Their plane landed, they got their stuff from baggage, their family picked them up, and they just didn't go home by the date on the paperwork.
So you're absolutely correct: making it harder to come here legally will just make people pay coyotes for border crossings.
This is what's so insane about America: we spend, with hidden costs, about 1.3 trillion a year on "defense" and protecting ourselves from imaginary enemies. Or worse, enemies we create or maintain just out of habit. Meanwhile, if we spent a fraction of that money on, say, improving infrastructure and opportunity in El Salvador -- where a little bit would go a very long way -- there would be fewer immigrants because there would be less reason to leave.
But Americans, in general, are terrified that someone, somewhere is getting something that they don't "deserve." We'll spend hundreds of billions on walls and Coast Guards and ICE raids over the course of a few years and Americans will wave flags and scream approval (and ten percent off for veterans and first responders). But the idea of spending maybe just a couple of billion in direct, middle-size grants and loans to a neighboring country? I'll be lucky if the FBI isn't already investigating me for charges of sedition and communism.
We've known for decades that, as dumb as it sounds, the best way out of extreme poverty is giving people money. No "micro loan" bullshit, no strings attached. It costs a lot more to do that in wealthier nations (where money is worth more), but some largesse in Central America would be the cheapest, fastest, AND most humane way of stopping illegal immigration.
(A similar phenomenon in the US can be found with homelessness. It costs society substantially less to just give homeless people homes. No strings, no sobriety requirement, no trainings. Just a stable home. It works incredibly well, as small experiments in places like Portland, LA, and SLC have shown, but is an incredibly hard sell: Americans don't want to give anything to the "undeserving," even if it's in our own economic benefit. We would rather spend three times as much on the homeless rather than give them homes, and spend literally a million times more on "security" rather than give security to other countries.
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