Two Colombian nationals are dealing with extradition to the U.S. for his or her alleged position in a human smuggling operation that resulted within the disappearance at sea of dozens of migrants.
The two males are accused to have been a part of a smuggling operation generally known as La Agencia, or The Agency, which ferried migrants from San Andrés Island, a vacationer vacation spot off Colombia’s Caribbean coast, to Nicaragua, the place they then continued on to the United States.
According to the federal indictment unsealed Monday within the Western District Court of Texas, Hernando Manuel de la Cruz Rivera Orjuela, 52, alias “Patron” (“Boss”), and Luis Enrique Linero, 40, have been concerned in a conspiracy that included placing some 40 migrants — a bunch of principally Venezuelans that included kids — on a vessel that disappeared in October 2023. The boat and its occupants haven’t been discovered.
Rivera and Linero have been arrested by Colombian authorities in coordination with the U.S. as a part of Joint Task Force Alpha.
“As this indictment makes clear, Joint Task Force Alpha continues to be one of many Justice Department’s best instruments for countering insidious human smuggling operations that gas struggling and exploitation,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland mentioned in an announcement.
Joint Task Force Alpha was began in 2021 with a give attention to migrant smuggling via Central America and Mexico. According to the Justice Department, it has resulted in over 345 arrests and 290 convictions.
In June, the duty pressure was expanded to incorporate Colombia and Panama in an effort to crack down on migration via the Darien Gap, a jungle move that, whereas notorious for its treacherous situations, has seen a serious rise in migrant visitors in recent times. The arrests of Rivera and Linero are the primary to consequence from this growth.
The route supplied and managed by La Agencia seems to bypass the damaging trek via the Darien jungle, providing as an alternative a secure journey to Central America by boat.
Adam Isacson, who leads the Washington Office on Latin America’s protection oversight program, mentioned the arrests might ship a major blow to networks utilizing this particular route.
“They might actually scale back plenty of the motion over the maritime area to Nicaragua simply by taking down a couple of key nodes within the community,” Isacson mentioned.
Joint Task Force Alpha focuses on migrant smuggling circumstances that contain aggravating elements equivalent to systematic violence or exploitation towards migrants, or operations that lead to mass casualty occasions, such because the disappearance of the boat off the Colombian coast or a semi-trailer that crashed in Southern Mexico in 2021, killing 50 migrants.
Mandatory minimal sentences for migrant smuggling as a stand-alone offense are comparatively low in comparison with comparable offenses like drug smuggling, however these aggravating elements enable prosecutors to hunt harsher punishments. Rivera and Linero, for instance, have been charged with a felony that carries a most sentence of 20 years.
“These alleged conspirators orchestrated a fancy human smuggling operation that recklessly risked human lives for ill-gotten achieve,” mentioned Katrina W. Berger, government affiliate director of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a element of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that led the investigation into the smuggling community.
While Joint Task Force Alpha was began by the Biden administration, analysts imagine it’s prone to proceed and even increase below the incoming Trump administration.