By Chris Hippensteel | Times Union, Albany
Albany, N.Y. — The advertisements are basic, often just a few lines of text on a solid-color background. Their offer, spelled out in Spanish, is simple: “trips from Montreal to New York.”
Some of the ads pledge guarantees, promise references, or specify upcoming departure dates. Almost all of them include a number in WhatsApp — a cross-platform messaging service — and a request to contact the poster privately for more details.
The promotions, which appear in dozens of Spanish-language Facebook groups based in the Canadian cities of Montreal and Toronto, have a clear subtext: They’re from apparent human smugglers — members of a growing network that promises to help migrants slip into the U.S. through its border with Canada, often via New York’s rural North Country.
A Times Union review of hundreds of ads posted on Facebook and TikTok reveals that social media is helping fuel the lucrative and often exploitative industry, enabling smugglers to widely and anonymously pitch their services to migrants.
But what smugglers sell to desperate migrants as an easy journey — “100 percent guaranteed,” some ads boast — can have fatal outcomes. In recent years, entire families of migrants have drowned or frozen to death during attempted crossings in New York and elsewhere along the northern border.
In December, a migrant relying on the services of a smuggler who her husband found on TikTok was found dead in the Great Chazy River in Clinton County, just south of the U.S. border, according to federal prosecutors. Her body was discovered by a state environmental conservation officer.
References, guarantees, and family deals
Authorities who investigate human smuggling networks describe them as loosely organized, with multiple semi-independent operators working in tandem along each step of the journey. The groups that recruit migrants for smuggling trips may not be the same as those who drop them off at the border, or who…
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