Disrupting the Route: Using Public Diplomacy to Confront Illegal Immigration
- Council of American Ambassadors
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
WILLIAM DOKURNO, M.A., B.A., is a U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Officer and a 2024-2025 Kathryn W. Davis Public Diplomacy Fellow. A former Presidential Management Fellow (PMF), he has supported rule of law, citizen security efforts, and strategic communications in multiple roles since 2010.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article belong to the author only and do not represent the views or policies of the U.S. government.
Introduction: Dawn on the Rio Grande
Before dawn on August 22, 2025, three Mexican nationals and one Guatemalan national illegally crossed the Rio Grande into the United States. They entered the thick cane and scrub brush of the riverbank near McAllen, Texas, where a motion-activated camera alerted nearby U.S. Border Patrol (USBP) agents. The camera and the agents represented two important national security tools. Border Patrol moved swiftly to detain the four while a third tool came into play; agents radioed a USBP public affairs officer to bring seven international journalists, all travelling as part of a U.S. Department of State public diplomacy effort, to report on the operation.[1] The journalists, from Mexico, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, spent four days observing and reporting on U.S. border operations in California and Texas.
The reporting tours are part of a public diplomacy strategy to address one of the U.S. government’s top foreign policy goals: ending illegal immigration to the United States. This strategy, which equips credible voices with accurate information while confronting malign messaging by bad actors in real time, serves as a useful case study in how public diplomacy can address acute foreign policy challenges. Public diplomacy has long been viewed as “soft power,” but recent efforts to combat illegal immigration show that public diplomacy can be deployed rapidly to influence the behavior of foreign publics and disrupt transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).
The Route: A Strategic Vulnerability
In 2023, more than half a million people crossed Panama’s notorious Darien region, including 328,650 Venezuelans, 57,250 Ecuadorians, and 46,422 Haitians fleeing violence and instability in their home countries.[2] The prevalence of third-country nationals in this migration flow, alongside the presence of 100,000 minors, indicate how much illegal immigration has become an international endeavor facilitated by human smugglers.
According to InSight Crime, Colombian paramilitaries monopolized the migrant route through the Darien as numbers increased after 2020, charging a 10 percent “tax” on individual smugglers. Meanwhile, in Mexico:
(P)owerful networks like the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels are making huge profits from taxing coyotes transporting migrants through areas they control and even installing their own human smuggling infrastructure . . . criminal groups are offering smuggling services at the same time they are carrying out mass kidnappings all over Mexico. Migrants are held for ransom multiple times along their journey from the southern border with Guatemala, throughout the interior, and to the northern border. [3]
Many of the more than half a million would-be illegal immigrants who crossed the Darien in 2023 became part of the 2,541,959 arrivals at the U.S. southern border in the same year.[4] Given that so many of these people report fleeing their countries of origin due to organized crime, the United States faces a situation in which TCOs are creating a new market for their services, and creating a new class of vulnerable people to exploit. This vicious cycle undermines the United States’ ability to secure its border and faithfully apply asylum laws, all while diversifying TCOs’ profits and expanding their reach throughout the hemisphere.
In the first six months of the second Trump administration, these numbers declined precipitously. Southwest border encounters fell from a peak of 301,981 in December 2023 to just above 12,000 in May 2025 and less than 10,000 in June. At the same time, Panamanian government figures show only 13 people crossed the Darien in May 2025, dropping to 10 in June.[5] In September, the Associated Press reported that more than 14,000 would-be illegal immigrants, mainly from Venezuela, have reversed course and turned south since President Trump took office.[6]
What changed? Certainly, the Trump administration’s increase in enforcement alongside key policy changes in the processing of asylum and humanitarian parole cases have had a transformative effect. Policy changes, however, only serve as a deterrent if they are effectively communicated to the public. In the case of illegal immigration, this communication occurs within a highly contested information environment, in which criminal organizations will use all possible means to preserve the income they draw from the migration route, lying to would-be illegal immigrants about current policy in order to maximize their illicit profits.
