Origin Regions and Northbound Trafficking Routes, 2015-2025

KJKey Judgments

Nine judgments carry this brief. Each is an analytic conclusion, distinct from the reported facts beneath it, and each carries an explicit confidence level per §1.2. A judgment can be wrong even where every underlying fact is correct. Three of the nine were corrected or revised after an adversarial verification pass and a follow-up pass on open items; those corrections are marked here and shown inline in the body rather than folded in silently.

1How to read this document

1.1 Source grading: the NATO/Admiralty scale

Every source cited in Section 12 carries a two-character Admiralty grade: a letter for the reliability of the source itself, a number for the credibility of the specific information cited. The two axes are independent, a highly reliable source can carry a specific claim that is only possibly true, and a source of unproven reliability can still carry information later confirmed elsewhere.

Source reliability:

• A: Completely reliable. No history of inaccurate reporting (a federal agency's own press release or official statistics page, speaking in its own voice).
• B: Usually reliable. Minor history of inaccurate reporting, or reliable but not a primary party to the events described (an established wire service, a credentialed investigative outlet, a research institution with transparent methodology).
• C: Fairly reliable. Some history of inaccurate reporting (a regional news outlet relaying an official's statement rather than the agency's own release).
• D: Not usually reliable. Significant history of inaccurate reporting. (Not used as a load-bearing grade in this document; a source graded this low would not be cited for a factual claim.)
• E: Unreliable. Lacks a history of accuracy. (Not used in this document.)
• F: Reliability cannot be judged. (Used for a source with insufficient track record to grade, noted individually where it occurs.)

Information credibility:

• 1: Confirmed by other independent sources.
• 2: Probably true (source is reliable, information is plausible, but not independently confirmed by a separate source in this document).
• 3: Possibly true (some doubt; typically a single named source with no independent corroboration).
• 4: Doubtful (some internal contradiction, or later superseded).
• 5: Improbable (contradicted by other sources).
• 6: Credibility cannot be judged (insufficient information to assess).

The four-tier shorthand used in section subheadings (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL, NAMED INVESTIGATIVE, PEER-REVIEWED, SECONDARY/UNVERIFIED) is a quick reference only; the Admiralty grade in Section 12 is the authoritative, source-by-source grading. Rough correspondence: PRIMARY/OFFICIAL typically grades A1-A2; NAMED INVESTIGATIVE and PEER-REVIEWED typically grade B1-B2; SECONDARY/UNVERIFIED typically grades B3-C4 or lower.

1.2 Analytic confidence and the probability lexicon

This document distinguishes reported information (a fact directly stated by a source) from analytic judgment (this document's own conclusion about what the reported information means, which requires interpretation and could be wrong even if every underlying fact is correct). A judgment is labeled "Assessment:" and carries two things: a confidence level and, where the judgment is expressed as a likelihood rather than a certainty, a calibrated probability term.

Confidence level (a function of source quality, quantity, and independence, not of how strongly the judgment is worded):

• High confidence: judgment is based on high-quality information, ideally corroborated by multiple independent sources using different methods (alternative explanations were assessed and found significantly less likely).
• Moderate confidence: judgment is credibly sourced but not independently corroborated, or the sourcing is corroborated but shares a common origin, or the analysis is sound but the sourcing is not extensive enough for High confidence.
• Low confidence: judgment rests on a single source, fragmentary information, or reasoning this document could not independently verify. A Low-confidence judgment is not a weak claim dressed up, it is this document's own honest statement that the evidence does not yet support more than that.

Calibrated probability lexicon (the words themselves, not just contextual tone, carry the meaning):

• Almost certainly: roughly 95-99 percent probability.
• Highly likely / very likely: roughly 80-95 percent.
• Likely / probably: roughly 55-80 percent.
• Roughly even chance: roughly 45-55 percent.
• Unlikely: roughly 20-45 percent.
• Highly unlikely / remote: below 20 percent.

A RECTUMmendation (an unverified assertion presented as settled fact, this project's standing term for it) is not the same failure as a properly labeled Low-confidence Assessment. The former hides its own uncertainty; the latter states it plainly. This document aims to never do the former and to do the latter whenever a judgment, rather than a directly sourced fact, is being made.

1.3 What stays a plain fact, not an assessment

Not every claim in this document needs a confidence label. A directly quoted official statistic, a specific named prosecution's outcome, or a directly quoted on-the-record statement is reported information and is presented as such, with its Admiralty grade in Section 12 doing the epistemic work. Assessment labels and confidence levels are reserved for this document's own interpretive judgments, most concentrated in the Signals, Key Assumptions Check, and Analysis of Competing Hypotheses sections, plus the Bottom Line Up Front.

Sources rejected during research, and why, are logged in Section 8. Advocacy and mission-driven organizations, and partisan political-body factsheets, were excluded from load-bearing claims. Where an advocacy source was the only place a claim appeared, the claim was either dropped or re-sourced to a primary document; none ship here on advocacy sourcing alone.

1.4 Multi-model verification pass

This document was drafted by Claude Opus 5 working from six parallel research dossiers produced by background research agents, each tasked against one origin region or against the Arizona corridor, and each instructed to state explicitly whether it had actually fetched a source or had seen it only in a search summary. Every load-bearing claim carried forward from those dossiers was then independently re-fetched and re-verified by the drafting model against its own primary source before being written into this document. Where a dossier's claim could not be re-verified, it is either flagged as unverified or omitted, and Section 8 and Section 13 record which.

That re-verification pass earned its cost in corrections rather than reassurance. It upgraded the entire State Department source set from third-party mirrors to state.gov originals; it confirmed a Colombian ministry data series that the originating dossier had explicitly warned was an uncertain inference, by finding two independent arithmetic checks the dossier had not applied; it corrected a Guatemalan decedent count from 426 to 438 by going to the more recent annual report; and it established that a source the companion border brief relies on no longer publishes the table it is cited for. Each is recorded inline where it occurs.

A third pass followed, working the five open items the verification pass had opened. It closed four of them fully or partly, and three of those closures changed findings rather than confirming them: Mexican federal microdata reversed this document's statement that no source connects Chiapas origin to the Arizona corridor, and in the process exposed a transposition in the UPMRIP graphic summary that had produced a wrong ranking in Section 4.1 and in the Bottom Line. HHS sponsor-release data settled the transit-versus-destination question in Section 11.1 outright. A Honduras control run on Signal 1 strengthened it. And Arizona state data, which the verification pass had assumed unavailable, turned out to publish trafficking offences by individual police agency, producing a Cochise County finding that federal charging data does not show. Every figure from that pass was recomputed by the drafting model from the primary files or re-queried from the source portals before being written in, including a direct test of whether the Arizona offence counts are reporting artefacts.

Two of the six research dossiers independently computed unaccompanied-child encounter figures from CBP's raw datasets, and the drafting model computed them a third time. The absolute Tucson Sector counts agreed exactly across all three. The derived percentage shares did not survive external checking, and the way they failed is worth recording because it is the failure this document warns about in Section 3.1. The drafting model's border-wide denominator was built from a hand-written list of sector codes containing "ELP" for El Paso Sector, whose actual code in the dataset is "EPT." The filter matched nothing, dropped El Paso Sector silently, and returned a smaller denominator without erroring. Every share computed against it was inflated, including a headline figure of 43.0 percent that is correctly 34.0 percent. The verification pass recomputed from the dataset's own Land Border Region field rather than a hand-written list, caught it, and every affected figure in Sections 3, 5, 6 and 9 has been corrected.

That episode also corrects what the agreement between the three runs was worth. It was replication of a shared code path, not independent verification, and it reproduced the same error three times without any of the three noticing. Agreement between runs of the same method establishes only the absence of a transcription error. What caught this was an external recompute using a different filtering strategy, which is the argument for the verification pass being adversarial rather than confirmatory.

Every correction and addition from the verification passes that appears in this document was independently re-verified against its primary source before being added, in keeping with the sourcing standard stated throughout, rather than taken on any model's word.

1.5 Abbreviations used in this brief

Spelled out here rather than on first use, because a reference document is read by jumping to a section rather than straight through. Organizations are given their own name in their own language where that is what the source uses.

2The five countries in context: what each state detects, counts and prosecutes

Source: two instruments, applied to all five countries, fetched directly. The first is the U.S. State Department's 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report, covering the 2024 reporting year, retrieved from state.gov. The second is UNODC's Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 country-data annexes, covering 2019-2023 depending on what each country submitted.

A caution on independence before the tables, because it changes how much weight the agreement between them can bear. Both instruments ultimately draw on national government submissions. UNODC's Guatemala tables are sourced to "National authorities of Guatemala," its El Salvador tables to the Unidad Fiscal Especializada, its Mexico and Colombia tables to each Ministry of the Interior. Where State and UNODC agree, that is two compilers agreeing about the same underlying national returns. It is not two independent measurements of the phenomenon, and this document does not treat it as correlation in the Section 9 sense.

2.1 Detected trafficking victims, as reported to UNODC (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: UNODC GLOTIP 2024 country annexes)

The Guatemalan rows carry the sharpest single fact in the table. Of Guatemala's detected victims, UNODC records 377 of 434 (2019), 375 of 439 (2020), 376 of 425 (2021) and 186 of 228 (2022) as children, that is 82 to 88 percent in every year reported.

Nicaragua's rows carry the second. Across three years the country reported detecting a total of under twenty victims, and UNODC's stated source for those figures is the National Coalition Against Human Trafficking, a body the Nicaraguan government has since dissolved (Section 6.2).

2.2 Enforcement activity, same instrument

UNODC's own convention, stated in the source, is that figures below five are published as "under 5" for privacy reasons. That convention is doing a lot of work in the Nicaragua and El Salvador rows.

2.3 The 2024 reporting year, from the 2025 TIP Report, and the child-share finding

This is the comparison the document was built to make, because the "emphasis on minors" question turns on it.

Method note, because these percentages are computed rather than quoted. The child counts are summed from each country's own disaggregation as published in its TIP narrative. El Salvador: 16 girls and 1 boy in sex trafficking, 4 children in labour trafficking, 3 girls unspecified. Guatemala: 25 boys and 125 girls in sex trafficking, 231 boys and 229 girls in forced labour, 5 girls unspecified. Mexico: 9 boys and 112 girls in sex trafficking, 30 boys and 25 girls in forced labour, 26 boys and 72 girls unspecified, with the State Department stating in its own voice that Mexico "did not report complete disaggregated data," so the Mexican child share is a floor. Colombia: 16 girls and 1 child described as non-binary in sex trafficking, 3 girls in forced labour, out of 400 potential victims referred to the Ministry of the Interior.

The Colombian figure has an internal cross-check inside the same document. The State Department states separately, in the Colombia trafficking profile, that "Government reports indicate between 85 and 95 percent of victims identified in Colombia were adults." A 5.0 percent computed child share sits inside that stated range. The two statements are not independent of each other, but they are consistent, which is worth more than a single unchecked figure.

With those stated, three mechanisms in the sources support detection over prevalence. Guatemala's 470 forced-labour victims, 460 of them children, come in part from joint worksite operations by the Public Ministry, the Solicitor General's office and the Labour Ministry, that is, from a programme that goes looking in workplaces where children are; the source states those operations resulted in the identification of child victims without quantifying how many of the 460. Colombia's own TIP narrative states that "Law enforcement officials did not proactively identify victims and did not have a victim identification protocol," and relied on victim self-identification, a channel adults reach more easily than children. And Nicaragua's zero is not a measurement of Nicaragua at all; it is the absence of one.

A fifth confound belongs with the mechanisms rather than against them, and it is argued at length in Section 11.2: two of the five countries are described by the State Department itself as counting to a definition different from the international standard, Guatemala broadly and Colombia narrowly, so the five numbers may not be measuring one category at all.

The counter-consideration, stated because it is real: Colombia's population is roughly three times Guatemala's (52.3 million against 18.1 million in 2023), and if Colombian children were being trafficked at anything like Guatemalan rates while Colombian identification found 20 of them, the gap would be enormous. This document cannot resolve that, and does not. What it can say is that the child-share figures are not comparable as prevalence measures, and that a reader treating Colombia's 5 percent as evidence that Colombian children are relatively safe would be making an error the sources themselves warn against.

2.4 Nicaragua's zero, stated precisely

The 2025 TIP Report places Nicaragua on Tier 3 and states, in its own voice: "The government did not report identifying any trafficking victims or prosecuting or convicting any traffickers." It further records that in April 2024 the government "enacted amendments to Law 896 that repealed the fund and its dedicated budget item, directing all relevant resources into the state treasury for general purposes," that the amendments "dissolved the inter-institutional coalition against trafficking" and "removed a requirement for coordination with civil society," and that owing to "the government's systematic closure of more than 5,700 NGOs since 2018," civil-society organisations "could no longer provide such care." The report adds that "there were no known civil society organizations working to support trafficking victims during the reporting period."

3The corridor in context: unaccompanied children at the southwest border and in Tucson Sector

3.1 Terms of art, stated before the tables because two of them change the numbers

"Apprehension" is a Border Patrol enforcement action between ports of entry. "Encounter" is the wider term CBP adopted, folding in Title 8 apprehensions, Title 8 inadmissibles at ports, and Title 42 expulsions; CBP's own footnote states the change took effect in March of FY2020, so any series crossing that boundary is not measuring one consistent thing.

Separately, and this one is a live trap rather than a definitional nicety: CBP's demographic field changed value between published dataset vintages, from "UC / Single Minors" in the FY2021-FY2024 file to "UAC" in the FY2022-FY2025 file. The two label the same category. A query written against the literal earlier string returns zero for FY2025 without erroring, which is exactly the kind of silent failure that produces a confident wrong number. Every figure in this section normalises the two labels.

