Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
If you want to know how bad the illegal-alien smuggling problem is, look beyond the southwest border of the United States across the world, then into heartland America.
An Indian woman living in Texas was sentenced to prison Wednesday for smuggling illegals from India, while on Monday border agents nailed a alien-smuggling suspect, himself an illegal alien, in Ohio just south of Detroit, Michigan.
Border Patrol Agents also collared a previously deported felon and another smuggler who was hauling illegals through Yuma Border Sector’s Dome Valley.
They also stopped the importation of nearly $5 million in illegal drugs.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
Indian Smuggler Sentenced
Federal prosecutors in New York announced that bail bondsman Hema Patel, “of McAllen, Texas,” landed a three-year prison sentence pursuant to her guilty plea, on June 7, to “alien smuggling for financial gain by fraudulently bonding illegal aliens from immigration custody and causing their release into the United States.”
From April 2015 through October 2016, Patel and her “co-conspirators executed a scheme to bring undocumented aliens, primarily from India, into the United States in exchange for ‘fees’ ranging from approximately $28,000 to $60,000 per person,” prosecutors reported.
Patel and her gang paid coyotes to bring the illegals in through Canada or across the Mexican border.
When the aliens were stopped and taken into custody by law enforcement officers at the U.S. border, they called Patel. Patel then prepared fraudulent bond documents on their behalf, including documents listing fictitious names and addresses indicating where and with whom the aliens would reside while their cases were pending. These documents and the bail bonds were then filed in United States Immigration Courts, and the aliens were released into the community. Patel used two of her hotels in Texas to temporarily harbor some of the aliens.
On Nov. 17, 2016, law enforcement agents executed a search warrant at Patel’s Texas residence, seizing thousands of fraudulent alien bonding records.
Patel’s co-defendant pleaded guilty in the same scheme in November 2017 and was sentenced last year.
Aside from serving three years behind bars, she will “forfeit her Texas residence, two hotels, $7.2 million in bail bonds, $400,000 in cash and 11 gold bars, among other assets.”
Opposite End
Meanwhile, far from the hot sands of the border with Mexico, border agents from the Sandusky Bay Station in Ohio just off Lake Erie stopped a car in Stony Brook, Ohio. Seven illegals were packed inside. “Each of the seven passengers admitted to being in the United States illegally and that they did not have any documents allowing them to be or remain in the United States,” Customs and Border Protection reported.
One of the border-jumping miscreants, a Salvadoran, had a bundle of cash, and “during processing at the Border Patrol station in Port Clinton he admitted that, after illegally crossing into the U.S., he had been paid by a subject in Houston, TX to transport people who had recently crossed the border to various locations in the Midwest and Northeast.”
The Salvadoran smuggling suspect, CPB reported, “has prior convictions for reckless driving and driving while intoxicated.” Immigration authorities deported him in May 2012.
More than 2,000 miles away in Dome Valley on Sunday and Tuesday, CBP reported, agents arrested nine illegals, one of them a previously-deported felon, along with a smuggler who is a U.S. citizen.
The first arrests were Sunday near dawn, when agents at the Yuma Sector’s Wellton Station “observed a white 2005 Toyota Sequoia passing through Dome Valley. Upon seeing the agents, the vehicle sped off.”
Agents found the car and the footprints of five illegals leading away. They quickly caught the bunch, all of whom are Mexicans.
About the same time a day later, agents at the same station tried to stop a white 2004 Ford F-150 also heading through Dome Valley, CBP reported. The truck took off, and led agents on a chase before pulling over to let four passengers escape on foot. Border agents caught them all. One was a previously-deported illegal with a conviction for felony possession of a firearm.
Agents charged the U.S. citizen who drove the truck with human smuggling.
Drugs Seized
Border agents have also intercepted three drug shipments worth about $4.6 million, CBP reported.
On Tuesday at Laredo Port of Entry, they stopped $2.23 million of methamphetamine. The 41-bundle haul weighed about 79 pounds.
Also on Tuesday, agents at Laredo stopped 96-pound, $170,00 shipment of marijuana that smugglers brought across the Rio Grande.
Last Friday, they stopped a $2.2 million shipment of meth, 111 pounds in 24 packages, at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge.
Photo: Bill Oxford/E+/Getty Images