Stopping illegal immigration therefore requires more than higher visibility enforcement and public announcements of additional restrictions; it requires the sophisticated use of public diplomacy, engaging foreign audiences to build trust and to accurately communicate U.S. policy, all while countering adversaries committed to spreading false information.
Equipping Credible Voices
The border reporting tour that visited San Diego and McAllen in August 2025 was the eighth in a series that has brought 84 journalists to the United States since 2023. The tours, which are funded by a public diplomacy grant to San Diego-based journalism nonprofit InquireFirst, have enabled journalists from 11 countries to produce more than 1,000 stories and live reports from the U.S.-Mexico border. Previously, few overseas outlets offered immigration reporting with this depth and nuance.
For the journalists, the value of participating in the program is clear: exclusive access. InquireFirst worked with the State Department to secure the first-ever visits by foreign journalists to an ICE detention facility and to a federal immigration court in El Paso. Journalists have interviewed U.S. Army Stryker mobile infantry units on patrol in the newly announced National Defense Areas. They have witnessed both the repatriation on foot of illegal aliens from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua to Mexican authorities and repatriation flights from the El Paso airport. The images and on-the-record interviews provide crucial context and underscore the reality of U.S. border security in a way government pronouncements cannot do alone.
The independent journalism supported by these tours is particularly important in reaching audiences most cut off from accurate information, including those living under authoritarian regimes. Two journalists from Nicaragua, two from Cuba, and four from Venezuela have taken part in the tours. These countries remain some of the highest source countries for illegal immigration, even as their regimes have sharply curtailed free media and actively promulgate anti-U.S. propaganda.
Cultivating trusted voices is equally important in countries like Mexico, where press freedoms exist but armed gangs and drug cartels regularly intimidate journalists, discouraging accurate reporting about criminal activity while facilitating the spread of word-of-mouth narratives meant to generate income for the human smuggling business. In the digital age, these non-state actors are capable of manipulating media narratives just as effectively as the state-run propaganda apparatuses present in Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. But unlike those regimes, where the party line exists to stifle dissent and evade accountability, these criminal groups manipulate information solely to improve their bottom line, putting the lives of the region’s most vulnerable people at risk.
Confronting Malign Messaging
Information manipulation in the social media age goes far beyond traditional conceptions of propaganda and is increasingly used by non-state actors as well as hostile foreign powers. Digital communications platforms play a central role in promoting and facilitating illegal immigration. Human smugglers, long known as “coyotes” or “polleros” in Mexico, advertise heavily on social media, expanding their reach farther into Latin America, including to people affected by security crises in places like Ecuador, Haiti, and Venezuela, and who, in the past, were unlikely to have been able to contact a Mexican “coyote” directly.
Two U.S. government contractors conducted public research on open-source social media data and have provided a sense of the scale of the problem. From May to August 2025, Two Six Technologies (TST) conducted an in-depth “social listening” campaign to identify cartel-affiliated networks offering smuggling services into the United States. TST found 375 social media accounts using a complex set of emojis to reference specific illegal acts and direct prospective clients to WhatsApp chats for coordination. Dozens of these accounts explicitly claimed ties to major Mexican trafficking organizations, including the Sinaloa Cartel, Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), and the Cartel del Norte (CDN).[7]
Another contracted report focuses on the ways human smugglers use social media to attract clients, one of which is the use of manipulated images to convince prospective migrants that the journey is safer and success more achievable than it is. These accounts — primarily on TikTok, with Facebook a distant second — post images of human smugglers in remote desert areas, claiming to serve as “scouts” capable of safely directing crossings. In alleged first-person testimonials, people claim to have returned to the United States within days of deportation. Smugglers assert they have access to tunnels, drone-monitored land routes, or access to falsified entry documents.[8]
The vast majority of these social media claims are false, but they reinforce the illusion of “coordinated, low-risk crossings . . . targeting vulnerable audiences with promises of ‘strategic routes’.”[9] As the Trump administration has increased border enforcement and illegal crossings have plummeted, these accounts have turned to even more blatant falsehoods, using AI-generated images of the president to sow confusion about the actual policies in place on the border. Some posts claim the U.S. government is loosening restrictions, while others claim even harsher restrictions are on the way to generate a sense of urgency and to force those intending to cross the border illegally to pay for a secure crossing while they still can.