Finally, and most important for reading Sections 4 through 6 correctly: smuggling is a paid transport service, an offence against the state, charged in this corridor under 8 U.S.C. section 1324. Trafficking is coercion for exploitation, an offence against the person, charged under 18 U.S.C. sections 1589 and 1591. CBP encounter data counts neither; it counts people encountered. A child in the tables below is a child Border Patrol met, not a child anyone has established was trafficked.

3.2 Tucson Sector unaccompanied-child encounters by citizenship (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: CBP Nationwide Encounters AOR datasets, recomputed locally)

All figures in this subsection were computed directly from CBP's own published row-level CSVs rather than quoted from any report. FY2021-FY2024 come from the FY2021-FY2024 vintage and FY2025 from the FY2022-FY2025 vintage; the FY2022, FY2023 and FY2024 Tucson Sector totals are identical in both vintages (19,009 / 22,775 / 27,854), which is a direct cross-validation of the two published files against each other.

Border Patrol, Tucson Sector, unaccompanied children encountered between ports of entry:

The same figures expressed as Tucson Sector's share of all southwest-border Border Patrol unaccompanied-child encounters for that nationality, which is the number that answers the corridor question. The denominator is all nine southwest Border Patrol sectors (Big Bend, Del Rio, El Centro, El Paso, Laredo, Rio Grande Valley, San Diego, Tucson, Yuma), selected on the dataset's own Land Border Region field rather than on a hand-written list of sector codes:

The border-wide denominators those shares are computed against, by citizenship and fiscal year: Mexico 24,129 / 25,950 / 25,130 / 29,885 / 9,815; Guatemala 58,571 / 60,513 / 49,012 / 30,965 / 7,481; El Salvador 15,473 / 16,328 / 10,040 / 7,578 / 1,849; Nicaragua 1,918 / 3,146 / 1,857 / 1,517 / 204; Colombia 79 / 803 / 1,340 / 1,501 / 374; all countries 144,834 / 149,093 / 131,519 / 99,704 / 26,199.

The second finding in the same table is about the corridor rather than the nationalities. Tucson Sector's share of all southwest-border unaccompanied-child encounters more than doubled across the focal period, from 12.9 percent in FY2021 to 27.9 percent in FY2024. In absolute terms it recorded 27,854 unaccompanied children in FY2024 against Rio Grande Valley's 25,037, making it the busiest unaccompanied-child sector on the southwest border that year.

3.3 The same pattern in all demographics, not only minors

The nationality concentration is not an artefact of looking only at children. Tucson Sector's share of all southwest-border Border Patrol encounters by nationality, FY2024: Mexico 52.2 percent, Guatemala 42.8 percent, Ecuador 34.9 percent, Nicaragua 8.2 percent, El Salvador 7.3 percent, Colombia 6.6 percent, Honduras 3.2 percent, Venezuela 0.4 percent.

One nuance worth keeping, because it complicates a simple reading. Colombian adults do come through this corridor in meaningful volume: Tucson Sector recorded 8,997 Colombian encounters across all demographics in FY2023 and 7,422 in FY2024, against 65 and 99 Colombian unaccompanied children in the same years. Colombian movement through Tucson Sector is real and is overwhelmingly adult.

3.4 Between the ports versus at the ports

Unaccompanied children encountered by the Office of Field Operations at the Tucson Field Office, which includes the Nogales ports of entry, across all nationalities: 253 (FY2021), 500 (FY2022), 643 (FY2023), 895 (FY2024), 249 (FY2025). Against Border Patrol's between-ports figures in the same years, the port channel accounts for 1.4 to 5.4 percent of unaccompanied children in this corridor, the high end being FY2025.

3.5 The longer baseline, and its discontinuities

CBP's archived, no-longer-updated sector pages carry the earlier series. Tucson Sector unaccompanied-child apprehensions: 8,262 (FY2014), 6,019 (FY2015), 6,302 (FY2016), approximately 5,005 (FY2018, derived from a stated 2 percent year-over-year change), 5,105 (FY2019), 5,949 (FY2020). FY2017 is absent: the CBP page carrying it returns HTTP 404 and no substitute was located. Southwest-border totals for the same early years: 68,541, 39,970 and 59,692.

Border-wide unaccompanied-child encounters by country, from the same archived source:

Two limits on that table, both material. CBP's published FY2015-FY2020 country series breaks out four countries and no others, so Colombia and Nicaragua cannot be separated from it at all; the same limit applies to CBP's Southwest Land Border Encounters dataset, whose citizenship field has exactly five values, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and "Other." And CBP prints its own caution on the page: "Beginning in March FY20, USBP Encounters statistics include both Title 8 Apprehensions and Title 42 Expulsions." The FY2020 column is not comparable with those before it.

3.6 The ORR custody series, and what it does not break out

ORR referrals count a different population from CBP encounters and the two must not be added. ORR counts children referred into HHS custody by DHS; Mexican minors are frequently returned rather than referred, which is why Mexico's ORR share and its CBP share differ sharply.

Guatemala is the largest country of origin of children in ORR custody in every year of the series, ranging from 32.1 to 47.5 percent of all referrals. Mexico rose from 1.4 percent of referrals in FY2021 to 20.3 percent in FY2024, and in absolute terms from 1,690 to 19,971. "Other" grew from 4.9 percent in FY2019 to 19.4 percent in FY2024.

The limit that survives is a different one, and it matters for two of this document's five origin countries: ORR breaks out only Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico. Colombia and Nicaragua are inside "Other" and cannot be separated from it. For those two countries, CBP encounter data by citizenship is the only fiscal-year federal series that exists.

3.7 Honduras as a control case (added in the open-items pass)

Honduras is not one of the five origin points this document was asked to cover, and it is not treated as one. It is introduced here for a different reason: it is the best available control on the corridor finding, and running that control strengthens the finding rather than weakening it.

Honduras qualifies as a control because it is large. It was the second-largest country of origin of children in ORR custody in FY2024 at 19,949 referrals, behind Guatemala's 31,621 and just below Mexico's 19,971. On the border side it produced 19,142 unaccompanied-child Border Patrol encounters southwest-wide in FY2024, on the same order as Guatemala's 30,965. If the Tucson corridor simply carried Central Americans, or simply carried whoever was arriving in volume, Honduras would show up in it.

It does not.

Ranking all seven nationalities this document has figures for, by Tucson Sector share of their own border-wide unaccompanied-child total in FY2024: Mexico 47.9 percent, Guatemala 34.0 percent, Ecuador 30.2 percent, Colombia 6.6 percent, Nicaragua 6.3 percent, El Salvador 3.7 percent, Honduras 2.1 percent.

That result does real analytic work, and it is the reason this control was worth running. It rules out the two cheapest alternative explanations for Signal 1. It is not that Central Americans generally route through Sonora, because Hondurans do not. And it is not that high-volume nationalities appear everywhere in proportion to their totals, because Honduras is high-volume and appears here least of all. Whatever selects Guatemalans and Mexicans into this corridor is specific to those two nationalities, and on the evidence in Section 5.1.4 the Guatemalan half of it is plausibly the highland exit geography, since 76.0 percent of Guatemalan irregular exits run through the two departments bordering Chiapas. That remains an inference rather than a finding, for the reasons given there.

The reason Honduras is not treated as an origin region in this document is that it was not one of the five asked for. Saying so plainly is better than leaving a reader to notice Honduras in every federal table and wonder why it goes unexplained.

4San Cristobal de las Casas and the Chiapas highlands, Mexico

4.1 The strongest finding: Chiapas leads Mexico as an origin state for unaccompanied minors (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: Segob, Unidad de Politica Migratoria)

Mexico's Unidad de Politica Migratoria, inside the Secretaria de Gobernacion, publishes repatriation events from the United States broken down by the returning child's state of origin.

UPMRIP publishes the same underlying data three ways: the graphic summary, the detailed bulletin table Cuadro 5.5, and a record-level public microdata file. The detailed table and the microdata agree with each other exactly and disagree with the graphic summary. Testing the graphic summary's two panels against the microdata for its own period settles what happened: its panels are transposed. The panel captioned "no acompanados" (unaccompanied) carries the all-minors distribution, and the panel captioned as all minors carries the unaccompanied distribution.

The first row reproduces, to the decimal, the graphic summary's panel captioned "no acompanados." The second reproduces its panel captioned for all minors. The transposition is established, not inferred.

The corrected findings, from UPMRIP's own Cuadro 5.5 for full-year 2024, which the microdata reproduces exactly (12,327 unaccompanied events nationally):

• All repatriated Mexican minors, by state of origin: Chiapas first at 3,263 events, 10.76 percent, ahead of Guerrero 8.80 percent, Guanajuato 7.74 percent, Tamaulipas 7.47 percent and Chihuahua 6.86 percent.
• Unaccompanied minors only: Tamaulipas first at 2,169, 17.60 percent; Chihuahua 1,831, 14.85 percent; Chiapas third at 1,626, 13.19 percent; Oaxaca 6.83 percent; Guerrero 6.67 percent.

Two things worth carrying from this. Chiapas being third rather than first for unaccompanied minors is a real weakening of the original claim, but 13.19 percent from a southern, non-border state, against border states that supply their own local crossers, remains a substantial finding. And the episode is a caution about instrument choice rather than about Mexican data quality: the agency's detailed table was right throughout, and the error was in the summary graphic that was easier to read. Note precisely what this measures. It is a Mexican-government count of children coming back, a methodologically separate instrument from the US-side encounter counting in Section 3, produced by a different government for a different administrative purpose. It says nothing about where those children were encountered on the US side, and this document does not bridge the two. Section 9 states that non-bridge as a specific limit rather than quietly closing it.

Chiapas is also, on the same agency's data, the point of entry for the second-largest share of irregular migration into Mexico: 315,887 events of persons in irregular migratory situation from January to August 2024, against 132,691 in the same months of 2023, a rise of 138.1 percent, and 34.1 percent of the national total of 925,085. Correction (verification pass): an earlier draft called this the largest share. It is not. The same table records Tabasco at 442,365 events, 47.8 percent of the national total, above Chiapas. That matters for Section 5.1.4 and Signal 3, because the largest Mexican entry point on this table is not a Guatemalan-highlands crossing. Regular entries through Chiapas moved the opposite way over the same span, falling from 1,359,906 in 2022 to 1,124,851 in 2024, a 17.3 percent decline, while national regular entries rose 16.9 percent.

4.2 Structural conditions, as measured rather than characterized (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: CONEVAL / Secretaria de Bienestar; INEGI)

CONEVAL and the Secretaria de Bienestar publish poverty at municipality level. For the municipality of San Cristobal de las Casas: 138,107 people in poverty, 66.1 percent, of whom 41.1 percent moderate and 25.0 percent extreme. State-level Chiapas: 66.0 percent in poverty, 27.1 percent extreme.

Two things in that comparison cut against the obvious reading and are worth stating. San Cristobal's extreme-poverty rate, 25.0 percent, is below the state rate of 27.1 percent, and its mean monthly household income, 18,190 pesos, is above the state figure of 13,695. At the same time its Gini coefficient is 0.453 against the state's 0.418. Municipal population is 232,704, of whom 97,970 self-ascribe as Indigenous and 73,527 speak an Indigenous language, 31.6 percent of the municipality.

On child labour, INEGI's Encuesta Nacional de Trabajo Infantil 2022: Chiapas recorded a child labour rate of 20.8 percent of the population aged 5 to 17, second nationally behind Guerrero at 24.5 percent, against a national rate of 13.1 percent. Correction (verification pass): an earlier draft stated that the Chiapas rate rose from 18.3 percent in 2019 while the national rate held flat. The national rate did not hold flat. INEGI's own release records the national child labour rate at 12.3 percent in 2015, 11 percent in 2017, and rising to 13.1 percent in 2022. Chiapas rose against a national rate that was itself rising.

The most useful number in that survey is not the state ranking but the school-attendance split, published nationally: child labour participation was 9.9 percent among children attending school and 52.1 percent among those not attending, a more than fivefold difference. Among non-attenders, 60.5 percent of boys and 41.7 percent of girls.

4.3 Forced marriage and the sale of girls: what is documented, and what is not (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: H. Congreso del Estado de Chiapas)

This is the subject on which the gap between what is widely described and what is officially counted is widest, and the honest statement of that gap is the finding.

What is legislatively documented: on 30 January 2026 the Congress of the State of Chiapas approved a decree adding to the state Penal Code the offence of cohabitacion forzada, penalising anyone who, in the decree's own words, "obligue, coaccione, induzca, solicite, gestione u oferte a un menor de edad, o a quien no tenga capacidad para comprender el hecho, a vivir de manera informal con otra persona" ("compels, coerces, induces, solicits, arranges for, or offers a minor, or a person lacking the capacity to understand the act, to live informally with another person"). Two of those verbs carry the weight. "Gestione" and "oferte," arranges and offers, reach the person on the other side of the exchange rather than only someone pressuring the girl herself, and "oferte" is commercial rather than social. And "a vivir de manera informal," to live informally, deliberately avoids the word marriage, because these unions are never registered; that phrasing is what lets the offence reach a union performed under usos y costumbres that leaves no civil record. The measure was proposed by Diputada Rosa Linda Lopez Sanchez, president of the Gender Equality Commission. The legislature's own bulletin does not state article numbers, penalty range, or vote tally; secondary reporting supplies 8 to 15 years and a 37 to 1 vote with 2 absences, and this document treats those as single-sourced rather than established.

That a state legislature created a new criminal offence for this conduct in 2026 is the load-bearing fact. It is a state's own on-the-record acknowledgment that the conduct was occurring and was not adequately reachable under existing law.

