A Guatemalan woman arrested in 2014 was sentenced to three years in a U.S. federal prison for helping run a human smuggling ring that brought illegal aliens from India to the United States via the Southwest U.S. border.
Rosa Astrid Umanzor-Lopez, 36, pled guilty last November to recruiting individuals from India and smuggling them into the United States between January of 2011 and her arrest on Feb 4, 2014. According to a press release from the Department of Justice, Umanzor-Lopez and her four cohorts charged their human cargo “large sums of money.” Three others have also been convicted and sentenced for their part in the smuggling operation, while a fourth remains at large.
From the DoJ press release:
For their smuggling operations, Umanzor-Lopez and her co-conspirators used a network of facilitators to transport groups of undocumented migrants from India through South America and Central America and then into the United States by air travel, automobiles, water craft and foot, she admitted. Umanzor-Lopez also admitted that many of these smuggling events involved illegal entry into the United States via the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen and Laredo, Texas.
The DoJ did not give any details as to the persons Umanzor-Lopez managed to get into the country in the three-year time frame, nor did they specify how many people the group managed to smuggle into the United States before being arrested.
While many of the illegal aliens streaming across the Southwest U.S. border are from Central America, some are from other nations -- obviously including India. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed eight Syrians were apprehended crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
In its latest report, U.S. Customs and Border Protection states that border agents apprehended 93,778 persons from countries other than Mexico in the six months between Oct. 1 and March 31.
CBP also reports border agents have apprehended a total of 21,521 unaccompanied minors and 28,878 family units from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in the same time frame, accounting for 50,399 of the nearly 94,000 total apprehensions.
This leaves a total of 43,379 single adults from countries other than Mexico -- including, but not limited to, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras -- who have come across the border unlawfully in the past six reportable months.