The Trump administration handed down a slate of charges and arrests against members of an alleged migrant smuggling ring who helped facilitate the years-long southern border crisis.
A total of 14 individuals were charged with conspiracy to transport, harbor and bring in hundreds of illegal migrants into the United States, the Department of Justice announced Monday. Members of the smuggling operation allegedly transported illegal migrants from Central and South America between November 2023 and February 2025 in exchange for money.
The smugglers would allegedly pick illegal migrants up near the U.S. side of the southern border and drive them to Albuquerque, New Mexico and elsewhere from various stash houses, according to the unsealed indictment. During the smuggling events, the individuals would repeatedly evade Border Patrol and Texas Department of Public Safety agents by driving away quickly and, in some instances, instructing illegal migrants to jump out of moving cars.
When a migrant died in August from heat exhaustion, one of the conspirators allegedly instructed the group of illegal migrants to leave the body behind in the New Mexico desert.
“Today’s indictment alleges that the defendants engaged in a sophisticated conspiracy to smuggle aliens into and throughout the United States at great danger to the aliens, resulting in the death of one person,” stated Supervisory Official Antoinette Bacon of the DOJ’s Criminal Division. “The Justice Department worked with our partners at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to dismantle an alien smuggling organization based in Mexico that has allegedly smuggled hundreds of illegal aliens, including unaccompanied children, through New Mexico and South Texas.”
The smugglers made thousands of dollars in proceeds by charging hundreds from each illegal migrant, according to court documents. Of the 14 men and women who were charged, eight have already been taken into custody.
The DOJ on Monday also announced the extradition of Raul Saucedo-Huipio, a Mexicali-based ringleader of an international migrant smuggling operation.
Saucedo-Huipio allegedly helped smuggle foreign nationals into the U.S. from Latin America and across the world, including Yemeni, Bangladeshi, Egyptian, Pakistani nationals, according to the DOJ. The ringleader and his co-conspirators allegedly charged as much as tens of thousands of dollars from illegal migrants to help them enter the country, even providing them with equipment such as ladders to climb over border barriers.
The administration on Thursday also celebrated a bilateral operation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement that resulted in the dismantling of a cartel-linked migrant smuggling ring based in Juarez, Mexico. Many members of the organization are current and former members of various Mexican cartel syndicates, demonstrating the close connection between the illicit drug trade and the migrant smuggling industry.
“On her first day in office, the Attorney General [Pam Bondi] directed the Department of Justice to prioritize efforts to achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations, and empowered Joint Task Force Alpha (JTFA) to increase their contributions to this fight,” Supervisory Official Antoinette T. Bacon of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division stated.
The arrests and high-profile extradition are the latest in President Donald Trump’s work to crack down on illegal immigration emanating from the southern border, a phenomenon largely enabled by smugglers who provide resources and assistance to illegal migrants. Border-related criminal enterprises are wildly lucrative, with cartels pulling in roughly $14 million per day by smuggling migrants, illicit drugs and other contraband across the border, according to some estimates.
After then-president Joe Biden entered office and dismantled the enforcement apparatus built during Trump’s first term, the U.S.-Mexico border quickly turned chaotic as illegal migrants arrived en masse, with fiscal years 2023 and 2024 being the worst and second-worst years, respectively, for migrant encounters in U.S. history. Cartels made eye-popping amounts of cash in the process, churning in an estimated revenue of $4 billion to $12 billion annually by sneaking illegal migrants and deadly drugs into the country.
Since his return to office, Trump has issued a slate of executive orders aimed controlling the crisis, such as declaring a national emergency that enabled troops to be deployed to the border and designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorists. The administration successfully coerced the Mexican government to deploy 10,000 of its own national guard troops to the southern border and the State Department has since officially designated the cartels as terrorists, allowing more resources to obliterate their operations.
Since the implementation of these orders, the U.S.-Mexico has turned incredibly quiet, with Border Patrol encounters dropping to levels not experienced in several decades.
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