[NYP] On social media, the pleas for help are studded with emojis of praying hands and crying faces — all from the desperate relatives of 13 migrants who disappeared in late September, as they were poised to illegally cross from Mexico into West Texas.
"I am the wife of one of them and I ask you for help," reads one recent Facebook post in English, although most of the pleas are in Spanish. "Today it is 88 days that I know nothing from any of the group."
"They were likely the victims of transnational criminal groups and got caught up in a cartel turf war over smuggling routes," said a US federal source who works on border issues and did not want to be identified.
In addition to the cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl that they smuggle across the border, both the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels — who dominate parts of northern Mexico — have branched out into smuggling desperate migrants, according to authorities on both sides of the border.
More than 95,000 people in Mexico are missing, many of them victims of cartel violence, according to the country’s National Search Commission.
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