What is not documented: no Mexican state or federal body publishes any figure for the price paid for a girl in these unions, or any count of them. Every price point in circulation reaches the record through journalism or through a single prosecutorial announcement. The Supreme Court-hosted investigative reportage that is the most-cited source on the subject says so in its own voice: "no hay monitoreos, ni estadisticas ni siquiera aproximadas que nos lleven a conocer la gravedad del problema" ("there is no monitoring, and no statistics, not even approximate ones, that would allow us to know the gravity of the problem").

4.4 The under-registration problem, documented by the government itself

The cleanest evidence that Chiapas trafficking data understates the phenomenon comes from a federal publication analysing the state's own child-protection records. Chiapas DIF received 3,155 child maltreatment reports across 2001-2004, substantiated maltreatment in 1,937, referred 356 to the Ministerio Publico, recorded 388 sexual-abuse reports, and recorded zero sexual-exploitation reports across all four years. The federal author's own comment on that zero: "llama poderosamente la atencion que en cuatro anos, en toda la entidad, no se hubiera presentado un solo caso de explotacion sexual. Algo grave ocurrio en esos anos" ("it is powerfully striking that in four years, in the entire state, not a single case of sexual exploitation was reported. Something serious happened in those years").

This is dated material and is not used here as a current statistic. It is retained because it is a government document stating, in its own voice, that a zero in these records is an artefact of the reporting system rather than a description of reality. That is the correct standing caution for every Chiapas figure in this section.

The same federal diagnostic supplies the only granular official Chiapas trafficking dataset located this session, and it covers 2009 to April 2012: 108 case files opened, 183 victims registered of whom 90 (49.2 percent) were aged 12 to 17, and by nationality 134 Mexican, 27 Guatemalan, 20 Honduran, 1 Nicaraguan, 1 Salvadoran. Of the 90 minor victims, 63 were Mexican, 14 Guatemalan, 11 Honduran and 2 Salvadoran. San Cristobal de las Casas was the locus of 5 of the 108 offences, ranking fourth among Chiapas municipalities behind Tuxtla Gutierrez (39), Frontera Comalapa (10) and Tapachula (10). Of 134 accused persons, 16 received conviction sentences.

4.5 Named cases in and around San Cristobal, and the limits of them

The most concrete documented trafficking prosecution in San Cristobal itself during the focal period is the July 2020 rescue of 23 minors in the Colonia Tlaxcala, in which three women were detained on trafficking charges in the labour exploitation modality. The children, including infants aged 3, 12 and 20 months, were forced to sell handicrafts in the city centre and showed signs of malnutrition. The operation arose out of the search for a missing minor.

Two things about this case need saying plainly. It is labour exploitation, not commercial sexual exploitation. And the primary source, the Fiscalia General del Estado de Chiapas' own release, could not be retrieved this session; what is in hand is a national broadcaster's relay of it, and it is graded accordingly.

Stated separately because a later document may want it: no source of any category located this session makes a trafficking or exploitation claim about the Barrio de Guadalupe specifically. Searches returned travel listings. That neighbourhood currently rests on nothing in the public record.

In May 2026 the municipal government of San Cristobal launched "Tarjeta Azul," a zero-tolerance strategy directed at hotel, restaurant and tourism-sector operators to prevent, detect and report child sexual exploitation. It contains no figures. Its evidentiary value is that the municipality publicly treats tourism-sector exploitation of children as an active risk, not that it quantifies one.

4.6 Armed-group control and displacement, and why the numbers here are weaker than they look

The CJNG and Sinaloa Cartel dispute over the Chiapas-Guatemala border corridor is documented in named investigative reporting. By June 2023 the Frontera Comalapa conflict had displaced more than 3,000 residents and killed more than 60 people in two weeks, with 1,500 or more army and police personnel deployed on 29 May 2023; the contested stretch is roughly 80 kilometres of the Guatemala border. Fighting intensified again in Frontera Comalapa and Chicomuselo from around 10 to 13 May 2024.

What is verified on minors and disappearance: Chiapas recorded 482 reported disappearances of children and adolescents in 2024, and 37 more in the first 45 days of 2025, per a named regional outlet citing the Comision Nacional de Busqueda. The then-head of the CNB, Karla Quintana Osuna, on the record: "El mas alto indice de desaparicion de las mujeres esta entre los 15 y 19 anos" ("the highest rate of disappearance among women is between the ages of 15 and 19").

4.7 The Chiapas-to-Arizona route question, answered honestly

This is one of the questions the document was asked, and the answer is that the corridor is not established in the public record.

One case documents the route end to end. In July 2026 a federal judge at the Centro de Justicia Penal Federal in Cintalapa, Chiapas bound over a defendant for trafficking in the sexual-exploitation modality; the federal specialised prosecution unit established that she recruited a then-minor in Chiapas under false employment promises, moved her to Sonora, where the victim was handed to a third party who crossed her into the United States, after which she was forced into prostitution in hotels in New York City. That is a Chiapas to Sonora to United States route, and it is one case, reaching this document through a regional outlet's relay of the prosecutor's announcement rather than through the announcement itself.

Against that: InSight Crime's dedicated study of trafficking geography on the US-Mexico border mentions Chiapas exactly once, in a list of victim origin states alongside Oaxaca and Puebla, and does not develop a Chiapas-Arizona corridor at all. That negative finding was established by programmatically searching all 26 pages of the report. And the mass-casualty smuggling event in Chiapas in December 2021, which killed more than 50 people including unaccompanied children and produced a US federal prosecution of six named Guatemalan defendants, ran to Texas, not Arizona.

Computed from that file, Chiapas-born unaccompanied minors repatriated through Nogales, Sonora: 196 (2016), 147 (2017), 172 (2018), 206 (2019), 223 (2020), 247 (2021), 829 (2022), 327 (2023), 255 (2024). In 2024 they were 16.9 percent of all unaccompanied minors returned through Nogales, and Chiapas was the second-largest birth state there behind Sonora itself. Separately, 99.8 percent of unaccompanied minors returned through Nogales in 2024 had been apprehended in Arizona, so the repatriation point is a reliable proxy for the corridor.

The same file also supplies the counterweight, and it is the more important half. Chiapas-born unaccompanied minors overwhelmingly do not return through Nogales. Their leading point is Ciudad Juarez at 945 in 2024, then Tijuana at 285, then Nogales at 255. And Nogales is not the leading reception point nationally: Ciudad Juarez received 4,781 unaccompanied minors in 2024 against Nogales' 1,506.

A caution against a tempting comparison: CBP recorded 14,301 Mexican unaccompanied children in Tucson Sector in FY2024, while Mexico recorded 12,327 unaccompanied-minor return events nationwide, of which 1,670 were apprehended in Arizona. Those are different universes, US encounters against Mexican reception events, and Title 8 returns exclude other pathways. They should not be set side by side as though one explained the other.

5The Central American highlands: western Guatemala and eastern El Salvador

These two are treated together because the record treats them oppositely. Guatemala's western highlands are the best-documented origin region in this entire document. Eastern El Salvador's highlands are, as an analytic unit, absent from the record altogether. Both findings are useful, and the second one is only useful if stated plainly.

5.1 The western highlands of Guatemala: the mechanism is documented, the trafficking is not (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: IOM, INE, Procurador de los Derechos Humanos)

5.1.1 What the trafficking statistics show, and why they cannot be read as prevalence

Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman published, in November 2025, the first and only department-level breakdown of trafficking victims located for this document. Of 1,201 persons recorded by the Ministerio Publico as aggrieved by the crime of trafficking in persons during calendar 2024, the seven western-highlands departments accounted for 97, or 8.1 percent: Quetzaltenango 29, Huehuetenango 19, San Marcos 18, Totonicapan 12, Solola 12, Quiche 5, Chimaltenango 2. The department of Guatemala alone accounted for 901, or 75.0 percent.

The Ombudsman's own report explains that concentration, and the explanation is the finding. It attributes the metropolitan share to the limited diffusion of knowledge about trafficking in rural areas, the concentration of complaint services in urban centres, and barriers to access to justice in peripheral territories. The dataset measures where complaints are filed, not where victims come from.

A second finding in the same report makes the point structurally rather than by inference. Of those 1,201 victims, 1,199 had no linguistic community recorded and 1,123 had no ethnic identity recorded; only 68 were registered as Maya. Across all of 2024, seven interpretations were performed in trafficking matters at the specialised prosecutors' offices, one Q'eqchi', one Mam, one Q'anjob'al and four K'iche', in a Public Ministry that maintains 106 indigenous-language interpreters.

Three national counts for 2024 disagree by a factor of roughly three: SVET reports 420 victims, the State Department reports 756, and the Ombudsman reports 1,201 aggrieved persons; convictions are 36 per the State Department, 26 per the Public Ministry and 23 per the Judiciary. Every Guatemalan figure in this document travels with its source attached for that reason.

5.1.2 Structural conditions: the highlands split into two profiles, not one (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: INE, ENCOVI 2023)

Nationally, ENCOVI 2023 records rural poverty at 66.4 percent against urban 46.7 percent, rural extreme poverty at 24.4 percent against urban 8.8 percent, and extreme poverty among those aged 0 to 17 at 20.7 percent.

5.1.3 The mechanism, quantified by a UN agency (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: IOM survey of Guatemalan migration and remittances, 2022)

This is the strongest evidentiary passage in the document, and it is not trafficking data. It is migration-finance data, and it describes with numbers the process by which an ordinary highland household is placed under coercive debt.

Sample note, which governs every figure below: these are returned migrants, and the report states that 49.5 percent of them returned before 2010. The block below therefore describes the mechanism across a long period, not specifically 2015-2025. Where the report publishes a period-matched cohort, those who travelled in 2021 and 2022, this document gives it separately at the end of Section 5.1.4.

Among returned Guatemalan migrants surveyed:

• 66.2 percent used a coyote for transit. A further 18.8 percent travelled on their own account and 6.5 percent on a tourist visa.
• Travel was financed by savings in 26.9 percent of cases, by a loan from a moneylender in 17.6 percent, by a loan from family or friends in the United States in 11.5 percent, by a loan from family in Guatemala in 10.5 percent, and by a US relative paying directly in 8.4 percent.
• Of those who borrowed from a moneylender, 19.8 percent had to pledge real property as collateral: 10.6 percent the deed to their house, 9.3 percent the deed to their land.
• The average moneylender credit was Q125,000, which the report itself converts to USD 16,700.
• Monthly interest on those credits: 67.5 percent paid 5.0 percent, 26.0 percent paid 10.0 percent, 4.4 percent paid 20 percent, 1.9 percent paid 15 percent.
• The stated cause of migration was the search for work in 74.4 percent of cases and family reunification in 19.8 percent.

The arithmetic is worth stating explicitly because it is the whole point. Ten percent monthly interest on Q125,000 is Q12,500 per month. Guatemala's national total-poverty line in 2023 was Q14,382.70 per person per year.

5.1.4 The exit geography, and the named crossings into Chiapas

The same survey establishes where people physically leave. Of returned migrants, 51.9 percent exited through Huehuetenango's borders (La Mesilla 33.6 percent, Gracias a Dios 18.3 percent) and 30.0 percent through San Marcos's (Tecun Uman 19.5 percent, El Carmen 10.5 percent). That is 81.9 percent of all irregular exits running through the two western-highlands border departments. The remainder: La Aurora International Airport 12.3 percent, El Naranjo in Peten 4.4 percent, Ingenieros in Quiche 1.4 percent.

For the period-matched cohort, those who travelled in 2021 and 2022, the same report gives La Mesilla 30.7 percent, Gracias a Dios 17.6 percent, Tecun Uman 20.3 percent and El Carmen 7.4 percent, which is 76.0 percent through the two western-highlands border departments rather than 81.9 percent, with La Aurora at 11.2 percent, El Naranjo 5.2 percent, Ingenieros 3.7 percent and Bethel 0.3 percent. The 76.0 percent figure is the one this document uses in Signal 3, because it matches the period of the Mexican data it is set beside. Addition (verification pass): the cohort figures were located in the same report during verification and were absent from the first draft.

Those four named crossings, La Mesilla, Gracias a Dios, Tecun Uman and El Carmen, all cross into Chiapas. This is the one place in the document where two of the five origin regions connect to each other in the primary record: the Guatemalan highlands' principal exits are Chiapas' principal entries, and Section 4.1 shows Chiapas absorbing 315,887 irregular-migration events in eight months of 2024.

5.1.5 Named cases: the massacre, and the network behind it

On 22 January 2021, nineteen people were murdered at Santa Anita, Camargo, Tamaulipas, shot and their bodies burned in a vehicle. Sixteen were Guatemalan, of whom twelve were from Comitancillo, San Marcos, and two from neighbouring San Marcos municipalities; one, Anderson Marco Antulio Pablo, was sixteen. On 30 October 2023 a Tamaulipas court sentenced eleven state police officers to fifty years each, with a twelfth receiving nineteen years after confessing under a cooperation agreement. It was the first conviction of state agents for a migrant massacre in Mexico. Guatemala's Public Ministry declined jurisdiction over the killings on territoriality grounds.

In January 2022 Guatemalan authorities executed nineteen raids in Comitancillo and Tejutla, San Marcos and captured ten members of the "Los Coronado" smuggling network. The Public Ministry charged that the network charged Q95,000 to Q120,000, roughly USD 12,000 to 15,500, per migrant. Named investigative reporting from Comitancillo independently documents families mortgaging land to raise Q95,000 to Q115,000 against loans of Q30,000 to Q50,000.

