Foreign National Sentenced to Five Years in Prison for Smuggling East Africans to the United States

The U.S. Department of Justice reports in its press release (quotation, not an independent finding): “WASHINGTON – A Ghanian man was sentenced today in the District of Columbia for his role in smuggling East Africans into the United States, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Rita M. Glavin, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeffrey A. Taylor and Acting Assistant Secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) John Torres announced. Mohammed Kamel Ibrahim, a/k/a Hakim, 27, a native of Ghana and naturalized citizen of Mexico, was sentenced to five years in prison by U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of bringing aliens to the United States for profit. According to his plea, Ibrahim operated an alien-smuggling organization in Mexico City that moved unauthorized aliens from East Africa across the southern U.S. border beginning as early as 2005. In plea documents Ibrahim admitted that between June 2006 and February 2007 he and co-defendant Sampson Lovelace Boateng conspired to smuggle unauthorized aliens to the United States by providing the aliens with fraudulently obtained Mexican visas. The visas, which Boateng obtained through a corrupt employee of the Mexican embassy in Belize, enabled East African aliens to travel into Mexico, then be smuggled across the southern U.S. border by Ibrahim’s Mexico City-based organization. According to the plea documents, Ibrahim’s organization smuggled the aliens by various means, including by concealing them for more than 12 hours in the sleeper compartments of commercial buses. In pleading guilty, Ibrahim admitted to smuggling betwee”