Two stash houses on the outskirts of Houston were the excruciating endpoint of migrant journeys to the U.S. An international human smuggling operation threatened to kill, chop into pieces and disappear people held captive there if their families didn’t cough up additional fees.
The man who rented the stash houses and commanded the local operation, Jose “Viejon” Nuñez-Arellano, was sentenced to 5½ years in federal prison Wednesday in Houston. A federal prosecutor asked U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein to drop four remaining charges against him, as part of plea agreement.
The defendant apologized, through a translator, for his actions, saying he was trying to cover the cost of his brother’s treatment and hospitalization for an illness.
The judge noted that in addition to these charges, the 32-year-old had been deported five times in one year to his native Mexico, demonstrating he had little respect for the law. Nuñez-Arellano pleaded guilty in November to conspiring to transport and harbor between 25 and 99 migrants during a three-month stretch in the fall of 2018.
Four co-defendants who previously pleaded guilty to aiding in the scheme were sentenced to shorter terms. Evidence in the case indicated that scouts, drivers, brush guides and money handlers were also involved.
The case came to light when the sister of one of the smuggled immigrants contacted law enforcement to report she’d been told by a caller in Houston to send $7,000 if she wanted to see her brother alive. If she told police about the caller’s threat, the man said, she’d be killed.
Ilsia Mazariegos-Salazar eventually told Homeland Security investigators she had already paid human traffickers in Guatemala $8,500 to shuttle her brother Migdael across two international borders.
She told them a man calling himself El Sobrino, the Nephew, had threatened to have Migdael “killed, chopped up into pieces and disappeared” if she didn’t come up with the money.
Federal officials then staged a hand-off of money for the brother’s freedom, which led to the arrest of the defendants. A relative of the crew’s leader, Huber Nuñez-Arellano, remains a fugitive with two counts pending of conspiracy to transport and harbor migrants as part of the scheme.
In the year this case came to light prosecutors filed 407 human smuggling cases in the region and roughly 2,800 cases in the preceding past five years, court records show.
This story is developing. Check back for updates.
gabrielle.banks@chron.com
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Leader sentenced for operation that extorted families of migrants held captive in Houston - Houston Chronicle
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