5.1.6 The Arizona question for Guatemala

Section 3.2 establishes the destination side firmly: Guatemala was the largest single nationality of unaccompanied children in Tucson Sector in FY2021 through FY2023, and by FY2024 Tucson Sector accounted for 34.0 percent of all Guatemalan unaccompanied children encountered border-wide. ORR's own referral data, recovered this session, shows Guatemala as the largest country of origin of children in US custody in every fiscal year from 2019 to 2025, ranging from 32.1 to 47.5 percent of all referrals.

What is not established is the middle of the route. InSight Crime's dedicated study of trafficking geography on the US-Mexico border documents the Sonoran corridor, Altar as a staging point and Nogales' tolerance zone as a sex-trafficking site, but does not document Guatemalan highland migrants in that corridor specifically. Reporting that Border Patrol encountered groups near Sasabe made up mostly of Guatemalan nationals could not be retrieved from a source this document is willing to grade.

5.2 The highlands of eastern El Salvador: an analytic unit that the record does not contain

5.2.1 The negative finding, stated first because it governs everything after it

No Salvadoran government body, US agency, UN agency, peer-reviewed publication or investigative outlet located this session publishes trafficking, exploitation or migration data disaggregated to the highlands of eastern El Salvador, whether defined as the Cacahuatique and Torola highland zone or as a highland subdivision of Morazan, La Union, San Miguel and Usulutan. What exists is department-level data on poverty, remittances and adolescent pregnancy, region-level data grouping the four departments as the "Region Oriental," and national-level data for essentially every trafficking statistic.

A second finding sits underneath the first. The four eastern departments do not behave as a bloc on any measure examined. The World Bank's 2024 poverty assessment groups Morazan and La Union together as one of three national poverty concentrations, and assigns Usulutan to a different one, the central corridor. On remittance dependency La Union is an outlier at 50.0 percent of households against 37.5 to 38.8 percent for the other three. On police enforcement intensity in the opening weeks of the 2022 state of exception, an academic coding of 1,245 police social-media posts found Usulutan mentioned in 82.98 percent, level with Santa Ana and La Paz, while Morazan appeared in 40.93 percent and La Union recorded no mass detainee displays at all. Morazan and La Union are the periphery, San Miguel is the regional urban centre, and Usulutan behaves like the centre of the country.

5.2.2 Structural conditions, at the level the record supports

Nationally in 2023, 1.9 million people, 30.3 percent, lived in poor households and 0.6 million in extreme poverty. Of the fourteen departments, nine exceed the national poverty figure, clustering in three zones, one of which the World Bank names as "la zona oriental (Morazan y La Union)."

On remittances, Salvador's 2024 census records 26.8 percent of households nationally, 505,668 households, receiving remittances, up from 19.2 percent in 2007. By department: La Union 50.0 percent, San Miguel 38.8 percent, Usulutan 38.1 percent, Morazan 37.5 percent. All four eastern departments sit far above the national rate and La Union is the highest in the country. That figure reaches this document through a state-aligned outlet reporting a central bank presentation rather than through a Banco Central publication, and is graded accordingly.

On adolescent pregnancy, UNFPA's 2024 subnational study records a national adolescent birth rate of 39.4 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 in 2021, with the rural rate at 55.2 against an urban 32.0, a 1.7-fold difference. That rural-urban gap is the closest thing in the located record to a highland signal, and it is national rather than eastern. The same study finds that the Region Oriental is unique among Salvadoran regions in showing a negative labour-income gap of 17.3 percent: women who became mothers as adolescents report higher average income than those who became mothers as adults, which UNFPA attributes to remittance inflows.

One highland-specific economic source exists, and it is about coffee rather than people. In December 2024, Morazan coffee cooperatives estimated losses of 30 to 35 percent of the total harvest after Tropical Storm Sara left plantations under water for more than eight days and a subsequent cold front damaged the maturing bean, with the affected zone named as Meanguera, Perquin and Nahuaterique, the Torola-river highland belt on the Cordillera Cacahuatique. Producers who previously harvested fifteen quintales expected ten. The source says nothing about migration or trafficking; the connection would be the reader's inference, not the source's finding, and is not drawn here.

5.2.3 The one department-level enforcement dataset, and why it complicates the premise

Data released by the Salvadoran Attorney General's office under the country's freedom-of-information law shows that over the five years to 2020, Morazan registered zero arrests for either migrant smuggling or trafficking in persons. Over the same period San Salvador led trafficking arrests with ten; Cuscatlan and San Miguel had five each and La Union four. Smuggling arrests were concentrated overwhelmingly in Ahuachapan and Santa Ana, the western departments on the Guatemalan border, running to 116 and 128 in their peak years.

The reporter's stated reasoning is geographic and is worth quoting because it is the structural point: Morazan borders Honduras and has many blind crossings, "pero no esta en la ruta hacia Guatemala" ("but it is not on the route toward Guatemala").

The counter-consideration is stated because it is strong: absence of enforcement is not absence of crime. The State Department documents that El Salvador improved access to justice outside the capital in 2023 by expanding the mandate of its specialised prosecution units, and had previously reported a national anti-trafficking police unit of twenty-eight investigators based in San Salvador with countrywide jurisdiction. Correction (verification pass): an earlier draft paraphrased this as prosecutors outside San Salvador lacking autonomy and being required to route cases through the capital, which is not what the cited editions say. Morazan's zero is as readable as an institutional blind spot as a clean record.

5.2.4 The state of exception, minors, and what the crackdown did to the counting

The State Department records that from the beginning of the State of Exception to December 2023, authorities arrested more than 75,000 people for alleged gang-related activity "without screening vulnerable persons for trafficking indicators," and that approximately 1,500 children were arrested and imprisoned in 2023, with 3,319 children imprisoned between March 2022 and December 2023 and 841 still imprisoned as of January 2024.

Against that, the 2025 report states that "since 2022, territorial gang control has effectively been ended across El Salvador," and that the arrests "disabled criminal networks that fueled sex and labor trafficking." In the same document it records that investigations fell from 38 in 2023 to 18 in 2024 and identified victims from 40 to 27, and, in the prior year's edition, that the State of Exception "directed law enforcement resources away from other crimes, including human trafficking."

The 2025 report supplies the population most relevant to a document about minors: "There are an estimated 140,000-200,000 children in El Salvador with at least one parent who has migrated abroad or is detained under the State of Exception; experts report these children are particularly vulnerable to sex and labor trafficking." That is a national estimate carrying a 43 percent spread and no named attribution, and it is used here as what it is. Given that the eastern departments have the country's highest emigration and remittance rates, that population is plausibly concentrated there, but no located source says so and this document does not claim it.

5.2.5 The two named eastern cases, and the asymmetry with US figures

Two named, dated, department-located eastern trafficking cases were verified from the Salvadoran Attorney General's own releases. Both are in San Miguel, the regional urban centre. In one, four people were ordered captured for trafficking in the sexual-exploitation modality against a fourteen-year-old girl in the district of Moncagua, with offences in January to June 2024. In the other, the owners of a bar in San Miguel were ordered captured for sexual exploitation, having used Facebook to advertise jobs as waitresses, dancers or companions; a victim who arrived seeking work in 2023 was raped, exploited, unpaid and not permitted to leave. Both are accusations at the arrest stage rather than adjudicated findings. Neither is highland, and neither is in Morazan, La Union or Usulutan.

One asymmetry is worth recording plainly. In FY2023, US Health and Human Services served 187 Salvadoran children as trafficking victims, a figure published in UNODC's country entry for the United States and attributed there to HHS (source 32, p. 28). In the same year El Salvador identified 40 trafficking victims of all ages domestically. A single US agency served more than four times as many Salvadoran child victims as the Salvadoran state identified victims of any age. VERIFICATION FLAG: this figure reaches the document through UNODC's compilation of HHS reporting, not from an HHS publication directly; the underlying HHS source was not retrieved and should be substituted in a later pass.

6The two outliers: Bogota, Colombia and Managua, Nicaragua

These two are treated together for a reason that will be argued rather than assumed: on the located record, neither is meaningfully connected to the southern Arizona corridor, and each is connected to something else instead. Bogota is a hub in a trafficking economy whose leading foreign destination is Mexico as a destination, not as a waypoint. Managua is documented far more strongly as a transit and revenue node than as an origin of trafficking victims.

6.1 Bogota, Colombia (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: Ministerio del Interior; Defensoria del Pueblo; Concejo de Bogota D.C.)

6.1.1 The national series, and where Bogota sits in it

Colombia's Ministry of the Interior, through its Centro Operativo Anti-Trata, publishes the country's authoritative victim-assistance series. Between 2008 and 2022 it articulated services for 1,490 victims, a total that does not reconcile with its own annual figures:

Those fifteen values sum to 1,450, not the 1,490 the ministry states in its own prose forty words earlier. The 40-victim discrepancy is in the source, not in the transcription, and it is recorded here rather than quietly reconciled; see Section 13 item 9.

Note on how that mapping was established, because it determines whether the series can be used at all. The ministry publishes these fifteen values as unlabeled chart data, and extracted text carries the numbers without their year axis. The research pass that located this document flagged the year mapping as an unverified inference and advised against publishing it. The mapping is nonetheless established here, by two checks that pass rather than by assumption. First, the report states in its own prose that 2021 is the year with the most reported cases, 181, and that this was "un incremento del 74% con relacion al ano inmediatamente anterior" ("an increase of 74 percent relative to the immediately preceding year"); 181 divided by 104 is 1.740, exactly 74 percent, which fixes 2020 at 104 and 2021 at 181 and therefore fixes the whole ordered series. Second, UNODC's separately published country table for Colombia reports 124, 104 and 181 for 2019, 2020 and 2021, matching three consecutive positions. Correction (verification pass): the series is usable, and the caution against it was over-strict.

Bogota's position is a double one, and it is the finding:

• Bogota is the second-largest department of origin of Colombian trafficking victims, 15.10 percent of cases 2008-2022, behind Antioquia at 17.30 percent and just ahead of Valle del Cauca at 14.70 percent.
• Bogota is simultaneously the single largest internal destination for exploitation inside Colombia, 35.53 percent of cases, more than three times the next-ranked department, Norte de Santander at 10.26 percent.

A widely circulated claim that "Bogota is the epicentre of 55 percent of trafficking cases in Colombia" does not survive contact with its own source: the article's body gives 33 of 91 cases nationally in the first half of 2024, which is 36 percent, and the underlying prosecutorial release could not be retrieved. It is not used here, and is logged in Section 8.

6.1.2 The age profile, which cuts against this document's emphasis

Across 2008-2022, Colombian trafficking victims break down as: adults 18-26, 42.8 percent; adults 27-59, 42.3 percent; adolescents 12-17, 13.3 percent; adults over 59, 0.8 percent; children 5-11, 0.6 percent; children 0-5, 0.2 percent. Minors are 14.1 percent of the total.

For the narrower 2020-2022 window, 430 victims with a cutoff of 22 December 2022, the minor share rises: adolescents 12-17 at 18.5 percent, children 5-11 at 0.7 percent, children 0-5 at 0.7 percent, for 19.9 percent. The State Department states the same thing from the other direction: "Government reports indicate between 85 and 95 percent of victims identified in Colombia were adults."

6.1.3 Destination: Mexico outranks the United States by five to one or better, in both windows

Ministry of the Interior destination data, 2008-2022: Colombia internally 30.30 percent, Ecuador 8.60 percent, Mexico 7.10 percent, China 7.10 percent, Venezuela 5.30 percent, Spain 4.50 percent, Argentina 4.50 percent, Panama 3.70 percent, Peru 3.60 percent. The United States is at 1.40 percent.

For 2020-2022, Mexico rises: Colombia 49.1 percent, Mexico 8.0 percent, Peru 6.9 percent, Ecuador 6.7 percent, Spain 6.1 percent. The United States is at 0.8 percent.

The mechanism is documented end to end in a single case. In an operation announced in July 2024 under INTERPOL's Project Turquesa, Colombian and Mexican authorities dismantled a network recruiting young women from Cali, Medellin and Bogota with promises of work as waitresses or hostesses in Cancun and Merida. Victims were given official invitation letters to satisfy Mexican entry requirements; on arrival their passports were confiscated and they were forced to sign contracts creating unaffordable debts, repaid through forced sex work in bars owned by the network's leader, a Cuban-Mexican citizen arrested in Medellin. Eight victims were safeguarded. The investigation began in June 2022 when victims escaped and reported to Mexican authorities.

6.1.4 The Bogota child-exploitation figures, which sit in a different register

Bogota's child sexual exploitation data does not come from the trafficking series. It comes from the National Police and is surfaced through the city council.

Per police figures presented in a political-control debate and published by the Concejo de Bogota on 11 March 2025: Bogota recorded 365 cases of commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents in 2024, a 98 percent increase, "lo que equivale a un caso diario" ("which amounts to one case a day"); 82 percent of victims were girls and adolescent females; and 89 percent of cases related to the production, distribution and consumption of child pornographic material.

That last figure is the one to hold. Assessment (Confidence: Moderate; likely): the overwhelming majority of what Bogota counts as commercial sexual exploitation of minors is, on the police's own coding, digital rather than physical. That is a materially different phenomenon from a child being moved to another city or country, and reading "365 cases of commercial sexual exploitation of children in Bogota" as 365 children physically trafficked would misread the source by an order of magnitude. Confidence is Moderate because the underlying police dataset was not obtained; what was retrieved is the council's publication of it.

Councillor Samir Bedoya, on the record: "Bogota NO puede ser la capital de la Explotacion Sexual Comercial de Ninas, Ninos y Adolescentes en comparacion con Cartagena y Medellin" ("Bogota must NOT be the capital of the commercial sexual exploitation of girls, boys and adolescents, in comparison with Cartagena and Medellin"), adding that the rate of increase in the capital exceeds that of cities traditionally associated with the practice.

