A lawsuit has been filed against three Fort Worth-based illegal aliens for participating in a human smuggling ring. The lawsuit prompted U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas into condemning his fellow Republican Congress members for failing to end the border crisis.
Roy told Texas Scorecard, “While Washington is fiddling around doing absolutely nothing to secure the border—and Republicans recently punted any leverage we had to force Biden to secure the border in the debt ceiling—we have stash houses in Fort Worth, Texas, where human beings, little girls, are being horrifically abused for ransom.
According to the lawsuit, “This was a large scale and sophisticated alien smuggling operation, connected to a Mexican drug cartel, which smuggled dozens of illegal migrants per month—including unaccompanied minor alien children.”
The three aliens accused of running the smuggling organization are Gonzalo Briseno Ramirez, Rodrigo Napoles Briseno, and Carlos Eduardo Plata-Ybarra.
Law enforcement allegedly discovered the Fort Worth stash house, where the three illegal aliens ran their human smuggling ring, after a man—the “Husband”—in Baltimore, Maryland, paid the organization to smuggle his wife and 2-year-old daughter into the United States.
The Husband claims he made a payment of $1,000 to the smugglers to bring his family to the U.S. However, after the smugglers trafficked them in, they imprisoned them in a stash house in Fort Worth, where they would remain until the Husband could fulfill their required payment of an additional $23,000.
The suit states the Husband was told by a member of the organization that “they would do things to his daughter he [would] not like” if he failed to make the payment.
Law enforcement traced phone calls back to Briseno and was able to arrest him and the two other defendants. Upon raiding the stash house, law enforcement discovered $110,175 in cash, the Husband’s wife and daughter, and 18 other illegal aliens awaiting transportation. Two of those 18 were unaccompanied minors.
It was discovered that the stash house had been used for several months and at least 60-80 illegal aliens were processed every week at this specific site.
“The organization deprived aliens of their freedom, sometimes for weeks on end, until the alien made the full smuggling payment,” the lawsuit states. “The smugglers’ tactics for extorting payment included threatening to ‘do things [the smuggled aliens’ family members would] not like.’”
In U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Judge Reed O’Connor’s response to the suit, he explained he does not think the guidelines adequately punish these crimes.
The Guidelines do not adequately take into account these facts when recommending an appropriate prison range. The current prison Guideline calculation of 51-63 months fails to meet the requirement that any sentence provide adequate deterrence and just punishment. Accordingly, the parties are provided notice that the Court intends to vary upward from the applicable Guideline range so that they may address this at the time of sentencing.
“[A] federal judge is saying we’re not even applying the highest penalties for the people carrying out these horrendous crimes,” Roy continued. “We have a problem, and we damn well ought to do something about it instead of sitting on our hands, but that’s what Republicans are doing.”
