(Image source from: alriyadhdaily.com)
An Indian origin man has pleaded guilty for assisting about 400 people from India to illegally enter the United States for profit, the U.S. Justice Department said.
The 60-year-old Yadvinder Singh Bhamba has pleaded guilty for his role in a dangerous transnational human trafficking conspiracy to one count of conspiracy and 15 counts of smuggling aliens to the U.S. for profit before U.S. Magistrate Judge Sivia Carreno-Coll of the District of Puerto Rico. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for April.
According to admissions in Bhamba’s plea agreement, since 2013, Bhamba had a leadership role in a human smuggling conspiracy operating out of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, India and elsewhere.
Between 2013 and 2015, Bhamba personally assisted around 400 to illegally enter the U.S. He also supervised and directed co-conspirators operating out of the Caribbean, Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said.
Individuals paid between USD 30,000 and USD 85,000 to be smuggled from India to the U.S. and from at least 2013 to 2016, human smuggling was Bhamba’s primary source of income, the Department said.
Bhamba was arrested in the Dominican Republic in August 2017 and later transferred to Puerto Rico. Bhamba and other members of the conspiracy made flight arrangements for people to travel from India through other countries including Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Iran, Panama, Venezuela, Belize, and Haiti - to the Dominican Republic, which was used as a staging area, where aliens were housed before being transported to the U.S.
The organization brought groups of aliens from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico or Florida by boat and from there they were picked up by co-conspirators and taken to stash houses until flights could be arranged to California, New York, or elsewhere in the U.S. Bhamba and others arranged for fraudulent identifications for some aliens to use in the U.S.
The Justice Department said that the boat trips organized by Bhamba and his co-conspirators were perilous. Boat captains used old, damaged, cracked, unlicensed, overcrowded, and unsafe boats to make the journey.
Now and then, the smugglers would take passports from the aliens during their journeys, physically assault them, and threaten their families to collect money. Bhamba used fraudulent Indian, Dominican, and Jamaican identifications for travel and financial transactions related to the conspiracy.
In some instances, he created and provided mendacious employment documents on behalf of the aliens to authorities to obtain foreign visas. Bhamba also instructed aliens traveling through foreign airports how to find, and in some instances, pay cash to, corrupt immigration officials, passport control officers, or airport employees in order to bypass regular immigration and passport control procedures.
-Sowmya Sangam
