Feds bust elaborate human smuggling operation stretching from Honduras to Boston

(The Center Square) – Two recent cases prosecuted by the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas highlight how business owners made millions of dollars orchestrating elaborate human smuggling and stash house operations in south Texas.

In one case, a Mexican couple illegally living in Mission, Texas, used trucking and car dealership businesses as fronts to smuggle 2,500 people through the southwest border and launder millions of dollars in proceeds. Their “LEMA smuggling operation” stretched from Honduras to Texas to Boston, investigators found. Smugglers used tractor trailers, 18-wheelers and commercial flights to transport illegal foreign nationals, threatened them with firearms, and held them in stash houses against their will, investigators found.

The Mexican couple pleaded guilty in March to money laundering charges and “conspiracy to transport illegal aliens,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas Alamdar Hamdani said. When sentencing them, Chief U.S. District Judge Randy Crane said, “this is one of the largest alien smuggling take downs this district has seen in recent history.”

After being sentenced to 240 months in federal prison, they were “expected to face removal proceedings following their sentences,” Hamdani said.

LEMA smuggling operators lived a lavish lifestyle and referred to their victims as “‘products’ and abandoned some in the harsh conditions of the brush without food or water, resulting in the death of one” and those held in stash houses begged “their families to pay smugglers for their release,” investigators found. The couple also “proudly boasted about using their trucking business as a front, which not only facilitated the alien smuggling but also enabled the laundering of $2.9 million,” according to investigators.

The Center Square exclusively reported on Texas Operation Lone Star efforts to crack down on human smugglers using 18-wheelers and tractor trailers. OLS sheriffs also warned a trucker convoy claiming to raise funds for “border awareness” to not come to Texas when such trucks are being used for border smuggling operations.

The case “started as a money laundering investigation at a business” and investigators “followed the evidence to uncover a much larger conspiracy involving human smuggling,” Aaron Tapp, FBI Special Agent in Charge leading the investigation, said. Multiple federal and local law enforcement agencies were involved.

The LEMA smuggling organization wasn’t limited to Mission, Texas. “The conspiracy involved a sophisticated network of alien smugglers across the United States utilizing commercial airplanes, tractor-trailers and various other smuggling methods,” the investigation, which began in November 2019 under the Trump administration, found.

Nearly 2,500 foreign nationals were smuggled into the U.S. through “southwest border regions” and transported “further into the northern parts of the United States. The network spanned from Honduras to as far north as Boston, Massachusetts, with a heavy emphasis on smuggling Brazilian nationals,” investigators found.

Multiple search warrants at the couple’s residence and “purported car dealership they operated as a front business” resulted in authorities seizing over $1.5 million in cash and $2.69 million in assets, jewelry, several luxury vehicles and real property.

In a second case, four men in Mission, Texas, including one Mexican national, were sentenced to roughly three to over a dozen years in prison for smuggling 3,000 people in addition to other charges involving firearms. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport or harbor illegal foreign nationals in the U.S. One had a prior smuggling conviction; another admitted to being a felon in possession of a firearm.

They led a smuggling ring that moved thousands of illegal “aliens in groups of at least 70 by placing them inside containers and drilling them closed from the outside, loading them onto trailers and transporting them on the highway in the hot Texas climate,” investigators found. They also used multiple firearms to threaten their captives and disregarded their safety in “inhumane” conditions, Crane said.

The investigation, launched in April 2022, found that a ringleader hired “hot shot” drivers to transport containers, wooden boxes, sheds and hay bales on flat-bed trailers north from the Texas-Mexico border to conceal dozens of illegal foreign nationals being smuggled inside. Driving north, stopping at the Falfurrias Border Patrol checkpoint in Brooks County, Texas, Border Patrol agents intercepted some of them.

As The Center Square has reported , drivers often claim they don’t know dozens of people are hiding in their vehicles when caught. After identifying a pattern, investigators learned that the smugglers were using a ranch property in Mission to build compartments, load those they were smuggling inside, and used firearms to threaten them. Search warrants also led to seizing firearms on the ranch property.

“These smugglers cramped dozens of migrants into wooden crates and then bolted those crates shut, leaving the migrants to the mercy of South Texas’s brutal heat. Such conduct was not just predatory; it also demonstrated a total disregard for the value of human life,” Hamdani said.

While Hamdani claims the smugglers received harsh sentences, if they had been found guilty in state court, they could have received multiple life sentences. Last year, the Texas legislature increased the penalties for smuggling of persons and operating stash houses in Texas to a minimum of 10 and five years in prison, respectively, per count depending on the offense.