Guatemalan woman jailed for smuggling Indians into US

Washington: A 36-year-old Guatemalan woman has been sentenced to three years in prison by a US court for smuggling undocumented migrants from India into America.

Rosa Astrid Umanzor-Lopez, who was extradited to the US from Guatemala, pleaded guilty in a federal court in Houston to one count each of conspiracy to smuggle undocumented migrants into the US for profit and human smuggling in the Southern District of Texas, the Department of Justice said yesterday.

She is expected to face deportation following her release from prison.

During the hearing, Umanzor-Lopez said that between January 2011 and her arrest in Guatemala on February 4, 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 US by air travel, automobiles, water craft and foot, she said.

Umanzor-Lopez also said that many of these smuggling events involved illegal entry into the US via the US-Mexico border near McAllen and Laredo, Texas.

Three other members of the conspiracy have also been sentenced while a fourth one was at large.