Two men have been charged in a human smuggling case that the U.S. Department of Justice has called a “dangerous scheme” to traffic people from British Columbia into the United States via freight trains.
Jesus Ortiz-Plata, 45, of Oregon and 35-year-old Juan Pablo Cuellar Medina of Washington were arrested last week and face charges of human smuggling. Three other non-citizens were also arrested after allegedly being smuggled out of B.C. into the U.S.
Washington State prosecutor Tessa Gorman called it “an extremely dangerous smuggling scheme,” according to the Vancouver Sun.
The two are also suspected to have been involved in a case last August that saw 29 people rescued from a freight car filled with plastic pellets.
According to an affidavit filed by a U.S. Homeland Security officer, 28 of those rescued were Mexican nationals and one was Colombian.
They were discovered after border officers noticed anomalies while conducting an X-ray scan of one of the freight cars.
Charges were filed in Seattle on Friday and court documents reveal that Ortiz-Plata and Medina first came under investigation last July.
Border patrol agents acquired a phone number associated with “numerous human smuggling events” in Blaine, Wash. dating back to September 2022.
The two men were arrested after being tracked by law enforcement agents to an apartment complex in Everett, Wash., a location where the pair allegedly picked up non-citizens who unlawfully entered into the U.S.
After being detained, agents questioned the three unnamed men who were found travelling with Ortiz-Plata and Medina, the affidavit says.
Two of the other three men arrested with them were brothers from Honduras who had flown into Vancouver and had previously been working in Calgary for several months.
One brother confessed to paying $2,000 each to the alleged smugglers, while another said they paid $4,000 to each “unknown smuggler” before being picked up by a “Hispanic male” and brought to a train station where they met a third man.
Agents ultimately discovered the third man was originally from India after interviewing him in Hindi and that he had flown into Toronto 15 days before the attempted border crossing.
He told authorities that he became connected to the smugglers through someone in his home village in India.
“The Hispanic male told them to climb on board the train and hide in the natural voids within the railcars of the freight train,” reads the affidavit.
After several hours on the train, the three men were picked up by another unknown suspect who would take them to an apartment.
“Being locked in a freight train car is dangerous — there is no control over the heat, cold or ventilation, and people can be injured or killed by shifting freight,” said Gorman in a news release.
Both men are now facing up to 10 years in prison and a fine of nearly $350,000.
