HOUSTON - A former police detective at the border city of Eagle Pass, Texas, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for her role in a conspiracy to harbor undocumented immigrants for a human smuggling organization.
Court documents released by the Western District of Texas show that Hazel Eileen Diaz, a 54-year-old Texas woman, rented out multiple properties she owned in Eagle Pass to a human smuggling organization between September 2020 and August 2021.
Diaz would often travel to the properties where the migrants were being held to collect rent payments, according to Border Report. A federal investigation revealed that almost 200 migrants were smuggled by the organization. She received large sums of cash in return.
In addition to the 10-year sentence, Diaz will serve three years of supervised release and will have to pay a $10,000 fine on top of $237,600 in money judgement. Diaz will also forfeit three properties, a truck, and more than $20,000 in cash.
When announcing Diaz's sentence, U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza said that she did not work alone, as joint investigations by the FBI, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Border Patrol and the Texas Department of Public Safety found that two other people, Tomas Alejandro Mendez and Paola Nikole Cazares, also had a role in the operation.
Mendez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants and is scheduled to be sentenced in January, while Cazares was sentenced in October of last year to 63 months in federal prison —or over five years- on the same charges.
Human smuggling in Texas
Last December, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that increased the minimum sentence from two years to 10 years for people convicted of smuggling immigrants or operating stash houses.
Reducing human smuggling across the state has been one of the focuses for Operation Lone Star, a border security initiative launched by Abbott in March 2021 in response to the rising number of border crossings, giving him the authority to deploy the Texas National Guard to the border.
Since 2021, the Texas governor has allocated over $10 billion under the banner of Operation Lone Star to deter people from illegally crossing the border into Texas, including the addition of a razor wire fencing along the riverbank between Texas and New Mexico.
According to Texas authorities, since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the multi-agency effort has led to over 518,900 apprehensions and more than 46,300 criminal arrests.
This year, Texas has given long sentences to several individuals involved in human smuggling. In July, a Mexican couple was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison each for their involvement in a sophisticated network of smugglers that utilized commercial airplanes, tractor-trailers and various other methods to smuggle people into the U.S.
More recently, in August, the Southern District of Texas sentenced a man to eight years behind bars after court documents found him responsible for smuggling at least 560 immigrants who were apprehended by authorities.
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