Intro/Outro (00:01):
Welcome to dial P for procurement, a show focused on today’s biggest spin supplier and contract management related business opportunities. Dial P investigates, the nuanced and constantly evolving boundary of the procurement supply chain divide with a broadcast of engaged executives, providers, and thought leaders give us an hour and we’ll provide you with a new perspective on supply chain value. And now it’s time to dial P for procurement.
Kelly Barner (00:31):
Think about the headlines that most of us have been focused on over the last couple of years. Supply chain disruptions, supply chain crisis. My personal favorite I think is snarled supply chains. We hear about issues at ports. We hear about issues at border crossings. We hear about issues with labor union negotiations. Can you fill your heart rate going up with all this I can. And that’s just from the business impact of goods and material slow downs. These disruptions are understandably the worst at transfer points and border crossings. The sheer scale of the traffic is unbelievable. There are 3.5 million tractor trailers on us highways every single day. And in addition to the volume of traffic, there is a legitimate need for inspections. Most often for drugs, for human trafficking or smuggling and strained customs and border patrol agents are doing the best they can in an attempt to inspect as many vehicles as possible for companies and for logistics providers.
Kelly Barner (01:45):
These are costly and disruptive times to work in, but what about the human cost of all these disruptions? Now, before I go any further, let me introduce myself. I’m Kelly Barner. I’m the owner of buyer’s meaning point. I’m a partner at art of procurement, and I am your host for dial P here on supply chain. Now I’m constantly scanning the news for stories that I think are interesting and bring a bit of complexity so that we can discuss them. Ultimately, the goal is having all of us presented with an opportunity to learn. I share a new podcast episode or interview every Thursday. So be on the lookout for future episodes. And don’t forget to check out past episodes of dial P as well. Now, before I get back to today’s topic, I have a quick favor to ask if you like what you hear today.
Kelly Barner (02:40):
I didn’t say agree with. I said like, if I make you think, please engage, share a comment, share the episode, forward it to someone else that you think should listen, give us a couple of stars in a review. That’s how we’re going to broaden the number of people we can reach and bring into the conversation. All right. Now, where was I? If you joined supply chain now, art of procurement and buyers meeting point for the 2022 supply chain and procurement awards, you know, that we partnered with a group called hope for justice. They are an amazing global nonprofit dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern slavery. Now they define human trafficking as the recruitment movement receipt or harboring of people by such means as threat force fraud, coercion, abduction, or deception, always with the intention of exploitation assessing the full scope of human trafficking is difficult because so many cases go undetected.
Kelly Barner (03:47):
Now we selected hope for justice as our philanthropy partner, partially because it’s an important cause. But also because it’s one that we think supply chain and procurement professionals can affect. If you work in supply chain, you have ways of monitoring the movement of goods and materials through different types of carriers and channels and the busier. These are the more likely there is that some amount of exploitation is going on in those same places. Procurement has a role to play here too. We’re always looking at risk and we have responsibility for ensuring that more than one tier of suppliers are not found on human rights, abuse watch lists. We can screen new providers as they bid and watch the companies that we contract with to make sure they don’t show up as offenders. Now, this all sounds great, but it still seems abstract. What are you supposed to do?
Kelly Barner (04:49):
Let’s take a recent news story that makes human trafficking and procurement and supply chain’s role in the fight against it. Very real. On June 27th, an abandoned tractor trailer was found near Lackland air force base in San Antonio, Texas. The truck had mechanical problems and it had been abandoned by its driver. A local worker heard cries of distress and opened the trailer door. What he found would go on to be declared the deadliest example of migrant smuggling in recorded history. And at the heart of this story are some very concrete supply chain issues. As of July 11th, when I’m recording this podcast, 48 people were found deceased on the scene. 16 others were taken to local hospitals, 12 of them were adults and four were minors. Five of those 16 later passed away from their condition. All of the migrants were stricken with heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
Kelly Barner (05:52):
And those who succumbed to their condition actually passed of heat stress. The truck was a refrigerated unit, but it was not working. There was no water on board and there are reports that the migrants had been sprinkled with steak seasoning to conceal them from dogs. If the truck were pulled over and searched. In addition to that, powdered chicken bullion was spread on the floor of the trailer. Making matters worse. June of 2022 was the warmest month on record in San Antonio. The victims in this case were from Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and El Salvador, making this a truly international incident. Now four men have been charged in connection with the case. All of them charged federally home Romero Zamarano Jr. Was the driver. According to the us attorney’s office in the Western district of Texas, he has been charged with one count of alien smuggling resulting in death.