VERIFICATION FLAG on the 98 percent increase: a near-doubling in one year, in a category not previously counted systematically, is at least as likely to measure a change in reporting and coding as a change in conduct. The council's own later technical report makes exactly that point about its education-sector alert figures. This document does not treat the 98 percent as an established change in the phenomenon. Nothing comparable was located for Bogota before 2024, which is itself the reason for the caution: the series effectively begins at the year of the increase.

The Defensoria del Pueblo, Colombia's constitutional ombudsman, issued Early Alert 004-24 on 21 February 2024 covering nine Bogota localities including Los Martires, Santa Fe and Chapinero, warning of Autodefensas Gaitanistas and Tren de Aragua presence tied to trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. Its own characterisation of the measurement problem: trafficking is "un delito altamente invisibilizado, con muy bajos indices de denuncia" ("a highly invisibilised offence, with very low rates of reporting") with "altos niveles de subregistro" ("high levels of under-registration"). On why enforcement fails, it records that venues "son frecuentemente avisados de forma previa a los operativos" ("are frequently warned in advance of the raids") because of the co-optation of people inside the institutions.

6.1.5 The Arizona question for Colombia

Section 3.2 answers it. Tucson Sector encountered 2, 12, 65, 99 and 14 Colombian unaccompanied children across FY2021 to FY2025, between 1.5 and 6.6 percent of the border-wide Colombian total; Colombian children arrive overwhelmingly through San Diego and El Paso. Section 7.4 corroborates it from an entirely different instrument: of 2,658 border-crosser decedents identified by the Pima County medical examiner between 2000 and 2025, six were Colombian.

Colombian adults are a different matter and do move through this corridor in real numbers, 8,997 Tucson Sector encounters in FY2023 and 7,422 in FY2024.

6.2 Managua, Nicaragua (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security and the Treasury; UNHCR; Servicio Nacional de Migracion de Panama)

6.2.1 Why the origin-side data cannot be used the way the other four can

Section 2.4 has already established that Nicaragua reported identifying no trafficking victims and prosecuting or convicting no traffickers in the 2024 reporting year, and that the state dissolved its own anti-trafficking coalition, repealed its victim-protection fund, and closed more than 5,700 NGOs since 2018.

Two further findings establish that even the earlier Nicaraguan numbers cannot be treated as data. First, the State Department's 2024 report states that Nicaragua "did not identify any trafficking victims for the second consecutive year" and did not prosecute or convict anyone for the second consecutive year, covering 2022 and 2023; the 2025 report, one year later, retrospectively credits 2023 with five investigations, two prosecutions, three convictions and three identified child victims. Both statements are official US government documents about the same calendar year. Second, the figures Nicaragua submitted to UNODC do not match the figures it gave the State Department for the same years: for 2022 UNODC records eight detected victims and nine prosecutions where State records zero and zero.

The State Department's own characterisation, in successive reports, is that observers "questioned the validity of government reporting on human trafficking, including law enforcement statistics; some alleged the government obscured or intentionally misclassified trafficking cases to minimize trafficking statistics."

The same blackout extends to structural indicators. Nicaragua's last published poverty measurement is 2016, at 24.9 percent on the national line; the World Bank series contains no Nicaraguan poverty observation for any year afterward, a gap spanning the 2018 crisis, the pandemic and the entire focal period. Any current Nicaraguan poverty rate in circulation is either that 2016 figure or an unofficial estimate. What can be stated from a fetched international series: Nicaragua's adolescent fertility rate was 93.5 births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 2023 and 93.2 in 2024, against a Latin America and Caribbean developing-country average of 51.6, having declined slowly from 103.2 in 2014.

6.2.2 What is documented instead: the exodus

UNHCR's population statistics, pulled from its own data API, record Nicaraguans holding refugee status or pending asylum claims worldwide rising from 2,706 at the end of 2015 to 386,221 at the end of 2024:

The inflection is 2018, the year of the political crisis. By the end of 2024, Costa Rica hosted 205,364 of them, 53.2 percent, and the United States 150,709, 39.0 percent. The recognition rate, refugees as a share of the total, is 7.8 percent.

6.2.3 The airlift, and the US government's own characterisation of it

This is where the Nicaragua record is strongest, and it is not a trafficking record; it is a migration-facilitation record.

In a joint alert issued on 15 May 2024, the Departments of State, Homeland Security and the Treasury stated, verbatim: "Migrants are increasingly traversing the region using Managua as a disembarkation point to continue the journey northward by overland means... In particular, actions by the Nicaraguan government are of grave concern. President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo have put in place permissive-by-design migration policies that have introduced opportunities for migrant smuggling and trafficking networks to exploit migrants for economic gain and fuel dangerous, irregular travel towards the U.S. southwest border."

On the same day, OFAC designated three Nicaragua-based entities, stating that the action was taken in response to "the Ortega-Murillo regime's continued repression of the people of Nicaragua and continued exploitation of vulnerable migrants, including via the facilitation and profiting off of irregular migration to the United States."

The preceding measure, announced 21 November 2023 under section 212(a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, imposed visa restrictions on "owners, executives, and/or senior officials of companies providing charter flights into Nicaragua designed for use primarily by irregular migrants to the United States," on the stated basis that "charter flight companies have been offering flights, and charging extortion-level prices, that put migrants onto a dangerous overland path north to the U.S. border."

The revenue mechanism is documented by three independent named investigative outlets working from Nicaragua's own published budget-execution reports: an August 2020 amendment to the General Law on Migration created a US$150 charge for "entry and exit through a non-authorised border crossing," issued without receipt or passport stamp, and observed in practice at $150 to $300. Published revenue estimates for 2023 range from $47.5 million to $50.3 million on an accounting basis, with a higher figure of $65.9 million circulating as a per-head extrapolation rather than a receipt. This document reports the accounting range and labels the extrapolation as one. The visa-free entry policy for Cuban citizens, introduced in November 2021, was ended on 8 February 2026.

A seam worth recording: the State Department's own Trafficking in Persons narratives for Nicaragua in 2023, 2024 and 2025 do not use the word "smuggling" at all and never mention charter flights or transit revenue. Two arms of the same government assess the same government through different channels and neither cites the other.

6.2.4 The route, and the Arizona question for Nicaragua

Nicaragua publishes no transit statistics of any kind. Every transit figure available is a proxy from a neighbouring government. Panama's national migration service records Darien transits at 133,726 (2021), 248,284 (2022), 520,085 (2023), 302,203 (2024) and 3,091 (2025); in 2023 the entire "America Central" category through the Darien totalled 29 people for the year, because Nicaraguans exit northward overland rather than through the Darien. The Managua air route existed precisely so that Caribbean, African and Asian migrants could skip the Darien.

On Arizona, the CBP data is the only quantitative answer. Nicaraguan Border Patrol encounters in Tucson Sector: 179 (FY2020), 1,866 (FY2021), 3,050 (FY2022), 1,031 (FY2023), 2,731 (FY2024), 82 (FY2025). As a share of all southwest-border Nicaraguan Border Patrol encounters, that runs 8.4, 3.7, 1.9, 1.1, 8.2 and 4.9 percent. Aggregated across FY2020-FY2025 the dominant sectors were Rio Grande Valley (135,047), then Del Rio (103,638), then El Paso (58,708). Correction (verification pass): an earlier draft gave 8.9 and 3.8 percent for FY2020 and FY2025, mixing two denominators, and ordered El Paso ahead of Del Rio. Nicaraguan unaccompanied children in Tucson Sector specifically ran 45, 56, 32, 95 and 7 across FY2021 to FY2025.

No fetched source documents Nicaraguan-specific smuggling routing through Chiapas or into Sonora. The fetched sources follow the route reliably as far as the Honduran border crossings of Las Manos and El Espino and then stop.

One structural note on ORR, which bears on the whole document: ORR does not disaggregate Nicaragua or Colombia in its published country-of-origin series at all. It breaks out Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico, and places everything else in "Other," a category that grew from 4.9 percent of referrals in FY2019 to 19.4 percent in FY2024. For two of this document's five origin countries, CBP encounter data by citizenship is the only fiscal-year federal series that exists.

7Regional focus: the Sonora corridor into Cochise County, Santa Cruz County and Nogales

7.1 Jurisdictional overview

Border Patrol's Tucson Sector covers 262 border miles from the New Mexico line to the Yuma County line, operating nine stations, Why, Casa Grande, Tucson, Nogales, Willcox, Sonoita, Bisbee, Douglas and Three Points, with approximately 3,700 agents. The sector operates an interior checkpoint ring on Interstate 19 north of Tubac, State Route 286 north of Sasabe, Arivaca Road, State Route 83 north of Sonoita, State Route 90 north of Sierra Vista, State Route 80 north of Tombstone, and U.S. Route 191 northwest of Sunizona. VERIFICATION FLAG: this list reaches the document through a regional newspaper compilation dated 2011 and is not on CBP's own Tucson Sector page, which carries no checkpoint, terrain or route description at all; the mileposts should be treated as indicative rather than current, and a CBP or GAO primary should be substituted in a later pass. Note also that two of these, State Route 286 and Arivaca Road, are in Pima County rather than Cochise or Santa Cruz. The checkpoint ring spans all three counties; it is not a Cochise and Santa Cruz feature alone.

On mortality jurisdiction, one point governs the whole of Section 7.4: the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner is the appointed medical examiner for Pima, Cochise, Graham, La Paz, Santa Cruz and Apache counties, and is the de facto examiner for Santa Cruz County, which maintains no such office. There is therefore no separate Cochise or Santa Cruz migrant-death count; the Pima County totals already include them.

7.2 What the corridor actually carries, and for whom

Section 3 establishes the nationality composition and is not repeated. The single most useful framing for a document grounded here is that this corridor's minors problem is two unrelated problems, with different victims, different statutes and different perpetrators.

The first is inbound: tens of thousands of Guatemalan and Mexican unaccompanied children per year arriving as clients of a paid smuggling service. The second is local: United States citizen teenagers in Cochise and Santa Cruz counties recruited through social media as drivers of load vehicles and as drug couriers. They have different victims, different statutes and different perpetrators, and this document holds them apart throughout.

7.3 Minors recruited locally as drivers and couriers (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: DOJ, U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Arizona; CBP)

In August 2023 the US Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona announced the unsealing of thirteen indictments charging twenty-two individuals with Conspiracy to Transport Illegal Aliens for Profit. The release states, in its own voice: "Smuggling coordinators often recruit juveniles and young adults as drivers with social media posts that glamorize alien smuggling. Many of the posts claim drivers can make large sums of money without the risk of being arrested." It describes coordinators using Snapchat to recruit drivers inside Arizona, then switching to WhatsApp for logistics. The investigations were run by Homeland Security Investigations in Casa Grande and Border Patrol's Tucson Sector.

The single clearest documented instance is the sentencing of Nathanael Alley Rivera, 23, of Eloy, to 71 months in January 2024. From May 2021 through November 2022 he "recruited drivers and mid-level coordinators for alien smuggling transportation by posting solicitations on Snapchat," posts that "often included photos of large sums of money, firearms, and requests for drivers to move undocumented noncitizens from locations near the United States/Mexico border further into the United States." The release states plainly: "He also used minors to facilitate certain smuggling events." He was on probation for a prior alien-smuggling conviction during part of the period. Investigated by HSI Douglas.

The local Nogales layer is documented separately. Two Nogales, Arizona residents, Ian Esteban Serrano and Marco Antonio Romero, were each sentenced to 45 months for managing a smuggling organisation, "recruiting drivers and sending them to various locations to pick up or drop off undocumented individuals in the Nogales and Rio Rico communities."

CBP's own local releases document the pattern at the traffic-stop level, and the recurring detail is that the drivers are US citizens from metropolitan Phoenix driving south to load and north to deliver: a Ford Taurus stopped on State Route 80 near Bisbee with a man in the trunk, driver a 51-year-old US citizen from the Phoenix area; a Ford Mustang on Highway 92 at milepost 354, driver a 21-year-old US citizen from Black Canyon City. In June 2025 a 17-year-old US citizen and a 19-year-old US citizen, both from the Phoenix area, were charged with human smuggling plus endangerment after a pursuit, with five people in a 2005 Honda Civic including a three-year-old US-citizen child who sustained a bloody nose from the driving.

On drug rather than people smuggling, named Santa Cruz County officials went on the record at a public panel in Nogales in early 2019. CBP officer Jose Aguirre: "Unfortunately, we've seen an increase in juveniles attempting to smuggle drugs. It's something we see every day without fail." Border Patrol agent Alan Regalado: "They tend to look for American juveniles because it's much easier for them to cross the border," and the majority "didn't do it because they had a financial necessity at home, but because of the group that they were in." Santa Cruz County Attorney George Silva: "I can't remember the last time I prosecuted a juvenile for crossing marijuana. Now it's all methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl."

7.4 Migrant mortality, and the independent corroboration it supplies (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, 2025 Annual Report)

From 1 January 2000 to 31 December 2025 the medical examiner received 4,104 recovered remains of suspected undocumented border crossers, averaging 158 recoveries per calendar year. Calendar-year figures 2015 through 2025: 135, 147, 118, 120, 136, 207, 215, 171, 197, 151, 109. The highest calendar year on record is 2010 at 222; the highest federal fiscal year is 2021 at 225.

Of the 4,104, 65 percent have been identified, 2,658 people, and 1,446 remain unidentified as of February 2026.

Nationality of identified decedents, 2000-2025: Mexican 2,001 (75 percent), Guatemalan 438, Honduran 82, Salvadoran 75, Ecuadorian 23, Peruvian 8, Brazilian 6, Colombian 6, Costa Rican 4, Indian 4, Dominican 3, Nicaraguan 2, Venezuelan 2, Bangladeshi 1, Chilean 1, Jamaican 1, Nepali 1.

