Guatemala woman pleads guilty to smuggling Indians into US

Washington: A Guatemalan woman on Friday pleaded guilty to the charges of smuggling undocumented Indians into the US after collecting huge amount of money from them.

Rosa Astrid Umanzor-Lopez, 36, a citizen of Guatemala, was extradited to the United States from Guatemala in April this year. Her sentencing is scheduled for March next year.

At the plea hearing and in related court documents, Umanzor-Lopez admitted that between January 2011 and her arrest in Guatemala on February 2014, she and other conspirators recruited individuals in India who were willing to pay large sums of money to be smuggled into the US.

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 US-Mexico border near McAllen and Laredo, Texas, federal prosecutors alleged.

So far, three co-conspirators have been convicted and sentenced.