'Hit the gas!' I barked at my translator behind the wheel of our tiny rental car.
'Let's get the f*** out of here!'
We tore off – and left the reflections of two cartel men shrinking in our rearview mirror.
Reporting on the ground in northern Mexico comes with certain risks and chief among them is unexpectedly coming face-to-face with gunmen.
I'd come to La Linea Cartel territory, a vast high desert region west of Ciudad Juárez, to document a part of the migrant crisis that few ever see: the smuggling of dangerous criminals into America.
Juárez is a crime-ravaged city at the junction of the New Mexico, Texas and Mexico borders.
Over the past three years, tens of thousands of migrants have traveled here to willingly turn themselves over to U.S. Border Patrol agents outside of El Paso, Texas.
These migrants hope to join the many millions, who've been processed and released into the U.S. on the sole condition that they eventually produce a legitimate reason for being in the country.
But a few miles west of Juárez, it's a different story.
Here, migrants – at great expense and considerable risk – do everything they can to avoid American law enforcement. That's because some have criminal records that would necessitate their instant removal from the U.S.
. . .
[Read the rest at the Daily Mail.]