On minors among the dead, which is the figure this document was asked for. Across CY2000-2025, the age distribution of all 4,104 recoveries is 13 decedents aged 12 or under, 266 aged 13-19, 960 aged 20-29, 842 aged 30-39, 435 aged 40-49, 120 aged 50-59, 21 aged 60-69, 1 aged 70-79, and 1,446 of unknown age. Those figures sum to exactly 4,104, which is how the reading of the published chart was verified. For CY2025 alone, of 23 identified decedents, none was 12 or under and 2 were aged 13-19.

Two handling cautions, both material, and both of which mean the minor figure must be presented as a range rather than a number. The 13-19 band straddles the age of majority, so 13 plus 266, or 279, is an upper bound on minors across twenty-five years, not a count of them; against 2,658 identified decedents that is at most 10.5 percent, and the true under-18 share is lower. And because 35 percent of all recovered remains are never identified and carry no age at all, any figure for minors among the dead is a floor derived from the identified subset, not a total.

On cause: since 2010 the most frequent cause of death in these cases has been undetermined, which the office attributes to the limits of examining decomposed and skeletal remains. In CY2024, 91 of 155 recoveries (59 percent) were certified undetermined in both manner and cause, 62 (40 percent) were accidents, and of those accidents 56 (90 percent) were environmental exposure, 53 of them heat. Of 128 undetermined cases in 2024, 111 (87 percent) were decomposed or skeletal.

Cochise County specifically, from the same reports: "Deaths due to environmental exposure have been trending upward since 2019. In 2024, exposure deaths were the third leading cause of non-natural manner deaths (n=19). The rise is attributed to an increase in undocumented border crosser (UBC) exposure deaths in Cochise County along with an increase in heat-related deaths in non-UBCs." In 2025 Cochise exposure deaths fell 42 percent from 2024 and motor-vehicle-related deaths fell 69 percent from the prior year's high of 32. The office declines to publish rates for these because the numbers are too small to be reliable, and this document follows that caution.

7.5 The interior leg, and the smuggling-versus-trafficking finding (PRIMARY/OFFICIAL: DOJ, District of Arizona)

Four Joint Task Force Alpha prosecutions in the District of Arizona document the stash-house layer, and all four run from crossings near Nogales into the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Amalia Gonzalez-Lara was sentenced to 21 months for conspiring to transport and harbour over 100 people for profit, managing a stash house in Avondale where twenty undocumented people, all Mexican or Guatemalan nationals, were found in January 2021. Macario Ulises Barragan-Cisneros received a combined 67 months after HSI found thirty people inside a trailer at a Phoenix mobile home park in September 2021 together with a smuggling ledger; the companion ICE release states the group "crossed the U.S.-Mexico border near Nogales, Arizona, then [were] transported to Phoenix," which is the cleanest documented Nogales-to-Phoenix route in a federal primary source.

The fourth is the one that matters most analytically. Angelico Roa-Joachin and three co-conspirators received a combined 220 months after HSI executed warrants at two Phoenix stash houses in April 2021, apprehending them along with over thirty undocumented people and seizing firearms, cash and ledgers. The organisation "regularly moved hundreds of undocumented non-citizens through the two stash houses. The individuals were often held in overcrowded conditions and were not permitted to leave until their families or sponsors paid the smuggling organization for their release." The sentencing judge found that three of the defendants sexually coerced or sexually assaulted at least one woman held at the stash houses, resulting in a sentence enhancement.

7.6 The origin-country minor question, answered negatively

No federal prosecution in the District of Arizona of a minor trafficked from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua or Colombia into Cochise or Santa Cruz County was located this session.

The nearest documented analogue is in the wrong district and instructive for a second reason. A federal jury in the Southern District of Florida convicted Julio Ruiz Chuta of smuggling an unaccompanied child into the United States for financial gain, and acquitted him of forced labour. The defendant and the child's family were from the same Guatemalan village; on his promise to care for the boy, the parents let him travel as guardian, after which he "imposed a debt upon the boy and his family, charged them interest and pressured them to pay, causing the boy to work instead of attending school," and took the deed to family property in Guatemala as collateral. That is the Section 5.1.3 mechanism appearing in a US courtroom with a named defendant, and even there the trafficking theory failed at trial and only the smuggling count stuck.

7.7 The Sonoran side, and the largest gap in this document

The Mexican side of this corridor rests almost entirely on one named investigative source, and that is a real weakness rather than a stylistic caveat. No Mexican primary source, from the national migration institute, Grupos Beta, the Sonora state prosecutor, the national human rights commission or the national search commission, was located or retrieved for the Sonoran side of the corridor.

What that single source documents: Altar, Sonora, roughly 100 kilometres south of the Arizona line, hosting approximately 130 guest houses and 20 hotels, with bed rates around 100 pesos a night; crossing prices rising from a historical $3,000-$5,000 to $7,000-$10,000 and above by 2022, with one migrant reporting $13,000 including onward transport to Phoenix and Houston; and organised crime collecting a transit quota of at least roughly $100 per migrant. The derived figure of roughly $3 million a month from Altar alone rests on a priest's estimate of 30,000 migrants monthly and is not used here as a figure.

The same source documents the cartel's role as taxation rather than management: sources in Nogales told its investigators that the Sinaloa Cartel "has networks that may collect a tax from these human trafficking operations but do not manage them," and that "some coyotes may also sell migrants to human traffickers," with prices varying by nationality. Its central thesis is that officials portray trafficking as cartel-controlled while "the reality on the US-Mexico border illustrates there is a far wider array of groups behind this problem." That finding is consistent with, and is the same investigation as, the finding already established in the companion border brief.

On the Nogales tunnels, CBP's own releases are specific and narrower than their reputation. The tunnel discovered on 5 December 2019 was the 124th found in Tucson Sector since 1990, roughly three feet wide and four feet tall, with its entrance concealed in the floor of an existing drainage system, located during a routine bi-national sweep of the stormwater drainage system serving both sides of the border. The 126th, in February 2020, was about 580 yards west of the DeConcini Crossing, hand-dug and incomplete, entered from the Grand Avenue drainage system on the Mexican side. CBP describes the sweeps as aiming to prevent "the smuggling of narcotics and humans," but every specific tunnel case it describes is a drug conduit. The proposition that the Nogales tunnels move people is weakly supported by the official record.

Likewise, and worth stating because it will be tempting to assume otherwise: no official CBP or DOJ description of the Huachuca, Patagonia, Mule or Chiricahua mountain foot routes was located. CBP's own Tucson Sector page carries no terrain or route description at all. Foot-route detail in this corridor is journalistic, and should not be attributed to CBP.

7.8 Destination or crossing point? The question, settled (added in the open-items pass)

This is the question Section 11.1 turns on, and unlike most questions in this document it has a clean answer from published federal data.

HHS publishes unaccompanied-child releases to sponsors by state and, where fifty or more children were released, by county. Set beside the Border Patrol encounter figures for the same years:

Arizona ranked 22nd of 53 jurisdictions in FY2024 and has never exceeded 1.31 percent of national releases. The FY2024 leaders are Texas 13,040, California 10,796, Florida 9,465 and New York 6,923.

The county data is sharper still. Across all 1,718 published county-year rows covering FY2019 to FY2026, Arizona appears eight times: Maricopa County in every year, and Pima County exactly once, at 65 children in FY2024. Cochise County and Santa Cruz County appear in no year, which given the fifty-child publication floor is a hard published ceiling: each received fewer than fifty children in every year of the series. In FY2019, every Arizona county other than Maricopa received 23 children in total.

The pattern is not peculiar to Arizona. In FY2024 no southwest border county was a significant reception site, San Diego 523, Hidalgo 208, El Paso 80, Pima 65, Cameron 53, while Harris County alone took 4,130 and Los Angeles 3,390. Harris County received more children than every southwest border county combined.

The mechanism is in ORR's own sponsor-category data. For FY2025, across 24,161 published releases, Category 1 (parent or legal guardian) was 50.0 percent, Category 2 (close relative) 41.1 percent and Category 3 (distant relative or unrelated adult) 8.9 percent. The longer historical anchor is GAO's: of 51,841 Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran children released between January 2014 and April 2015, 60 percent went to a parent, 13 percent to an aunt or uncle and 12 percent to a sibling, with GAO summarising that "in nearly 90 percent of these cases, the sponsors were a parent or other close relative already residing in the United States."

The mechanism is the same on any of those splits. The sponsor is a family member already living somewhere, and that somewhere is overwhelmingly Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta or Phoenix rather than Douglas or Nogales.

Note also that Arizona is not short of custody infrastructure. GAO records 21 ORR-funded facilities in Arizona as of July 2019, including three it reviewed with bed capacities of 304, 300 and 78. Children are housed in the corridor at scale and placed out of it. One distinction to keep sharp: the facility that held more than 900 unaccompanied children at Nogales in July 2014, frequently cited in general discussion of this corridor, was a CBP facility, not an ORR one, and it sat upstream of ORR custody rather than inside it.

Two limits on that finding, both stated because they bound it rather than undermine it. ORR records the sponsor's address at the moment of release and publishes nothing about subsequent moves, so this establishes where children were placed, not where they live a year later. And placement at release is the measure most favourable to a destination reading, which is what makes failing it by a factor of several hundred decisive rather than merely suggestive.

Note also that the presence of ORR custody infrastructure in southern Arizona is not evidence against this. Children are processed and housed in the corridor and then leave it. That is what a transit corridor looks like in administrative data.

7.9 What Arizona state data shows that federal data misses (added in the open-items pass)

Section 7.6 reports that no federal prosecution of a minor trafficked from the five origin countries into these counties was located, and Section 11.1 assessed that charging practice was part of the reason. That assessment was made on an entirely federal search. Arizona state data was then checked, and it changes the picture in a way neither hypothesis predicted.

Arizona's Department of Public Safety publishes human trafficking offence counts, in two categories, for each individual reporting agency. The figures below were retrieved from the state's own portal and independently re-queried agency by agency for this document.

Two findings, in opposite directions.

Cochise County has a trafficking footprint that federal charging data does not show. Roughly 45 offences across 2022-2025, after five consecutive years of zero, including eight involuntary servitude offences, which is to say forced labour, concentrated in Douglas, Willcox and Tombstone. Douglas is a port of entry.

Santa Cruz County, containing Nogales and the busiest crossing in the sector, records zero in every year at every agency.

The obvious objection is that these are reporting artefacts rather than real changes, because Arizona agencies transitioned to the federal NIBRS reporting standard on staggered dates and the portal warns about exactly this. That objection was tested directly rather than assumed, by pulling each agency's total person-offence counts alongside its trafficking counts, on the reasoning that a reporting transition shows up as a discontinuity in the total.

It does, and the test is informative. Cochise County Sheriff's total person offences jump from 179 in 2020 to 373 in 2021, which is its transition; its trafficking counts remain zero through that transition year and rise only in 2022. Douglas Police shows no discontinuity in its totals at all, running 96 to 108 to 93 across 2020-2022, while its trafficking offences appear in 2022 alone. Santa Cruz County Sheriff's totals jump from 2 in 2021 to 125 in 2022, its transition, after which it reports four further years at zero trafficking.

This document does not resolve that. Both are official instruments, both were retrieved and recomputed directly, and no located source reconciles them. Any figure taken from this area must name which system it came from, and the two must not be placed in one table.

Three further limits, all material.

Offence counts are not victim counts and say nothing about nationality, so none of this establishes that the Douglas forced-labour offences involved border crossers from any of the five origin countries, and no press coverage of that cluster was located. A trafficking offence recorded by a police department is a considerably weaker thing than a charge, let alone a conviction.

Arizona's federal reporting coverage rose from roughly 8 percent of population in 2013-2019 to 93 percent by 2025, so any trend read off the federal series is confounded by that expansion. This is the same caution as the state-side transition test above, applied to the other instrument.

And the Santa Cruz zero means two different things in the two systems, which is worth stating precisely because it would be easy to overclaim in either direction. In the state system it is a reported zero from an agency that is demonstrably reporting: Nogales Police recorded between 95 and 232 person offences every year from 2018 to 2025 while recording no trafficking offence in any of them, and Santa Cruz County Sheriff did the same from 2022 once its own totals show it reporting. In the federal system it is not a zero at all: no Santa Cruz County agency appears anywhere in the FBI human trafficking file, in any year, and that file does record explicit zeros elsewhere, so the county's absence there is non-submission rather than a reported nil return. The state-side zero is a finding. The federal-side absence is not, and must not be cited as one.

Which leads to the structural finding, and it is the one that matters most for Section 11.1. Arizona publishes trafficking offences down to the individual police department and publishes nothing at all about what happens to those cases afterward. No Arizona source, not the courts, not the Attorney General, not the county attorneys, not the criminal justice commission, publishes trafficking prosecutions, filings or convictions by county. The state holds the records in its computerised criminal history system and has never released them broken out that way. The annual "Crime in Arizona" series, which did publish county-level trafficking counts for 2015-2020, has been discontinued.

One federal award record does name the geography. Paired Office for Victims of Crime cooperative agreements to the City of Tucson Police and to a Tucson service provider, running 2015 to 2019, are described in the award text as an enhanced collaborative model "located within the southern Arizona counties of Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise," and a current award to another Tucson provider states that "the geographic service area is Pima County, Arizona." Federal money has been spent on trafficking victim services in these counties. What does not exist is a federal count of victims served in them.

8Sources rejected this session, and why

Prose notes on sources whose status changed, in both directions.

Upgraded from mirror to primary. Four of the six research dossiers reached the State Department's Trafficking in Persons reports only through a third-party mirror, because state.gov returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, and graded them down accordingly. The verification pass retrieved all five 2025 country narratives directly from state.gov with a browser user-agent. Every State Department figure in this document is therefore cited to the primary at A-grade, not to a mirror.

