NRI Smuggled 400 Foreigners To US; Jailed For 5 Years

The Department of Justice in Washington has found a 61-year-old Indian guilty for smuggling illegal foreigners during the period of 2013 and 2015, reported The New Indian Express. The Department of Justice, has sent Yadvinder Singh Sandhu to jail for five years for committing this crime. Sandhu, in his plea, earlier this year had admitted that he had facilitated the smuggling of 400 foreigners to enter the US illegally.

According to the statement released by the Department of Justice, these smuggling which put several lives in danger resulted in at least one death. Sandhu, was charged in for serious crimes returned by a federal grand jury in the District of Puerto Rico in March 2017, used various alias such as Yadvinder Singh Bhamba, Bhupinder Kumar, Robert Howard Scott, Atkins Lawson Howard, and Rajinder Singh.

In Sandhu’s plea agreement, he mentioned that since 2013 he had spearheaded human smuggling conspiracy operating out of Haiti, Republican, India, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. He also played an active role in helping co-conspirators operating out of the Caribbean.

Foreigners were halted in the Dominican Republic

He with his team of conspirators made flight arrangements for foreign nationals to travel from India via other countries such as Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Panama, Venezuela, Haiti, Argentina to the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic (Caribbean) was a place where all these foreigners were housed and later on they were transported to the US. These conspirators with the help of boats helped these foreigners to reach Florida and Puerto Rico from the Dominican Republic, where they were provided them with stash houses. Later on, flights to California, New York and other parts of the country were arranged for them. The prosecutors alleged that Sandhu along with his counterparts provided fraudulent identification for foreigners to use in the US.

Unsafe boats were used

It was found that boats that were used to ferry foreigners from the Dominican Republic to the US were damaged, old, wrecked, unlicensed, and unsafe. It was also found that these boats were overcrowded, throwing a serious question on the safety of the fellow passengers. The prosecutors also mentioned that in one instance, a foreigner died in a boat while travelling to the US. The prosecutors also alleged that during smuggling, smugglers used to keep the foreigners’ passports and they used to physically assault them. The foreigners had to end up paying somewhere between US$ 30,000 to US$ 85,500 for migration from India to the US.

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