Last June, a routine vehicle inspection at a busy border crossing in San Ysidro, California, one of the world’s busiest ports of entry, revealed something that the agents had not anticipated. A cardboard box containing seven live Amazon parrots was placed on a car’s passenger floorboard. The driver, Juandaniel Medina, a 24-year-old Lindsay, California resident, admitted to federal agents that he had paid $700 in cash for the birds. He intended to breed them and possibly resell them. By his telling, it was fairly easy. Federal prosecutors had a different perspective.
In just a few weeks, Medina became the third person charged with smuggling exotic birds through ports of entry in Southern California. Within weeks of one another, three distinct arrests occurred along the same border, using the same pattern. It’s not a coincidence. That is more akin to a supply chain.
Drug tunnels, weapons seizures, and human smuggling are examples of more dramatic crimes that often overshadow the illegal bird trade. However, the illicit movement of exotic birds, in particular, is a persistent and remarkably sophisticated operation that operates through the same corridors as wildlife trafficking. Moving birds is less expensive than moving drugs. Until recently, the penalties were less severe. Additionally, the demand from pet markets, breeders, and collectors never truly decreased.
One of the most commonly confiscated species at the southern border is the Amazon parrot. Since CITES, the international treaty governing the trade in endangered wildlife, lists all thirty or so known species, most smugglers lack the permits and documentation needed for any cross-border movement.
The birds are indigenous to parts of South America, the West Indies, and Mexico. Technically, it is a federal offense that carries a twenty-year prison sentence to transport them across the border in a cardboard box without any documentation. It is another matter entirely whether courts consistently impose sentences that are even close to that ceiling.
Beyond the obvious cruelty, the public health aspect of this trade is especially concerning. The quarantine procedures that legally imported animals must follow are circumvented by illegally imported birds. Bird flu, also known as avian influenza, can spread through airborne particles, feathers, or droppings. It is more than just a wildlife crime when an infected bird passes through a port of entry unnoticed. It could be a biosecurity incident. Devastating flu outbreaks have already affected poultry operations in the United States. There is no theoretical link between the risk of disease and unscreened smuggled birds.
This issue is far more widespread than California. In Thailand, a critically endangered helmeted hornbill was allegedly moved from Southeast Asia to India inside an untagged luggage box, reportedly passing through airport screening before being intercepted. Rich collectors purchase luxury ornaments carved from the hornbill’s solid casque, the bony helmet-like structure above its beak. The portion of the bird that someone wishes to put on a shelf takes precedence over the bird itself. There’s something especially gloomy about that.
Back in San Diego, the six Red-Lored Amazon parrots identified among Medina’s seven birds were, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, alive and recovering in a quarantine facility after the seizure. Really, that’s a relief. However, it’s important to remember that it’s unclear how many similar attempts go unnoticed for every interception at San Ysidro or Otay Mesa. Border agents are scanning for fentanyl, for weapons, for people — a cardboard box on a floorboard doesn’t always rise to the top of the priority list.
The number of recent arrests indicates that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and Customs and Border Protection have increased their coordination on these cases. But the economics here are stubborn. In American pet markets, a parrot that costs several hundred dollars south of the border can fetch many times that amount. The incentive to try persists until that gap is closed, whether through enforcement, changing consumer behavior, or something else. There are seven birds in one box. It sounds minuscule. It isn’t.