Upgraded from unverified inference to established. The Colombian Ministry of the Interior's fifteen-year victim series was flagged by the originating research pass as an uncertain chart reading that should not be published. It is published here, because two arithmetic checks that the originating pass did not apply both succeed: the report's own stated 74 percent year-over-year increase computes exactly from 104 to 181, and UNODC's independently published table matches three consecutive positions in the series. See Section 6.1.1.

Recovered after being reported unavailable. ORR's unaccompanied-children country-of-origin table returns a caption with no table in the served HTML, on the live page and on archived snapshots, which this document initially recorded as a verification failure. The data is in fact published, as a Tableau Public dataset behind the page, and was retrieved as a CSV export. That recovery both resolves the flag and independently confirms the figures the companion border brief cites for the same source. Section 3.5 carries the corrected statement.

Corrected against a later edition. A Guatemalan decedent count of 426 was carried from the Pima County medical examiner's 2024 annual report; the 2025 report gives 438 for the cumulative series through 2025. The later figure is used.

Excluded sources whose underlying claims survived because a primary was found. Two advocacy sources held Chiapas material located nowhere else: a child-rights network's disaggregation of child trafficking in Chiapas for 2015-2022, and the only San Cristobal-specific trafficking study located, produced by a peace-and-human-rights collective. Both are excluded from load-bearing use and both are logged here in full, because the second is methodologically explicit, quotes prosecutorial administrative records directly, and states in its own text that no prior study of trafficking in San Cristobal existed. Neither supplies a figure used in this document.

What the adversarial verification pass changed. A verification agent running on a different model was given the completed document and instructed to attack it, with independent re-fetching required for any finding. It recomputed 100-plus figures from primary sources. Most matched. The ones that did not produced this document's largest correction: a sector-code error that inflated every percentage share in Section 3.2 and everything derived from it (Section 1.4, Section 3.2). It also established that Chiapas is Mexico's second-largest irregular-entry point rather than its largest (Section 4.1), that Colombia's long-series destination ranking puts Ecuador above Mexico (Section 6.1.3), that Mexico's national child-labour rate was rising rather than flat (Section 4.2), that the Colombian ministry's stated fifteen-year total exceeds the sum of its own annual figures by 40 (Section 6.1.1), that Signal 1's independence claim was overstated (Section 9), that the same judgment carried three different confidence labels in three places (Sections 2.3, 9, 11.2), and that Section 11.1 had over-weighted the wrong hypothesis (Section 11.1). Each is corrected inline and marked. The pass is the reason this document's central tables can be relied on, and its findings are recorded here rather than folded in silently.

A source rejected for lack of verification rather than category. Several outlets on this project's accepted list, including El Faro and La Prensa Grafica, could not be retrieved at all: El Faro sits behind bot protection and La Prensa Grafica returns HTTP 403 from this location. Their material is excluded here for non-retrieval, not for category, and that distinction matters for a follow-up pass.

9Signals: genuine cross-source correlation

The standard applied here: a correlated signal requires two or more independently produced sources, from different institutions, using different methods, arriving at the same finding without one citing or reprinting the other. Multiple outlets covering the same press release, study or dataset is not correlation; it is one data point reported several times, and it counts as one. Two bodies analysing the same underlying dataset is a real but weaker correlation than two independent bodies of evidence, and is rated as such rather than collapsed into the stronger category.

Genuine correlations found this session

Signal 1 (MODERATE TO STRONG, downgraded in the verification pass). The Arizona corridor carries Mexicans and Guatemalans, and almost no one from the other three origin countries.

The first is CBP's Nationwide Encounters dataset, a federal enforcement record, recomputed locally for this document: in FY2024 Tucson Sector accounted for 52.2 percent of all Mexican and 42.8 percent of all Guatemalan Border Patrol encounters border-wide, against 7.3 percent of Salvadorans, 8.2 percent of Nicaraguans and 6.6 percent of Colombians.

The second is the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, a county death register: of 2,658 border-crosser decedents identified between 2000 and 2025, 2,001 were Mexican and 438 Guatemalan, against 75 Salvadorans, six Colombians and two Nicaraguans.

What supports the correlation: the two instruments measure different things (living people encountered by an enforcement agency; human remains recovered by a county coroner), are produced by different levels of government for unrelated purposes, and the medical examiner's report contains no reference to CBP, Border Patrol or any federal biometric system anywhere in its 141 pages.

What survives all four objections: the two instruments agree on the ordinal ranking of five nationalities, and the Colombian and Nicaraguan figures are so small in absolute terms, six and two decedents across twenty-five years, that no plausible identification bias closes the gap between them and 2,001 Mexicans. The finding stands at High confidence. The claim that it rests on two fully independent instruments does not, and is withdrawn.

Signal 2 (MODERATE). Child share of identified trafficking victims measures state detection capacity, not prevalence.

The pattern: on the 2025 TIP Report, children were 88.9 percent of victims identified in El Salvador, 81.3 percent in Guatemala, 31.9 percent in Mexico and 5.0 percent in Colombia, with Nicaragua at zero identifications. UNODC's separate compilation shows Guatemala's child share at 82-88 percent across four years, consistent with the TIP figure.

The mechanisms, each from a different source: Guatemala's 460 child forced-labour victims arise substantially from joint worksite inspections by three government bodies, that is, from a programme that looks where children are; Colombia's own TIP narrative states that law enforcement "did not proactively identify victims and did not have a victim identification protocol," relying on self-identification; and Guatemala's ombudsman documents that 1,123 of 1,201 victims had no ethnicity recorded, establishing that the identification system does not see the population it is being asked about.

Why moderate and not strong: State and UNODC both draw substantially on the same national government submissions. Their agreement is two compilers agreeing about one set of returns. The mechanism statements are what lift this above a single data point, and they come from two institutions rather than three: the Guatemalan ombudsman, and the State Department speaking twice in different country narratives. Correction (verification pass): an earlier draft said three institutions, which double-counted the State Department.

Signal 3 (MODERATE). The Guatemalan highland exit geography and the Chiapas entry volumes describe the same physical crossings.

Two institutions, two governments, two instruments, converging on the same geography. Rated moderate rather than strong for three reasons. They do not measure the same people: the IOM figure is Guatemalan returnees recalling their own exit, the Segob figure is events recorded on Mexican territory across all nationalities, and no located source joins them at the individual level. The IOM figure is self-reported recall. And the convergence is weaker than it first appears, because on the same Segob table the largest Mexican entry point is Tabasco at 442,365 events, not Chiapas, and Tabasco does not border the Guatemalan highlands.

Signal 4 (MODERATE). Coercive conduct in the Arizona corridor is charged as smuggling, not trafficking.

Rated moderate because the four prosecutions are one institution's charging decisions, which is a single body of evidence however many cases it contains, and the investigative finding is adjacent rather than identical.

Tested and found weak or absent, reported because the test is part of the finding

Signal 5 (ABSENT). A documented trafficking corridor from any of the five origin points to southern Arizona.

This was the document's central question and it was tested against four bodies of evidence. One case runs Chiapas to Sonora to the United States, and its US destination is New York. InSight Crime's dedicated study of trafficking geography on this border mentions Chiapas exactly once, in a list of origin states, and does not develop an Arizona corridor; that negative was established by searching all twenty-six pages of the report rather than by not finding it. No District of Arizona federal prosecution of a minor trafficked from any of the five countries into Cochise or Santa Cruz County was located. The one clean minor-trafficking conviction with the highland debt mechanism intact was prosecuted in the Southern District of Florida, and lost its forced-labour count at trial.

Revised (open-items pass): two of the four evidentiary legs above have moved, in opposite directions. Mexican federal microdata now documents a Chiapas-to-Nogales movement of unaccompanied minors, a few hundred a year, so "no source connects origin to corridor" is withdrawn (Section 4.7). At the same time, HHS sponsor-release data establishes that southern Arizona is a crossing point rather than a destination, with Pima County crossing ORR's fifty-child publication floor once in eight years and Cochise and Santa Cruz never (Section 7.8).

Signal 6 (DIVERGENT, and the divergence is the finding). Tucson Sector's unaccompanied-child volume moved opposite to the border-wide total.

Border-wide Border Patrol unaccompanied-child encounters fell across the focal period, from 144,834 in FY2021 to 99,704 in FY2024, a 31 percent decline. Tucson Sector's rose across the same years, from 18,655 to 27,854, a 49 percent increase. Its share of the border-wide total therefore more than doubled, 12.9 to 27.9 percent, and in FY2024 it was the busiest unaccompanied-child sector on the southwest border in absolute terms, 27,854 against Rio Grande Valley's 25,037. Correction (verification pass): the denominators in this signal were understated in the first draft, per Section 1.4; the corrected figures are above and the finding is unchanged.

Named specifically as NOT correlation (single-sourced, included for what they are)

Each of the following rests on one source. They are not weaker facts for it, but they must not read as corroborated.

• Chiapas as the leading Mexican state of origin for unaccompanied repatriated minors, 9.1 percent. One source, Segob's migration policy unit. No independent instrument measures Mexican state of origin for this population.
• The IOM finding that 19.8 percent of moneylender-financed Guatemalan migrants pledged house or land deeds, at an average credit of Q125,000. One survey. The Comitancillo reporting on mortgaged land is consistent with it but is a journalistic account of one municipality, not a second measurement.
• Bogota at 15.10 percent of victim origin and 35.53 percent of internal destination. One ministry's tables.
• The 365 commercial-sexual-exploitation cases in Bogota in 2024, of which 89 percent were coded as involving child pornographic material. One police dataset, reached through the city council's publication of it rather than directly.
• The US government's assertion that the Nicaraguan head of state and vice president operate "permissive-by-design" migration policies. Two documents, but one government issuing both on the same day; that is one source speaking twice.
• The Guatemalan ombudsman's finding that 1,123 of 1,201 trafficking victims had no ethnicity recorded. One report, and the only department-level Guatemalan trafficking dataset located for any year.
• That minors are at most 10.5 percent of identified border-crosser decedents in this corridor. One office's records, and an upper bound rather than a count, for the reasons in Section 7.4.

10Key Assumptions Check

A Key Assumptions Check states the things this document takes as true without having verified them. They are flagged not because they are doubted but because they are unverified, which is a different thing. If one of them is wrong, findings above change, and each entry says how.

Assumption 1: CBP's citizenship field records actual nationality accurately. Every corridor-composition finding in this document, and Signal 1, rests on it. Citizenship at encounter is typically self-declared and often undocumented at the moment of recording. If a material share of encountered people misstate nationality, the composition findings shift. Partially mitigated: the medical examiner's identifications, which are made through fingerprints, DNA and consular records rather than self-report, produce the same national ordering, which is evidence the self-reported field is not badly wrong.

Assumption 2: "Unaccompanied child" means the same thing across the two CBP dataset vintages and across the label change. The demographic value changed from "UC / Single Minors" to "UAC" between published files. This document assumes the underlying operational definition did not change with the label. If it did, the FY2025 figures are not comparable with the earlier years. Partially mitigated: FY2022-FY2024 totals are identical in both vintages, so the two labels are certainly interchangeable for the overlapping years.

Assumption 3: The absence of a District of Arizona minor-trafficking prosecution reflects charging practice rather than an exhaustive search. Section 7.6 assesses it that way. DOJ press releases are not a complete record of prosecutions, and the search was conducted against press releases and a press-release API rather than against PACER or a court docket system. If such a prosecution exists and was simply not announced or not surfaced, Signal 5 weakens considerably.

Assumption 4: Guatemalan highland origin can be inferred for Guatemalan children encountered in Tucson Sector. It cannot, and Section 5.1.6 says so, but the document repeatedly places the two facts adjacent to each other, which invites the inference. The assumption being flagged is that the reader will not close that gap. If highland-origin children are in fact a small share of Guatemalan arrivals in this corridor, the entire Guatemala-to-Arizona thread is weaker than its component parts suggest.

Assumption 5: Nicaraguan and Colombian figures are absent from ORR's series because ORR does not disaggregate them, not because the underlying numbers are near zero. ORR breaks out four countries and an "Other" bucket that reached 19.4 percent of referrals by FY2024. This document assumes the bucketing is an editorial choice about presentation. It is possible, though unlikely, that country-level data is not collected in a usable form at all, which would matter for anyone trying to close this gap later.

Assumption 6: Figures reported by a government about its own conduct are usable when labeled. This document uses Mexican, Guatemalan, Colombian and Salvadoran official statistics throughout, while explicitly refusing to use Nicaraguan ones the same way. The line drawn is that the State Department has assessed only Nicaragua as non-compliant and as obscuring its own data. That line is defensible but it is a judgment, and the same report documents Mexican and Guatemalan data-collection failures, official complicity, and in Mexico's case describes the government's own anti-trafficking data as "unreliable."

11Analysis of Competing Hypotheses: contested points

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses guards against the specific failure of anchoring on the first plausible explanation and then collecting only confirming evidence. Each subsection states a contested question, lists competing hypotheses, weighs the evidence against each, and closes with an assessment. Where the evidence does not resolve the question, that is stated, and the absence of a claim in the sources is not treated as evidence for any hypothesis.

11.1 Why is there no documented trafficking route from these five origins into southern Arizona?

What the in-scope sourcing supports: Guatemalan and Mexican people, including tens of thousands of unaccompanied children per year, demonstrably arrive in Tucson Sector. Guatemalan highland families demonstrably finance departure through debt secured on their homes and land. Coercive detention for ransom demonstrably occurs in stash houses at the Phoenix end of this corridor. What is missing is a documented case or dataset connecting an origin-region recruitment to a southern Arizona exploitation outcome.

