A Texas man was one of the offenders sentenced this week for his involvement in an immigration smuggling operation that resulted in the deaths of two unauthorized migrants.
Texas smuggling operation sentences
Jerry Lee Anderson, 29, lives in Spring, near Houston. He and Orlin Wilfredo Padilla-Murillo, 25, an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, were sentenced to jail this week by Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses, according to a Friday announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.
Anderson was sentenced to 14 years in prison, while Padilla-Murillo received slightly less than 16 years. Michael Demond Kennedy, a member of the “alien smuggling organization” (ASO), was also convicted in recent weeks, receiving 7.25 years for his role.
Another co-defendant, Rashad Jermaine Joshua, is set to be sentenced on April 7.
Texas deadly smuggling operation
The penalties are the outcome of an October 2022 incident in which a single-vehicle crash killed the cargo driver and two unauthorized immigrants and seriously injured two more.
The following inquiry revealed that the car Kennedy was in at the time was linked to Anderson and Padilla-Murillo, who cooperated to plan the smuggling trips. Padilla-Murillo’s specific task was to recruit load drivers to pick up immigrants to smuggle across the border from Eagle Pass to Houston, with the revenues split between Anderson and the driver.
In one incident involving the ASO, authorities discovered a horse trailer attempting to smuggle 11 undocumented immigrants into Galveston County.
According to the announcement, the ASO carried at least 100 undocumented immigrants throughout the operation, collecting an average of $10,000 from each undocumented immigrant to be smuggled, totaling more than $1 million.
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