala — wonders for weeks or months if their loved one simply lost their phone before considering contacting authorities. Then there is the question of which agency to contact, and how. Martínez says the offices in charge of investigating the cases of missing migrants rarely if ever take any action after a disappearance is reported. 

Since Mexico’s drug war began in 2006, over 100,000 people have disappeared in the country. Many if not most of these disappeared people, Mexicans and migrants alike, are victims of extortion, the primary tool criminal groups use to accumulate wealth without consequence in an environment of eroded judicial norms. The justice system, rife with corruption, usually does more harm than good.

“No migrant who has disappeared is going to have an answer in their case,” Martínez said. “In the cases where we have pressured [an office] to accept a report [of a disappearance], the cases just sit there. They never conduct an investigation. If they wanted to do an investigation, it wouldn’t be that hard — because in all of the cases they would be referred to the same places.”

The goal of the kidnappers is simple: to arrange for a wire transfer, usually several thousand dollars, from the migrant’s family in their home country or the U.S. But many migrants are already in debt to their family to pay for the journey to the border, a process that requires $10,000 to $20,000, a colossal sum that many families must pool collectively. With 2 million people crossing Mexico on their way to the U.S. border in 2024, several thousand dollars per migrant amounts to billions of dollars in potential annual profit for criminal groups through kidnapping alone. 

Once the ransom has been paid, the migrant is usually set free. Sometimes migrants will attempt to negotiate a more favorable deal, a strategy that sometimes yields results. But whether a migrant without accessible cash will be set free or killed depends entirely on the whims of the kidnappers. 

Felix Bonilla, a migrant from El Salvador, was the victim of a highly organized kidnapping operation last October. He was kidnapped when his bus from Mexico City to Tijuana stopped unexpectedly in the middle of the desert in the central Mexican state of Durango. The driver ordered all passengers to disembark and hand their documents to waiting police officers. All those who were not Mexican citizens were then driven in police cars to another nearby point in the middle of nowhere where they were handed over to waiting cartel members. All the passengers — men, women and children — were blindfolded and driven to a safehouse where they lived for weeks off the occasional can of tuna provided by their captors. 

“The police tried to calm us down,” says Bonilla. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re just going to take you to the station for a moment and make sure you don’t have any problems in your home country and then we’ll let you go. When I got to the house, it was just an empty house, no furniture, with everyone sleeping on mats on the floor. After 15 days, they started the threats, either you pay us or we kill you. That’s when the beatings started.”

The fee for freedom, the kidnappers said, was $4,500. They promised Bonilla and his family in the U.S. that if the money was paid, the cartel would buy Bonilla a bus ticket to Juárez, where a smuggler would be waiting to take him over the border. The family wired the full sum, but when Bonilla arrived at the station in Juárez — “afraid, traumatized and a little relieved,” he says — no one was there to greet him. He does not know the fates of the people in the safehouse whose families could not pay the fee. 

International humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International say the surge in kidnappings is the direct result of U.S. immigration policy. By making it more difficult to enter the United States, the U.S. government intentionally shuts vulnerable populations in dangerous areas. Without a functional justice system in Mexico, organized crime groups have every incentive to kidnap as many people as possible. 

In December, a number of leading immigration nongovernmental organizations released a joint report arguing that U.S. government policy under both the first Trump and Biden administrations violated the International Refugee Convention. “Policies that restrict access to asylum at ports of entry,” it stated, “exacerbate risks that migrants will experience disappearances, as they are often trapped in dangerous conditions and pushed to attempt crossings between ports of entry, leaving them vulnerable to disappearances, death, and other harms.” 

Since taking office, Trump has deported less than 50,000 people to Mexico, several thousand of them citizens of other countries, such as Venezuela, that do not often accept direct deportation flights. 

But by shutting down the CBPOne app on his first day in office, the only remaining means to seek asylum in the United States, Trump left hundreds of thousands of migrants, most of them from Central and South America, trapped in Mexico, at high risk of kidnapping. All of these people were waiting for their opportunity to enter the United States “the right way,” but the pathway closed in their faces. 

Jessica, a migrant from Venezuela who has been living in a shelter in Juárez for several months, said she is afraid to leave the shelter, even just to go to the convenience store at the corner. It is common knowledge among the shelter population that any migrant who walks alone in Juárez could be snatched off the street; many have seen it happen. Jessica has no means to return to her home country, let alone pay a ransom. 

Mexican citizens who are deported are also at risk of kidnapping, some of them in the moments immediately following deportation. Miguel Valenzuela, a Mexican citizen who was deported on March 27, said he was dropped off near the border in a cartel-controlled area where he knew he would be kidnapped if he did not immediately secure transportation. The problem: He wasn’t carrying any cash in Mexican pesos. Valenzuela says he owes his safety to the Mexican government’s Mexico te Abraza policy, designed to help deportees re-assimilate into Mexican society. 

“If you’re an immigrant, it’s very dangerous to stick around the border, because the cartels will pick you up,” Valenzuela said. “My only choice was to go to the government shelter.”

As draconian immigration policies continue, Martínez says not everyone will be so lucky. Survivors like Celaya will continue to recount their experiences, but hundreds if not thousands of others will end up in unmarked graves.