Real-time monitoring allows the U.S. government to actively counter these social media trends. The insights gleaned from social listening campaigns are used to generate social media content for official U.S. government accounts, including those of the U.S. embassies in high-migration countries and a centralized “Migración USA Oficial” account managed by the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (WHA). Direct acknowledgment of rumors popular on smuggler-linked accounts, especially TikTok accounts, and debunking them from official accounts signals to would-be illegal immigrants that the United States is monitoring this online traffic, is aware of the “strategic routes” promised by human smugglers, and has already shut them down.
The “Migración USA Oficial” social media accounts, available on Facebook, Instagram, and X, together with a dedicated channel on WhatsApp, the secure messaging app preferred by human smugglers for operational planning, have accrued almost 500,000 followers. When the Trump administration announced new border security measures in early 2025 and ended previous “legal pathways” such as Temporary Protected Status and the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), these accounts provided a direct connection to the audience the U.S. government most needed to reach: those already on the move, who were eagerly monitoring social media for any rumors about what was happening at the border.
These channels also publish testimonials from illegal immigrants, including those arrested and deported to their home countries; those who have taken advantage of “self-deportation” incentives such as the CBP Home mobile application; and those who never reached the United States. “Marvin,” for example, is a Nicaraguan national who did not make it to the United States and tells his story of being robbed and abandoned in Guatemala by the coyotes to whom he had given his life savings.[10] These social media campaigns turn human smugglers’ digital techniques against them, using the same platforms and first-person testimonials to generate doubt amongst would-be illegal immigrants. They also save lives by presenting compelling narratives about the deprivations and predations of the illegal immigration route to those who have made, or are considering making, life-altering decisions based on the self-serving narratives of ruthless criminal organizations.
Conclusion: Influence in a Contested World
Journalist Oscar Ramirez, in one of the stories generated from the August 2025 border tour, reports the following to his audience in Colombia: “Among those detained was a 15-year-old-minor, who was not just another victim of the exodus, but the group’s guide. The coyote was a teenager.” [11] Ramirez interviewed USBP agents who explained this is a common occurrence because smugglers know juveniles are subject to lighter penalties if caught. To have an internationally recognized journalist, a voice the overseas audience trusts, acknowledge the complexity of this challenge directly advances U.S. national security.
From the cultivation of trusted journalists to the real-time analysis of social media to identify and disrupt smuggler narratives, U.S. public diplomacy techniques are channeling all government efforts to secure the border directly into handheld devices from Mexico to Venezuela and beyond. Public diplomacy has always had the power to build connections between people around the world, but its tools also can be sharpened to achieve more immediate objectives like disrupting the invisible networks that pull desperate people into a dangerous, and ultimately futile, journey to the U.S. border. Like all public diplomacy, this effort seeks to make a genuine connection with people overseas, to communicate something important about the United States, and to encourage people toward behavior that advances U.S. interests.
In a 2014 paper published by the Atlantic Council, “Diplomacy for a Diffuse World,” Roxanne Cabral and other public diplomacy specialists argue that “Globalization, urbanization, and fragmentation are reshaping the world order by diffusing power throughout the global system. In order to remain relevant, American diplomacy will require a fundamental retooling that includes a more deliberate and serious engagement with novel forces and actors.”[12] Deploying public diplomacy to combat illegal immigration is one illustration of this fundamental retooling, as this campaign inverts the logic of soft power, which Joseph Nye defined as “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion.”[13] In the more diffused and fragmented world described by Cabral, adversarial forces are able to exploit the United States’ power of attraction for their own nefarious ends. Changing this dynamic without undermining the United States’ existing soft power — the country’s ability to promote itself as a partner of choice while encouraging people to imagine their futures elsewhere — requires more sophisticated thinking about public diplomacy and a deeper understanding of foreign populations’ attitudes and motivations.
