Carrizo Springs, Texas — From the street, the little brown house was ordinary but pleasant.A yellow school bus and a red toy truck hung on the chain-link fence.The front of the house had a large Texas lone star.But in the backyard was a gutted trailer that a prosecutor would later describe as a "house of horrors."It was discovered one day in 2014, when a man called from Maryland to report that his stepfather, Moises Ferrera, a migrant from Honduras, was being held there and tortured by the traffickers who had brought him into the United States.His captors wanted more money, the stepson said, hitting Ferrera's hands with a hammer with the threat of continuing until the family sent him away.When federal and sheriff's agents arrived at the home, they discovered that Ferrera was not the only victim.Smugglers had held hundreds of migrants there for ransom, his investigation found.They had mutilated limbs and raped women."What happened there is something out of science fiction, out of a horror movie, something we just don't see in America," the prosecutor, Matthew Watters, told a jury when the smugglers were brought to trial.Organized crime cartels, he said, had "brought this horror across the border."But although it was the first such case, it would not be the last.Migrant smuggling on the southern border of the United States has evolved over the past 10 years from a loose network of independent coyotes to a multimillion-dollar international business controlled by organized crime, including some of Mexico's most violent drug cartels.The American leader of a smuggling ring with ties to a Mexican cartel owned the small brown house.Prosecutors said he ordered the migrants to be tortured in a mobile home behind the house.(Christopher Lee/NYT)Last month, the death in San Antonio of 53 migrants crammed into the back of an air-conditioned tractor-trailer — the country's deadliest human smuggling incident to date — happened at a time when border restrictions of the US, exacerbated by a pandemic health directive, have encouraged more and more migrants to turn to smugglers.While migrants have traditionally faced kidnapping and extortion in Mexican border cities, such incidents have been on the rise on the US side, according to federal authorities.Last year, more than 5,000 people were arrested and charged with human trafficking, an increase from 2,762 in 2014.In the past year, federal agents have conducted almost daily raids on safe houses containing dozens of migrants.Title 42, the public health order introduced by the Trump administration early in the coronavirus pandemic, has authorized the immediate removal of those caught crossing the border illegally, allowing migrants to repeatedly cross with hoping to succeed at some point.This has led to a significant increase in encounters with migrants at the border—1.7 million in fiscal year 2021—and booming business for smugglers.On a single day in March near El Paso, agents rescued 34 migrants from two unventilated shipping containers.The following month, 24 people being held against their will were found in a safe house.The dense brush in South Texas hides migrants and smugglers trying to elude US authorities."You could hide a million elephants in here," said Jerry Martinez of the Dimmit County Sheriff's Office.(Christopher Lee/NYT)There have been so many high-speed chases involving law enforcement officers and drug dealers in Uvalde, Texas, lately — there were 50 of them in the city between February and May — that some school employees said they hadn't taken the shelter-in-place order seriously. during the mass shooting in May because too many lockdowns had been ordered in the past when smugglers rushed through the streets.Teofilo Valencia, whose 17- and 19-year-old sons died in the San Antonio tragedy, said he had used the family home as collateral for a loan to pay the traffickers $10,000 for the transfer of each of the boys.Fees typically range from $4,000 for migrants from Latin America to $20,000 for those who must be transported from Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a smuggling expert at George Mason University. .For years, the independent coyotes paid the cartels for the authorization to transport the migrants they controlled at the border, and the criminal organizations limited themselves to their traditional line of business—drug trafficking—which was much more profitable.In 2019 that began to change, Patrick Lechleinter, the acting deputy director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told Congress last year.The sheer number of people seeking to cross has made migrant smuggling an irresistible source of money for some cartels, he said.The startups have teams that specialize in logistics, transportation, surveillance, safe houses and accounting, all in support of an industry whose dividends have jumped from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion today, according to Research from Homeland Security, the federal agency that investigates these cases.Rigs carrying migrants mingle with the 20,000 trucks that travel daily on I-35 to and from Laredo, the nation's busiest land port.(Christopher Lee/NYT)Migrants are transported by plane, bus and private vehicles.In some border areas, such as in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, smugglers put colored bands on migrants' wrists to indicate who they belong to and what kind of service they receive.