Kelly Barner (06:58):
Christian Martinez has been charged with one count of conspiracy to transport, illegal aliens resulting in death. And both of those men face life in prison or the death penalty. If they are found guilty, there were two other men involved in this case. Allegedly of course, Juan Claudia Del Luna Mendez is a Mexican citizen as is Juan Francisco Del Luna. Bill BA both of them had overstay tourist visas in the us, and may have both been charged with one count of possession of a weapon by an alien illegally in the us and face up to 10 years in prison. When the police approached them to ask them about their involvement in the tractor trailer incident, they had an illegal weapon on them at that point. And that is the reason for that charge. Now I’m no lawyer and of course any, and all of these charges may be amended or expanded over time.
Kelly Barner (07:56):
The investigation is ongoing and is being led by us immigrations and customs enforcement, as well as by Homeland security and the San Antonio police department. This story is a horribly sad and needless loss of life, but how are supply chain professionals or procurement professionals supposed to do something to prevent this tragedy from happening? My answer is surprisingly straightforward. It all comes down to the equipment. Now we have conversations all the time. What’s the true difference between procurement and supply chain. In this case, we’re talking pure logistics. The use of tractor trailers for human smuggling is increasing and the border patrol knows this. They’re using x-ray equipment to look for human shapes inside of trailers, and they use dogs to search without needing to enter. That’s the rationale for the steak seasoning and the chicken Bullon powder. But remember the volume of vehicles is absolutely overwhelming.
Kelly Barner (09:07):
According to the us transportation department, 7 million vehicle crossings took place at the us Mexico border in 2021 smugglers charged between nine and $13,000 per person. They agree to get into the country. And so the sad reality is that the use of tractor trailers is about achieving economies of scale. In many cases, 30% of the money collected by smugglers is theirs to keep, but the vast majority, 70% of it goes to cartels as a payout. And so the more people and therefore the more profit they can jam into one of these trailers, the more money they can make per risky crossing the San Antonio truck crossed the border without issue. And the wall street journal has reported that the migrants were expected to get across the border potentially or allegedly led by the Del Lunas before meeting up with the tractor trailer in Laredo, Texas, to help them move further into the country.
Kelly Barner (10:19):
Now, if the challenge associated with the volume of traffic, wasn’t enough, there’s another issue that I think all of us need to learn more about. It’s called cloning multiple news articles, especially the ones that came out more than a couple of days after the truck was found noted that the equipment had been cloned. So what exactly does that mean and how big of a problem is it for information about that? I went to the federal motor carrier safety administration, or FM C S a and I looked at department of transportation regulations. So the issue of cloning all comes down to us D O T numbers, unlike VINs or vehicle identification numbers, which each truck and passenger car also has U S D O T numbers are unique to the carrier. So if one carrier or company operates multiple vehicles, they will share that D O T number it’s required for interstate trucks that meet a list of different combinations of requirements.
Kelly Barner (11:28):
The guidelines generally include trucks that weigh 10,000 pounds or more, and then vehicles that are transporting eight or more passengers who are paying for transportation or 15 or more passengers who are not paying for transportation. Now, in addition to being required for vehicles that cross state borders 39, us states also require vehicles to have U S D O T numbers for intrastate operation as well. The display of this information is also regulated. You must have the name of the business entity and the D O T number on both doors of the cab or power unit. The minimum character height is two inches. And the objective is that it should be clearly seen from 50 feet away. So try to put yourself at one of those border crossings and think about the visual of all these vehicles flowing through from 50 feet away. If you can read the carrier name and the U S D O T number in thought, you should be able to look that vehicle up without actually individually stopping it, furthering this goal, the lettering must be bold and in a contrasting color from the power unit’s paint or units paint, this is required of all 3.5 million rigs that run on us highways every day.
