SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — A representative with the U.S. Department of Justice says there needs to be stiffer penalties, including longer prison terms, for those caught smuggling people across the border.
Ian Martínez Hanna, co-director of Joint Task Force Alpha, also wants the U.S. to work closer with Central American countries, Mexico and Colombia to go after criminal organizations that recruit, organize and smuggle large groups of migrants.
Martínez Hanna said prison terms need to be especially longer when it involves injuries or death to a migrant.
“Sentences are very light for those trafficking people,” he said. “Longer sentences would be a deterrent.”
As an example, Martínez Hanna used the disappearance of dozens of migrants who were on a boat near Nicaragua.
He also pointed to the 50 migrants who died inside a trailer in San Antonio last summer.
“We’re trying to get longer sentences longer for the leaders of these smuggling groups, those who work with cartels in Mexico to conduct their human trafficking,” Martínez Hanna said. “They gain from the migrants’ suffering, in the last four years, our group has made 345 arrests of national and international human smugglers and 300 of them received sentences longer than 30 years.”
He also stated those in charge are rarely punished especially now that cartels are relying more and more on human trafficking because it has a higher profit margin than illicit drugs, which require more investment to produce and transport.
“These numbers reflect the cruel reality of those coerced by smugglers, those who are forced into the sex trade or become slaves to those who become indentured servants.”
Martínez Hanna is hopeful the Justice Department will design and impose stiffer sentencing guidelines for smugglers in the near future.
