Record border crossings are a major issue in November’s US presidential election, with more migrants coming from around the world. Inside two new routes that take Indians and Africans via Central America.

When a Legend Airlines Airbus A 340 landed at San Salvador airport on July 15 after an 18-hour flight from the United Arab Emirates, its crew quickly realised something was wrong.

Salvadoran officials refused to connect the jet bridge to allow the roughly 300 passengers, all Indian nationals, to disembark, according to three former crew members on the flight who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Several passengers told the cabin crew they planned to travel onward to Mexico and cross the border there illegally into the US, one crew member said. Others said they were going on vacation to the Mexican border city of Tijuana, another crew member said.

Salvadorean officials were already on high alert when the flight landed. Several months earlier, US and Salvadoran authorities had noticed an unusual pattern of charter aircraft landing in El Salvador carrying primarily Indian nationals. The planes were arriving full and leaving empty, a US official said.

And some passengers claiming to be tourists brought only a backpack for weeks-long trips. US authorities later discovered that nearly all of the charter passengers disembarking in San Salvador had crossed the border into the US, the official said.

Such charter flights represent a new phase of illegal immigration to the US, five US officials said in interviews with Reuters. Increasingly, they said, migrants from outside Latin America are paying smuggling networks hefty fees for travel packages that can include airline tickets – on charter and commercial airlines – to fly to Central America and then bus rides and hotel stays en route to the US-Mexico border.

“You have certain charter transportation companies charging extortion-level prices to prey on and profit from vulnerable migrants.”

Eric Jacobstein, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere

“You have certain charter transportation companies charging extortion-level prices to prey on and profit from vulnerable migrants and facilitating irregular migration to the United States,” Eric Jacobstein, deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere, said.

Jacobstein declined to comment on Legend or identify specific companies.

Liliana Bakayoko, a Paris-based attorney representing Legend since December, said the Romanian charter airline has not been accused of wrongdoing by any authorities. She added that she was unaware of the July flight and said the airline was basically like a “taxi driver.”

The record number of migrant arrests at the southwest US border, which topped more than two million last fiscal year, has emerged as a major vulnerability for Democratic President Joe Biden in November’s presidential elections, with opinion polls showing more Americans trust Republican former President Donald Trump’s hardline approach to immigration.

On June 4, Biden – trailing in the polls in key battleground states – announced executive actions to deny access to asylum and quickly deport migrants or turn them back to Mexico if crossings surpass a certain threshold. It remains unclear how the policy will work in practice for migrants from faraway countries, which account for a growing share of illegal migration.

About 9 per cent of irregular crossings at the US border in the 2023 fiscal year involved migrants from outside Latin America, or about 188,000 people, according to US Department of Homeland Security data. A decade ago,  people from outside the Americas accounted for barely 1 per cent of irregular arrivals.

The Biden administration attributes the historic levels of migration to global economic and political instability. Trump has blamed the high border crossings on Biden’s policies.

Indian nationals were the largest single group from outside the Americas encountered at the border last year, comprising about 42,000 arrivals. Migrants from 15 West African countries accounted for another 39,700, with most from Senegal and Mauritania.

The Biden administration has been working with some regional governments as well as travel companies to curb the flow of migrants. In March, it began revoking US visas for owners and executives of charter airlines and other companies thought to be facilitating smuggling. The State Department’s Jacobstein declined to name individuals or companies affected or how many had faced restrictions. It was not possible to independently establish which companies had been targeted.

In May, the administration warned commercial airlines to be on the lookout for passengers who might be intending to migrate illegally to the US Apprehensions on the border in April fell 48 per cent from December, US government data show, which US officials attribute in part to tougher enforcement by Mexico.

El Salvador’s Vice President Felix Ulloa said in an interview that his government has “permanent, constant, and effective” collaboration with the US to fight irregular migration. The introduction of visa requirements and $1,000 transit fees on citizens of India and many African nations last October has “drastically reduced” the number of migrants transiting through San Salvador, he said.

But as some routes for illegal migration get squeezed, others open up.

Reuters and Columbia Journalism Investigations, the university’s postgraduate reporting programme, traced two new intercontinental migrant smuggling routes. The reporting for this story draws from previously unreported aviation data, border figures obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and close to 100 interviews with government officials, police, airline employees, smugglers, travel agents and migrants in nine countries.

The second, serving migrants from India, offers charter flights to Central America and overland transfers to the US border for between six million ($72,000) and eight million rupees ($96,000) per person – in many instances with full payment due after arrival in the US, according to Indian court documents and K.T. Kamariya, a deputy superintendent of police in the western Indian state of Gujarat investigating illegal migration.

The new routes via Central America avoid the visa requirements for migrants flying directly into Mexico. They also skip the dangerous northward trek across the jungle region between Colombia and Panama, known as the Darien Gap, that migrants face after arriving in some countries in South America with lax visa regimes.

Blas Nuñez-Neto, the US Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for Border and Immigration Policy, singled out Nicaragua as the new entry point for many migrants. President Daniel Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla and Cold War adversary of the United States, has been called out by Washington for authoritarianism following crackdowns on internal protests and opposition groups.