Kelly Barner (12:56):
The practice of cloning takes the U S D O T number and the carrier name typically legitimately paired and puts them on a truck that is not legitimately associated with that business. And in fact, it may have a separate registered owner, as we saw in San Antonio, the name and D O T number on the San Antonio truck, legally belonged to Betten court trucking and harvesting based in Alamo, Texas, that company had absolutely no idea anything was wrong until the authorities contacted them to inquire about where their truck had been. It had been parked for days, and it was red like the migrant smuggling truck, but ironically its refrigeration did work displaying the carrier name and U S D O T number on the door made it look legally registered. So that is the practice of cloning. And in this case, they cloned both the U S D O T and Texas D O T numbers.
Kelly Barner (14:10):
The license plate on the truck used for smuggling was registered to the du Luna’s home address. And that’s where the police caught up with them and found them in possession of that illegal weapon. So 75 cases of this cloning practice are caught every year, but remember there’s 3.5 million rigs. So 75, just logically thinking that has to be a tiny fraction of the actual instances of cloning that are happening. Now, if you know me, you know, I love my research and this was an interesting case because I was shocked that for the number of articles that mentioned cloning, very few of them went on to explain it in any detail. And I wasn’t actually able to find much in the way of content that explained the problems associated with the practice or the attempts to solve it beyond this particular story. Now, because I don’t give up easily, I really dug and I did come across a police issued instructional guide, intended to train officers to handle and look out for cloned vehicles.
Kelly Barner (15:24):
There was a note on the training guide that even though I found it on the internet, it was not intended for public distribution. So I’m not going to be any more specific than that, about which agency or location offered it up. But I will share the information that was contained inside, according to that guide, cosmetically cloned. So think a wrap, a general appearance, cosmetically cloned vehicles are not illegal. That’s considered trademark violation or a civil infraction. So someone might take a vehicle and wrap it to make it look like a FedEx delivery van or a us postal service vehicle. If officers suspect that a vehicle has been cloned, whether cosmetically or because of the number that is justification to stop it, but it is not automatic justification to search for that. The officer’s need multiple red flag factors. And given the complexity of figuring out that a vehicle has been cloned either in terms of cosmetics or the U S D O T number.
Kelly Barner (16:36):
Now you start to get a sense of why there’s only 75 officially reported cases of this every year. One last point, if you think you’re exempt from this because you don’t own and operate a tractor trailer, think again, car VINs are actually cloned more often than tractor trailer, U S D O T. Numbers are cloned. According to John, as Spara the CEO of the Texas trucking association, 73% of cloning victims are passenger vehicles. So I take you now back to the backups and congestion at the border. What can we learn from this more importantly, what can we do? This is definitely one of those cases of things that are simple, not being real and things that are real, not being simple. We know bad actors are taking advantage of the congestion to smuggle drugs and people across the border. And that’s a circular issue. Much of that congestion exists because the search attempts that are being used to thwart these legal activities take time and they take people.
Kelly Barner (17:51):
So there’s a huge flow of traffic. And as with everywhere else, there are worker shortages. The fact that U S D O T numbers have to be so clearly displayed makes them an easy target for theft. I wouldn’t drive around town with my social security number spray painted on the side of my car. And yet it’s regulation that the carrier name and the U S D O T number for that carrier have to be easily displayed in terms of what we can do. I think the greatest issue is the fact that there’s not currently more information available about the problem and practice of cloning. We should be asking our third party logistics providers and freight suppliers. What do they know? What are they doing to protect themselves against this type of cloning risk? If you have those conversations and learn something, share it with the rest of the community, having a dearth of information is never the best way to solve a problem.
Kelly Barner (18:55):
Now that’s my point of view. Education provides progress and answers and hopefully solutions, but it’s a complex issue. And so I also ask you not to just listen to this conversation. I want you to be part of it. This is how we insert ourselves as a solution. Let me know what you think. Reach out directly on LinkedIn. Share this episode with your network. Let’s get a conversation going. That’s how as procurement and supply chain professionals, we are going to take action and join organizations like hope for justice to try and bring the global problem of human trafficking and modern slavery to an end. Thank you for joining me for this episode of dial P until next time I’m Kelly Barner. I’m glad as always to be your host, and I appreciate your time and interest. Have a great rest of your day.
Intro/Outro (19:57):
Thank you for joining us for this episode of dial P four procurement, and for being an active part of the supply chain now community, please check out all of our shows and events@supplychainnow.com. Make sure you follow dial P four procurement on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to catch all the latest programming details. We’ll see you soon for the next episode of dial P for procurement.
