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A woman in Texas who hatched a scheme to dupe border officials into thinking she was a lawyer for migrants has been sentenced to 14 years in prison after investigators discovered she was orchestrating a human smuggling operation, Department of Justice officials announced Monday.

Kimberly Cruz, posing as an immigration attorney, brought nearly 100 Mexican migrants through a border crossing in Eagle Pass, Texas. They paid her a total of nearly $275,000 for legal services to cross the border and connect with family; the 35-year-old was also creating fraudulent documents she used to fool border officials, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas.

Cruz’s scheme of misrepresenting herself to migrants and passing phony documents to U.S. border agents is unusual in the world of human trafficking at the border, where typically "coyotes" smuggle people in by skirting legal points of entry or stowed away in a truck. A coyote is a nickname for someone who clandestinely smuggles people across the border for money.

Cruz, of San Antonio, was sentenced after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud. She was ordered to forfeit $271,00 and pay $9,900 in restitution.

“The glaring thought that crossed my mind was, ‘How can someone get away with this,’” Charles Kerby, the assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Eagle Pass, told USA TODAY. “But, ultimately, it does come down to the desperation of the individuals she’s going into contract with. They’ll believe it’s true because their desperation overwhelms that doubt.”

“Have no doubt,” said Special Agent in Charge Craig Larrabee for Homeland Security Investigations San Antonio. “Individuals who impersonate a legal advocate to exploit others for their own personal gain will be held accountable for their crimes.”

Cruz’s attorney did not return requests for comment.

A con at the border

Cruz orchestrated her scheme for most of 2019, according to court documents. 

It consisted of Cruz collecting identity documents, including birth certificates, passports and I.D. cards, from Mexican nationals who believed she was an attorney. She paired the ID photo with valid immigration paperwork to which she had access and sent the completed documents to border officials, according to her plea agreement. 

The documents technically allowed the migrants to enter the country for only 24 to 48 hours for immigration appointments. But instead of taking them to get biometrics - such as fingerprints - taken for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she was taking them to their families, dropping them off at mall parking lots or taking them to an airport or bus station where they could travel to another destination in the U.S., according to the plea agreement. 

Her scheme ran afoul when a border agent talked to the people she was helping cross and learned they thought they were going somewhere other than where their paperwork claimed they were going, the guilty plea says. She admitted the scheme to Homeland Security Investigations officials who questioned her. 

Kerby, who supervised the investigation, recalled border agents already felt something was off.

She styled herself as a legal advocate in emails to the assistant director of the Eagle Pass border crossing but let officers at the border believe she was an attorney, an official for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services or with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to court filings.

“She was all over the place as to who she was,” Kerby said.

Cruz managed to be so convincing because she previously worked at a law firm in an administrative capacity, according to Kerby.

“She learned the lingo, she learned how the system worked and then she broke off on her own,” he said. “She used those contacts built working in an official capacity to branch off into an unofficial capacity and it worked for her.”

Kerby didn’t have an immediate answer on what happened to the migrants involved. Court documents note that Cruz left her victims with family inside the U.S.

He said they could have avoided the scheme by checking for Cruz with the American Bar Association.

An unusual scheme

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is a border scholar at George Mason University who has studied smuggling networks for a decade.

She said more and more people are falling for smugglers or seeking them out of desperation.

“It seems that ‘business’ is going really well, because with all of the restrictions, with all of this propaganda, with this election coming, people think they cannot do it by themselves,” she said. “Smugglers tell them . . . if you don’t do it now, you might not be able to do it anytime.” 

It’s unclear how many people are smuggled across the border because it’s such a clandestine process, but data shows the number of people charged with offenses related to human smuggling has risen significantly.

These charges include smuggling, transporting or harboring an unlawful alien; trafficking in documents related to citizenship; and fraudulently acquiring documents relating to citizenship.

In the 2023 fiscal year, 5,237 people were charged with some or all of those crimes, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, up nearly 9% over 2022 and up 15% from 2019. Immigration fell during the pandemic.

Cruz’s scheme, where migrants got an official stamp of approval at the border crossing, was atypical, Correa-Cabrera said. Usually, coyotes lead people between ports of entry or stow them away in cars or 18-wheelers. 

But it bears all the usual hallmarks of opportunists aiming “to take advantage of migrants who are vulnerable and uninformed,” she said.

By transporting migrants across the border, smugglers appear successful to clients, the Virginia-based professor said. But in the end, the migrants are not being helped in any meaningful way, because in all likelihood they will end up being undocumented immigrants facing deportation and other problems.

“They're not going to be able to have their [immigration] case successfully decided and they're going to end up in situations that are very complicated,” she said. “These are things that are very unethical.”

Smuggling facts

• Nearly a quarter of all immigration cases involved smuggling in fiscal year 2022, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commision. The vast majority did not involve physical injury, though 40% involved risk of injury. A death occurred in less than 1%.
• The Justice Department launched an initiative in 2021 with Homeland Security aimed at disrupting human trafficking networks, especially those who endanger the people being smuggled, have links to organized crime or pose national security threats. Joint Task Force Alpha operations have led to over 300 arrests, 240 convictions and over 170 people sentenced for charges related to human trafficking.
• A Mexican coyote was sentenced to 10 years in prison in June for his role as a foot guide in a smuggling operation where one migrant died from heat exposure in the New Mexican desert, according to the Department of Justice.
• A 28-year-old in California was sentenced to over five years in prison in June for charges related to drug distribution, money laundering and human trafficking, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington. Andre Jackson used social media to recruit drivers to smuggle people across the border. 
• In federal court in San Antonio, Texas, a man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role a human smuggling operation. Sedrick Zelitis Smith, 47, acquired tractor trailers to use for smuggling and did some of the driving himself, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office The trailers carried between 30 and 100 migrants.