For Cabral, public diplomacy’s strength lies in its ability to engage the individuals and networks that play an increasingly central role in this more diffuse world. “Individuals, increasingly empowered through technology, social media, wealth, and education, are broadcasting their views, rallying others to their causes, and better coordinating their efforts.”[14] This description accurately describes the human smugglers who saw a new business opportunity in the instability and mass emigrations of the 2010s and early 2020s, but it can just as accurately describe people who have suffered extreme hardship in a futile effort to reach the United States, as well as those committed to improving and building up their communities where they are. Empowering these voices at the expense of those who profit from instability has already had an effect at the U.S. border, an answer to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s call to make the State Department “a 21st century agency that can move . . . at the speed of relevance,”[15] while sketching the early outline of what maintaining U.S. influence in a more diffuse world might look like.
[2] “Transitó irregular por Darién 2023,” National Migration Service of Panama, Estadísticas – Migración Panamá.
[3] Parker Asmann and Henry Shuldiner, “GameChangers 2024: Crime Cashes in on Migration Boom,” InSight Crime, December 26, 2024.
[4] “Southwest Land Border Encounters,” U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
[5] “Migrant Crossings at the Darien Gap Continue to Plummet, Crossings Are Down 99.98%,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security press release, last updated August 5, 2025. Migrant Crossings at the Darien Gap Continue to Plummet, Crossings Are Down 99.98% | Homeland Security
[6] Megan Janetsky, “14,000 US-bound migrants have returned south since Trump border changes, UN says” Associated Press, September 2, 2025.
[7] “Pulse Report: Digital Smuggling Ecosystems,” prepared by Two Six Technologies, July 15, 2025.
[8] “Monthly Migrant Disinformation,” prepared by Partners of the Americas and Elevation, June 1-30, 2025.
[9] “Monthly Migrant Disinformation,” prepared by Partners of the Americas and Elevation, July 1-31, 2025.
[10] Embassy of the United States Managua Facebook page, “Marvin fue estafado por un coyote en Guatemala. Le robó $8,000 y lo dejó abandonado. Pasó hambre, miedo y días sin saber qué hacer.” August 13, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/embusanic/videos/1082622150170491/
[11] Oscar Ramirez, “El muro invisible: informe especial sobre odisea de los migrantes en el paso fronterizo de Texas” TV news report for NTN24, 3 min. 6 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V6kfT7FCEs
[12] Roxanne Cabral, Peter Engelke, Katherine Brown, and Anne Terman Wedner, “Diplomacy for a Diffuse World.” Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Atlantic Council Issue Brief, October 3, 2014. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/diplomacy-for-a-diffuse-world/
[13] Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (Public Affairs, 2004), x.
[14] Cabral, et al. 1
[15] “Secretary Marco Rubio Remarks to Employees,” January 21, 2025. https://www.state.gov/secretary-marco-rubio-remarks-to-employees
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WILLIAM DOKURNO is a Career Foreign Service Officer joining the Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (WHA/PDA) as a Public Diplomacy Desk Officer for Regional and Multilateral Affairs. William served as Assistant Cultural Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. He also served overseas as Vice Consul at the U.S. Consulate General in Matamoros, Mexico. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he supported foreign assistance programming in Central America, including three years on contract with the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, El Salvador.
William graduated with an M.A. in International Affairs from American University after obtaining a B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University. William is married with 3 children and enjoys cooking and studying history in his free time. He is a native of Madison, Connecticut.