“They organize merchandise in ways that were unimaginable five or 10 years ago,” Correa-Cabrera said.Recently, groups of Central American families who crossed the Rio Grande into La Joya, Texas, wore blue armbands with a dolphin, the Gulf Cartel logo, and the word "renditions," a sign that they planned to turn themselves over to the US authorities and seek asylum.Once they crossed the river they were no longer cartel business.In the past, migrants arriving in Laredo, Texas, would wade through the river on their own and get lost in a thick urban landscape.Now, according to interviews with migrants and security agency officials, it is impossible to cross without paying a coyote linked to the Northeast Cartel, a splinter faction of the Zetas.Teenagers are often recruited by smugglers to transport new arrivals to safe houses in working-class neighborhoods.After they round up several dozen people, they put the migrants into trucks parked in Laredo's large warehouse district near Killam Industrial Boulevard."Drivers are recruited from bars, strip clubs, truck stops," said Timothy Tubbs, who was deputy special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for Laredo until he retired in January.Timothy Tubbs, a retired agent with Homeland Security Investigations who said drivers for smuggling are routinely recruited at bars, strip joints and truck stops, stands by the Rio Grande River in Laredo, Texas, July 18, 2022. With smuggling migrants across the border now a billion-dollar business, organized crime has moved in, with cruel and violent results.(Christopher Lee/The New York Times) (Christopher Lee/NYT)Rigs carrying migrants mingle with the 20,000 trucks that travel daily on I-35 to and from Laredo, the nation's busiest land port.Border Patrol agents stationed at checkpoints inspect only a fraction of all vehicles to ensure traffic continues to flow.The tractor-trailer discovered on June 27 with its tragic load had passed a checkpoint about 30 miles north of Laredo without raising suspicion.By the time it stopped three hours later on a road outside of San Antonio, most of the 64 occupants had already died.The driver, Homero Zamorano Jr., one of two men charged Thursday in connection with the tragedy, said he was unaware that the air conditioning system had failed.The 2014 safe house incident in Texas led to the arrest of the perpetrators and a subsequent trial that provided an unusually vivid picture of the brutal tactics of human smuggling operations.While extortion and kidnapping do happen with some frequency, such cooperating witness trials are relatively rare, federal law enforcement officials say.Fearing deportation, undocumented relatives of migrants rarely call authorities.The case in question began in the thick brush region of Carrizo Springs, about 12 kilometers from the Rio Grande, a popular transit point for people trying to avoid detection.“You could hide a million elephants here, this brush is so thick,” said Dimmit County Sheriff's Office Capt. Jerry Martinez.Ferrera, a 54-year-old torture victim, first immigrated to the United States in 1993, heading to construction sites in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where she earned more than 10 times what she earned in Honduras. .She returned home a few years later.Moises Ferrera lost mobility in his right hand after the smugglers hit it over and over again with a hammer.'I came here in search of a better life, to help my family,' he said in his court statement.'That's how my hand was.This hand is useless to work now'.(Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/NYT)“Coyote was not needed in those days,” he said in an interview from his home in Maryland."I went back and forth a couple of times."When he left in early 2014, Ferrara knew that he would have to hire a coyote to cross the border.In Piedras Negras, Mexico, a man promised to take him to Houston.Ferrera's stepson, Mario Pena, said he sent her $1,500 in payment.Upon arriving in Texas, Ferrera and several other immigrants were taken to the trailer in Carrizo Springs.Shortly after, Ferrera's stepson received a call demanding another $3,500.He replied that he no longer had any money.The calls became frequent and threatening, Pena recalled in an interview.The dealers made him listen to the sound of his stepfather's screams and moans as the hammer collided with his fingers.Pena managed to send $2,000 via Western Union, he said, but when the captors realized it was Sunday and they couldn't collect the money, they stepped up their attacks.Law enforcement officers found Ferrera in the trailer “in serious, severely damaged physically, with a lot of blood on him, lying on a couch” in the living room, according to testimony from one of the officers, Jonathan Bonds.Another migrant, who was in his underwear, writhed in pain, his injured hand held high, in the front room.In the later one, the agents found a naked woman, also a migrant, who had just been raped by a trafficker who came out of the bathroom naked.The owner of the house, Eduardo Rocha Sr., known as Lalo, was identified as the leader of the smuggling group and arrested along with several others, including his son Eduardo Rocha Jr. The youngest Rocha testified that his cell was affiliated with the Zetas cartel and that in two years had channeled hundreds of migrants to the United States and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.The oldest of the Rocha was sentenced to life in prison.His son and the man who had carried out most of the physical abuse received sentences of 15 and 20 years.Ferrera testified at his trial.As a crime victim who had collaborated with law enforcement, he was allowed to stay in the United States.But his new life came at a price, which he upheld in front of the jury as he raised his right arm with limp fingers."That's how my hand looked," he said.—Susan C. Beachy assisted with this investigation.