“Nicaragua has really, I think, unfortunately been weaponising these flows,” Nuñez-Neto said in an interview. “It’s difficult when you have a government in the region that has essentially thrown its doors open and allows anybody from anywhere in the world to fly directly in exchange for a cash payment.”

Nicaraguan Vice President Rosario Murillo, who manages communications for the government, did not respond to requests for comment.

The abortive Legend Airlines flight to El Salvador – which has not been previously reported – originated in Fujairah in the UAE, with a stopover in Paris, according to aviation data from global tracking service Flightradar24.

As the Airbus remained parked at the gate in San Salvador, crew members popped open a cockpit window to ferry in food and water. But no cleaners were allowed on board and a passenger complaining of kidney stones was not given access to medical care, according to aviation data and the three crew members.

Undated video footage shows Legend Airlines flight crew dropping trash bags onto the tarmac of El Salvador’s international airport. The aircraft was held for eight hours in July 2023 with no one allowed to disembark.

When the plane took off to return to the UAE about eight hours later, the pilot and attendants, who had joined the flight on a brief stopover in Paris some 19 hours earlier, were still on duty.

The passengers, including children, were on board for around two full days, the crew members said. Video footage shared shows flight staff dropping trash bags from the open cabin door onto the tarmac before they prepared for take-off.

The Romanian Civil  Aeronautical Authority said it was informed of the incident and about US concerns that “some Indian passengers travelling to Central America on such charter flights had plans to irregularly migrate to the United States.”

But it said: “Romanian CAA has no legal responsibility as regards the immigration laws applicable in the United States of America.”

“There are a lot of Indian people travelling everywhere,” Legend’s lawyer Bakayoko said. “So actually, it was not suspicious at all.”

She would not disclose who hired Legend to fly the charters.

The turned-around flight was the third Legend flight to San Salvador recorded in aviation data over a two-week period starting June 29.

Passengers aboard the first flight in June had been allowed to deplane but Salvadoran airport officials were suspicious, according to one cabin crew member on board.

“They were asking us a tonne of questions like, where were we from? Where is the company from? Where, when was the company founded?” the crew member said.

Legend registered in Romania in 2020, according to the Romanian government’s official database of companies. Legend’s owners – Ramin Youresh, a former executive of Afghanistan’s Kam Air, and Timor Shah Shahab – did not respond to requests for comment. Reuters was unable to find passengers who were on the flight.

Bakayoko would not comment on the company’s ownership structure. The Legend Airlines website shows an Airbus model used by the Romanian charter carrier. The Legend Airlines plane has capacity for around 300 passengers.

After the July flight was turned back from El Salvador, aviation data show no more flights to Central America until December 9, when a Legend Airbus landed in Managua. The data show four additional Legend flights heading to Managua over the next two weeks. By this point, the US considered Nicaragua “a major hub of extra-continental irregular migration,” Jacobstein said.

Some 879,000 passengers landed at Managua’s airport last year, according to data from Nicaragua’s Central Bank, a 56 per cent increase from 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic ground flights to a halt. Only 573,000 people flew out of the airport.

A senior US Customs and Border Protection official said that on some commercial airline routes into the region, more than 10 per cent of seats were filled by people intending to migrate to the US. The official declined to name specific companies operating these flights.

Nicaragua’s finance ministry recorded income of 1.9 billion Nicaraguan cordobas ($52 million) from landing and transit visa fees last year, less than 2 per cent of the government’s overall revenues, but more than five times the revenue from those same fees in 2019.

Aviation data shows Legend Airlines flew four charter flights from the United Arab Emirates to Nicaragua in December 2023. Sources: Flightradar24, Natural Earth

The Biden administration in May took steps to impose visa restrictions on 250 Nicaraguan officials and sanctions on government-affiliated companies over irregular migration and repressive policies. On the day sanctions were announced, Vice President Murillo did not address them directly, but denounced “traitors, cowards and sell outs who serve the Yankee imperialists” on local television.

Senegalese migrant Diop shot this undated video from the window of a bus traveling across Mexico as he made his way to the US border.

Late on the evening of Aug 28, Ismaila Diop, 30, a small-business owner from Senegal, landed at Managua aboard Avianca flight TA315. On arrival, Diop said he paid $160 for a tourist visa and got a taxi from the airport to the Honduran border, five hours away. His Nicaraguan driver confirmed the trip and the $50 fare.

Diop flew from Dakar to Rabat to Madrid, where he boarded an Avianca flight to Managua with layovers in Bogota and San Salvador, ticket stubs and photos show.

Engaging in gay sex is criminalized in Senegal. Diop, who identifies as bisexual, said he fled after a severe beating left him unable to work for close to a month. His account was confirmed by medical records, photos and asylum documents reviewed by Reuters and CJI.

“In Senegal, there are some people who don’t believe in that,” he said, referring to same-sex relationships. “Either you go to prison or you get killed.”

Diop said a gay friend in the US passed on the contact of a ticket broker in Morocco named Lisa Sow. Diop wired more than 2 million CFA francs ($3,200) to Sow, who told Reuters and CJI she used the money to buy Diop a plane ticket to Nicaragua. In addition to Diop, Reuters and CJI spoke to 11 other migrants from West African countries who said they flew  Avianca to Nicaragua before heading to the US border.

• A Reuters report