Two Colombian nationals are facing extradition to the U.S. for their alleged role in a human smuggling operation that resulted in the disappearance at sea of dozens of migrants.
The two men are accused to have been part of a smuggling operation known as La Agencia, or The Agency, which ferried migrants from San Andrés Island, a tourist destination off Colombia’s Caribbean coast, to Nicaragua, where they then continued on to the United States.
According to the federal indictment unsealed Monday in the Western District Court of Texas, Hernando Manuel de la Cruz Rivera Orjuela, 52, alias “Patron” (“Boss”), and Luis Enrique Linero, 40, were involved in a conspiracy that included putting some 40 migrants — a group of mostly Venezuelans that included children — on a vessel that disappeared in October 2023. The boat and its occupants have not been found.
Rivera and Linero were arrested by Colombian authorities in coordination with the U.S. as part of Joint Task Force Alpha.
“As this indictment makes clear, Joint Task Force Alpha continues to be one of the Justice Department’s most effective tools for countering insidious human smuggling operations that fuel suffering and exploitation,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.
Joint Task Force Alpha was started in 2021 with a focus on migrant smuggling through Central America and Mexico. According to the Justice Department, it has resulted in over 345 arrests and 290 convictions.
In June, the task force was expanded to include Colombia and Panama in an effort to crack down on migration through the Darien Gap, a jungle pass that, while infamous for its treacherous conditions, has seen a major rise in migrant traffic in recent years. The arrests of Rivera and Linero are the first to result from this expansion.
The route offered and managed by La Agencia looks to bypass the dangerous trek through the Darien jungle, offering instead a safe journey to Central America by boat.
Adam Isacson, who leads the Washington Office on Latin America’s defense oversight program, said the arrests could deliver a significant blow to networks using this specific route.
“They could really reduce a lot of the movement over the maritime space to Nicaragua just by taking down a few key nodes in the network,” Isacson said.
Joint Task Force Alpha focuses on migrant smuggling cases that involve aggravating factors such as systematic violence or exploitation toward migrants, or operations that result in mass casualty events, such as the disappearance of the boat off the Colombian coast or a semi-trailer that crashed in Southern Mexico in 2021, killing 50 migrants.
Mandatory minimum sentences for migrant smuggling as a stand-alone offense are relatively low compared to similar offenses like drug smuggling, but these aggravating factors allow prosecutors to seek harsher punishments. Rivera and Linero, for example, have been charged with a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
“These alleged conspirators orchestrated a complex human smuggling operation that recklessly risked human lives for ill-gotten gain,” said Katrina W. Berger, executive associate director of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a component of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that led the investigation into the smuggling network.
While Joint Task Force Alpha was started by the Biden administration, analysts believe it is likely to continue or even expand under the incoming Trump administration.
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