H1: The route exists and is documented, in sources not located this session. H2: The route exists and is not documented, because the conduct is charged and recorded as smuggling rather than trafficking, so it never enters trafficking datasets. H3: The route does not exist as a systematic pattern. The Arizona corridor is a smuggling corridor whose exploitation happens at the financial and custodial layers rather than through organised trafficking of victims recruited at origin.

Against H1: the searches that failed were not casual. InSight Crime's dedicated border-trafficking geography study was searched in full and mentions Chiapas once. The DOJ press-release API was queried directly rather than through the blocked public site. Three separate research passes plus a verification pass looked for such a case.

For H2: this is the strongest hypothesis on the evidence. Section 7.5 documents a case with hostage-holding, ransom demands and sexual assault of a detained woman charged as a smuggling conspiracy. Section 7.6 documents a case with the highland debt mechanism fully intact in which the jury acquitted on forced labour and convicted only on smuggling. If the archetypal conduct is being charged as smuggling in the District of Arizona and losing its trafficking counts at trial elsewhere, then a trafficking-shaped route would be invisible in trafficking-shaped records by construction.

For H3, partially: the InSight Crime finding that this border's human smuggling is run by independent clan networks rather than by a cartel, and that the cartel role is a transit tax, is consistent with a corridor that is commercial rather than predatory in its basic structure. Against H3: absence of documentation is not absence of conduct, and Sections 5.1.1 and 5.2.3 both establish that the counting apparatus in the origin countries is demonstrably incapable of seeing large parts of the phenomenon.

Further revised (open-items pass) on H2 specifically: H2 is now untested rather than supported. Arizona state data shows real trafficking offences in Cochise County that federal charging data does not reflect, which is consistent with H2. But no Arizona source publishes trafficking prosecutions by county, so the charging step H2 turns on cannot be observed at all (Section 7.9). H2 should be carried as an open hypothesis with a specified test, not as a partial explanation.

The original reasoning, retained because it is still the mechanism for the custodial layer: Two objections drove the revision. H2 explains why custodial coercion is not counted as trafficking; it does not by itself explain the absence of an origin-to-Arizona route, and the two cases offered for it are neither origin-recruitment cases nor Cochise or Santa Cruz exploitation cases. And the question as originally posed conflated a route through southern Arizona with a route to it: every documented endpoint in this document is Phoenix, Houston or New York, and Cochise and Santa Cruz are small, low-density jurisdictions in which this document documents no exploitation market at all. That is H3, and the document's own evidence fits it better.

The most probable reading is therefore that this is a transit corridor whose exploitation is realised elsewhere, with debt and custodial control as the operative mechanisms, and that the custodial layer is additionally hidden by being charged as smuggling. H1 cannot be excluded. An earlier draft also claimed that a trafficking-shaped route would be invisible in trafficking-shaped records "by construction," which is too strong: several trafficking datasets that are not charge-shaped exist and were not searched, including HHS Office on Trafficking in Persons eligibility determinations by state, National Human Trafficking Hotline state data, and Arizona state-court prosecutions under ARS 13-1307 and 13-1308. Those are the cheapest tests of H3 and are added to Section 13, alongside the PACER search, which tests H1 rather than H2.

11.2 Does the variation in child share of identified victims measure detection or prevalence?

What the in-scope sourcing supports: a seventeenfold spread across five neighbouring countries on one instrument in one year, with El Salvador at 88.9 percent and Colombia at 5.0 percent.

H1: The variation is real. Central American child trafficking genuinely runs at far higher rates than Colombian child trafficking. H2: The variation is an artefact of detection. Each state finds the victims its programmes are built to find. H3: The variation is an artefact of definition. The countries are counting different things under one word.

For H2: the mechanism evidence is direct and comes from three institutions, as set out in Signal 2. Guatemala's child-heavy numbers come substantially from worksite inspections; Colombia's own narrative admits to having no identification protocol and relying on self-identification.

For H3: this is stronger than it first appears and is under-weighted in most treatments. The State Department states in the Guatemala narrative that Guatemala's anti-trafficking law "did not consider the use of force, fraud, or coercion as an essential element of an adult trafficking offense" and "defined trafficking broadly to include all labor exploitation and illegal adoption without the purpose of exploitation," and that "some victims counted in these statistics may have been victims of crimes that did not constitute trafficking under international law." Colombia's Article 188A is separately described as "inconsistent with the definition of trafficking under international law." Two of the five countries are explicitly described by the same source as counting to a different definition than the international standard, in different directions.

Against H1: nothing rules it out, and this document cannot. Colombia's population is roughly three times Guatemala's, so if Colombian child trafficking ran at Guatemalan rates the identified 20 would represent a vanishing detection rate. That is possible; a country with no identification protocol could plausibly miss almost everything.

11.3 Did El Salvador's 2022 state of exception suppress trafficking or suppress its measurement?

What the in-scope sourcing supports: Salvadoran trafficking investigations fell from 38 in 2023 to 18 in 2024 and identified victims from 40 to 27. More than 75,000 people were arrested through December 2023 without trafficking screening. The State Department asserts both that the arrests "disabled criminal networks that fueled sex and labor trafficking" and, in the prior year's edition, that the State of Exception "directed law enforcement resources away from other crimes, including human trafficking."

H1: Suppression of the conduct. Gang territorial control ended, and with it a major driver of coercion. H2: Suppression of the measurement. Investigative capacity moved to mass gang processing. H3: Both, in unknown proportion.

The evidence does not separate them, and the single source that asserts both does not adjudicate between them. One asymmetry is worth noting: the same reports document that children compelled into criminality were arrested without screening, which means H1's mechanism (removing coercive networks) and H2's mechanism (not looking) were operating on the same population at the same time.

12Sources Cited

Numbered continuously. Every source below was retrieved and read during this session unless the entry says otherwise. No source is graded that was not fetched.

Primary/official: United States federal

Primary/official: county and state

Primary/official: Mexico

Primary/official: Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and international

Named investigative journalism

Sources located, evaluated and excluded from load-bearing use

Companion document

13Open items for a follow-up research pass

Resolved this session, originally flagged as failures and since closed:

• RESOLVED. ORR's country-of-origin series, which returns a caption and no table in the served HTML on both the live page and archived snapshots, is published as a Tableau dataset and was retrieved as a CSV. The full FY2019-FY2025 series is now in hand and independently confirms the figures the companion border brief cites. See source 5.
• RESOLVED. The Colombian Ministry of the Interior fifteen-year series, flagged in research as an unverifiable chart reading, is established by two independent arithmetic checks. See Section 6.1.1.
• RESOLVED, partially. The State Department country narratives, initially reached only through third-party mirrors, were retrieved directly from state.gov. What remains unresolved is the 2015 and 2016 Nicaragua narratives, whose tier placements are confirmed from the archived tier-placement tables but whose narrative text was not retrieved.

Still open:

• A PACER or court-docket search of District of Arizona filings under 18 U.S.C. 1589 and 1591. This is the single highest-value open item, because it directly tests H1 in Section 11.1. The search conducted this session was against DOJ press releases and DOJ's press-release API, which are announcements, not a docket. Specific next step: query the District of Arizona docket by statute for 2015-2025.
• Mexican primary sources for the Sonoran side of the corridor. No INM, Grupos Beta, Fiscalia General del Estado de Sonora, CNDH or Comision Nacional de Busqueda document was retrieved. The entire Mexican side of Section 7.7 rests on one investigative organisation. This is the largest single gap in the document. Specific next step: the Fiscalia de Sonora transparency portal and the CNDH recommendation series.
• SESNSP's victims open-data file, for a Chiapas trafficking series covering 2020-2025. The published link serves a Microsoft HTML shell rather than the data file to a non-browser client. Attempted twice across passes and failed both times. Specific next step: the federal ATDT open-data mirror, which the companion border brief used successfully for a different SESNSP dataset.
• The Chiapas cohabitacion forzada decree text in the Periodico Oficial del Estado. The legislature's bulletin omits article numbers and penalties, and the secondary reporting that supplies them is single-sourced. Specific next step: the Periodico Oficial for early February 2026.
• Costa Rica's DGME year-by-year Nicaraguan asylum series. migracion.go.cr returns HTTP 403 across three attempts and two tools. The UNHCR stock series is used instead, which is adequate but is a stock rather than a flow. Specific next step: UNHCR's country-level operational data portal, or a direct request.
• A published Cochise County Sheriff's Office statistical report on bailouts, pursuits and juvenile drivers. Every figure in circulation is a televised verbal claim by the Sheriff. It is possible no such published report exists, in which case that should be recorded as a finding rather than chased indefinitely. Specific next step: the county's document centre and a records request.
• El Faro and La Prensa Grafica. Both are on this project's accepted-source list and neither could be retrieved: El Faro sits behind bot protection, La Prensa Grafica returns 403 from this location. Their eastern El Salvador and Salvadoran education-statistics material is consequently absent. Specific next step: manual retrieval.
• The Salvadoran education-statistics blackout. The Ministry of Education is reported to have disabled the statistics section of its website in June 2023, which would explain a genuine hole in the record and would itself be a finding. The report of it could not be retrieved (see item 7). Specific next step: an archived snapshot of the ministry's statistics section.
• The three-way Colombian discrepancy for 2022, where the same ministry publishes 119 and 145 in two documents issued the same month and UNODC publishes 162. This document reports all three and reconciles none. Specific next step: the ministry's own methodological note, if one exists.
• Whether the ORR country-of-origin table was withdrawn from the page HTML deliberately or is a rendering failure. Now academic for data purposes since the CSV was recovered, but it bears on the companion document's citation practice. Specific next step: compare archived snapshots before and after mid-2025.

Closed by the open-items pass (items 11-15 below were opened by the verification pass and worked immediately afterward):

• RESOLVED, item 13, decisively. ORR publishes releases to sponsors by state and by county. Arizona absorbs about 1.24 percent of national placements; Pima County appears in the county series once in eight years at 65 children; Cochise and Santa Cruz never cross the fifty-child publication floor. Southern Arizona is a crossing point, not a destination. Folded into Section 7.8 and used to settle Section 11.1.
• RESOLVED, item 14, and it reversed a finding. No published Mexican tabulation crosses state of origin against point of repatriation, but UPMRIP's record-level microdata carries both variables plus US state of apprehension on the same record. The join is constructible from one official file. It documents a Chiapas-to-Nogales movement of unaccompanied minors at a few hundred a year, and shows it is a minority of the Chiapas flow. Folded into Section 4.7 and Signal 5. Working the same file also exposed the transposed panels in the UPMRIP graphic summary that had produced this document's original, wrong, Chiapas ranking (Section 4.1).
• RESOLVED, item 15. Honduras was run as a control on Signal 1 and the signal survived it. Section 3.7.
• RESOLVED, item 12, partially, and it produced a new finding. Arizona publishes trafficking offences by individual police agency, which the verification pass had assumed was unavailable. It shows a real Cochise County cluster of about 45 offences across 2022-2025, including eight forced-labour offences, and zero in Santa Cruz County in every year. Folded into Section 7.9. What remains genuinely unavailable is Arizona prosecution data by county, which no state source publishes; that half of the item stays open and is restated below.
• Item 11 remains open, and is restated below.

Still open. Items 13, 14 and 15 from the verification pass are closed above and are not restated here.

• RESOLVED. HHS publishes no trafficking victim data below the national level, in any of its series, despite collecting the victim's state on its own certification form. DOJ's Office for Victims of Crime publishes at state level but no finer, and its state dimension is undefined. The National Human Trafficking Hotline does publish Arizona figures, but it is operated under federal contract by an advocacy organisation and is excluded from load-bearing use here; federal award records confirm the operator. Folded into Section 7.9. What replaced this item is narrower and is listed below.
• Reconciling the state and federal offence counts for the same Arizona agencies. The state portal and the FBI's dataset disagree by a factor of three to five on the same agency-years (Section 7.9), and nothing located explains it. Specific next step: Arizona DPS, which administers the state UCR programme and holds the submission-level records behind both.
• Arizona prosecution data by county, from the state's computerised criminal history system. The offence half of this item is closed (Section 7.9). The state holds arrest-through-disposition records for every charge under the Arizona trafficking statutes and publishes none of it by county. Specific next step: a public records request to the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission, or docket work in Cochise County Superior Court. The Douglas Police forced-labour cluster of 2022, three offences cleared with seven arrests and no located press coverage, is the single most specific target for that docket search.

14Note on the eventual VoT World-Building Document

This document draws no line from any real event, place, organisation or person named in it to any character, faction or location in the Vampires of Tucson series. It names none of them, and it should not be read as implying that any fictional organisation operates the way any real one described here does.

That firewall is deliberate and it runs in one direction only. This brief was built to inform worldbuilding, not to be shaped by it. Several of its central findings are ones a writer might have preferred to come out differently: that no documented trafficking route connects these five origin points to southern Arizona; that Colombian and Nicaraguan minors are close to absent from this corridor on two independent instruments; that the eastern Salvadoran highlands do not exist as a unit in the public record at all; that the conduct in this corridor is charged as smuggling rather than trafficking almost without exception. Those are reported because they are what the record shows.

Where the World-Building Document draws on this material, that is a separate, later, clearly fictional-license step, and it should be treated as such rather than presented as continuous with the sourcing standard used here. A fictional route from Bogota to Cochise County is a legitimate thing for a novel to contain. A claim that such a route is documented would not be, and nothing in this document supports one.

This document is not authoritative outside that purpose. It is a research reference assembled from public sources over a single session, with its gaps, failures and open questions recorded in Sections 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13 rather than smoothed over. Several of its findings rest on a single source each and are named as such in Section 9. It should be read with those limits in view.