Due to their suspected involvement in a human smuggling scheme that led to the disappearance of several migrants at sea, two Colombian citizens are being considered for extradition to the United States.
Allegedly, the two men were involved in a smuggling enterprise called La Agencia, or The Agency, which transported migrants from San Andrs Island, a popular tourist destination off the Caribbean coast of Colombia, to Nicaragua, from where they proceeded to the United States.
The federal indictment, which was unsealed Monday in the Western District Court of Texas, claims that Hernando Manuel de la Cruz Rivera Orjuela, 52, also known as Patron (Boss), and Luis Enrique Linero, 40, conspired to place about 40 migrants, primarily Venezuelans, including children, on a ship that vanished in October 2023. There is no sign of the boat or its occupants.
As part of Joint Task Force Alpha, Colombian officials arrested Rivera and Linero in cooperation with the United States.
According to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s statement, “Joint Task Force Alpha remains one of the Justice Department’s most effective tools for combating pernicious human smuggling operations that fuel suffering and exploitation, as this indictment makes clear.”
In 2021, Joint Task Force Alpha was established to combat the smuggling of migrants across Mexico and Central America. The Justice Department reports that it has led to 290 convictions and more than 345 arrests.
In an attempt to combat migration through the Darien Gap, a jungle route that has experienced a significant increase in migrant traffic in recent years despite its notoriously dangerous circumstances, the task force was extended to encompass Colombia and Panama in June. Rivera and Linero are the first people arrested as a result of this expansion.
Bypassing the perilous walk through the Darien jungle, the route provided and overseen by La Agencia offers a secure boat ride to Central America.
The arrests might deal a serious damage to networks that use this particular path, according to Adam Isaacson, head of the defense oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America.
“Just by taking down a few key nodes in the network, they could really reduce a lot of the movement over the maritime space to Nicaragua,” Isaacson said.
Joint Task Force Alpha focuses on migrant smuggling cases that involve aggravating factors like systematic violence or exploitation of migrants, or operations that lead to mass casualty events like the 2021 crash of a semi-trailer in Southern Mexico that killed 50 migrants or the disappearance of a boat off the coast of Colombia.
These aggravating circumstances enable prosecutors to seek heavier punishments, even though mandatory minimum terms for migrant smuggling as a stand-alone offense are relatively low when compared to similar felonies like narcotics smuggling. For instance, Rivera and Linero are accused with a felony that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
According to Katrina W. Berger, executive associate director of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that oversaw the investigation into the smuggling network, these alleged conspirators planned a sophisticated human smuggling operation that heedlessly put human lives at risk for ill-gotten gain.
Although the Biden administration established Joint Task Force Alpha, experts predict that it would likely continue or even grow under the upcoming Trump government.
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