Smuggling ring carried on for more than 3 years.
AB Wire
A Guatemalan woman has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and a human smuggling charge for her role in a scheme to smuggle undocumented migrants from India into the United States.
On April 23, 2015, Rosa Astrid Umanzor-Lopez, 36, a citizen of Guatemala, was extradited to the United States from Guatemala to face one count of conspiracy to smuggle undocumented migrants into the United States for profit and five counts of human smuggling charges in the Southern District of Texas. The Justice Department released the news on Friday, November 20.
At the plea hearing and in related court documents, Umanzor-Lopez admitted that between January 2011 and her arrest in Guatemala on Feb. 4, 2014, she and other conspirators recruited individuals in India who were willing to pay large sums of money to be smuggled into the United States.
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. Many of these smuggling events involved illegal entry into the United States via the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen and Laredo, Texas.
To this date, three co-conspirators have been convicted and sentenced. Umanzor-Lopez’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 4, 2016 in Houston.