Six people — five Cuban nationals and one U.S. citizen living in Florida — were sentenced to federal prison on Thursday, October 29, for running what prosecutors described as a vast international operation that smuggled Cuban nationals into the United States, filed fraudulent asylum claims on an industrial scale and laundered more than $22 million between 2021 and 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
The longest sentence went to Liannys Yaiselys Vega-Perez, 27, described by prosecutors as the primary manager of the group's fraudulent immigration-benefits business: four years in prison. Layra Libertad Treto Santos, 30, received 30 months. Miguel Martinez Vasconcelos, 31, Luis Emmanuel Escalona-Marrero, 32, Walbis Pozo-Dutel, 32, and Emanuel Martinez Gonzalez, 29, each received two years. All six had pleaded guilty earlier to conspiracy charges. The sentencings were handed down in the Middle District of Florida.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
How the smuggling organization worked
According to court documents summarized by the Justice Department, the group operated an alien smuggling organization, or ASO, that encouraged and induced thousands of Cuban nationals to enter the United States. Some were smuggled illegally across the southern border. Others were brought in through ports of entry using fraudulent Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) visa waivers — a route prosecutors say the defendants knew was closed to them, because Cuban residents are not eligible for the ESTA program at all.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
To get around that bar, the organization filed hundreds of fraudulent ESTA applications with U.S. Customs and Border Protection using fake addresses and false information, including the false representation that applicants had not been present in Cuba since 2011, even though the applicants were living in Cuba when the applications were submitted. The group advertised its smuggling and bogus immigration services on social media platforms aimed at Cuban nationals living in Cuba, including a service that promised to help Cubans who held European citizenship enter the U.S. on a European tourist visa waiver. Fees ranged from $1,500 to $40,000 per person, and co-conspirators sometimes chartered private planes to move groups of people.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
A second business: fraudulent asylum and immigration filings
Once clients were inside the United States, the organization ran a fraudulent immigration-benefits business that filed asylum paperwork and other applications for a fee. Prosecutors say Vega-Perez personally filed hundreds of fraudulent asylum applications and also handled the logistics of moving people from their country of origin into and across the United States, including buying international and domestic flights. Independent reporting on the sentencings put the total number of fraudulent asylum applications linked to the organization at more than 1,700. Treto Santos filed fraudulent asylum claims as an employee and manager of the business, used the organization's smuggling services for herself and her family members, and referred other Cuban nationals to it.
Source: Cuba Headlines
The other defendants each played a defined role, according to the Justice Department. Vasconcelos bought airline tickets, helped fund charter flights and personally transmitted at least $150,000 to companies outside the United States. Escalona-Marrero worked with a co-conspirator in Mexico to ship Cuban passports into the United States so the passports would not be confiscated by the Border Patrol and could later be used in asylum applications, and he formed a shell company used to move smuggling proceeds. Pozo-Dutel supplied hotel and flight information along the travel routes and instructed people being smuggled on what to say if CBP officers questioned them. Gonzalez coordinated travel logistics after people arrived in the United States, working with his partner and co-defendant Marianny Lucia Lopez-Torres, and accepted payments from the people being smuggled.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
Following the money: $22 million through shell companies
Between 2021 and 2025, the defendants laundered more than $22 million, moving illegal proceeds through multiple shell companies before distributing the money back to themselves, the Justice Department said. Between July 2022 and November 2024 alone, the organization spent more than $600,000 with a single airline on commercial flights. As part of the sentences, Escalona-Marrero was ordered to forfeit $2.9 million, Vasconcelos $150,000 and Treto Santos $95,000.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
"These defendants turned illegal immigration into a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise, smuggling aliens into the United States to line their pockets and laundering millions in illicit proceeds to conceal their operations," said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. HSI Tampa Acting Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Ingegno called it "a transnational criminal organization that treated our immigration system as a profit center," and USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow said the sentences were "a clear warning to anyone seeking to profit by exploiting, abusing, or undermining America's legal immigration system."
Background: why the ESTA and asylum routes matter
ESTA is the automated system that lets citizens of Visa Waiver Program countries travel to the United States for short stays without first obtaining a visa. Cuba is not a Visa Waiver Program country, and people who have been present in Cuba since 2011 are ineligible — which is why, prosecutors say, the organization had to invent European-citizenship claims and false travel histories to push its clients through the system. Asylum, by contrast, is a lawful protection for people who can show persecution or a well-founded fear of it; prosecutors say this group treated that protection as a product, filing hundreds of claims they knew were fraudulent. Cases like this one are the backdrop to the extra scrutiny that genuine asylum and visa applicants — including Punjabi and other South Asian applicants using legal immigration consultants — now routinely face, and they are a reminder that anyone who pays an unlicensed 'agent' promising a guaranteed entry or a guaranteed asylum outcome risks both their money and their own immigration future.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice
What happens next
The six sentencings do not close the case. Twelve people were charged in the superseding indictment. Yuniel Lima-Santos, 32, and Gisleivy Peralta Consuegra, 41, have pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing; Erik Ventura-Castro, 25, was sentenced on July 29 to 30 months in prison; and Lazaro Alain Cabrera-Rodriguez, 29, was found guilty by a jury in September and is also awaiting sentencing. Two defendants, Marianny Lucia Lopez-Torres and Frandy Aragon-Diaz, remain at large, the Justice Department said. The investigation was led by Homeland Security Investigations in Tampa, the U.S. Border Patrol's Miami Sector and USCIS's fraud-detection arm, with help from agencies in Washington and the Cayman Islands. The prosecution is part of Joint Task Force Alpha, the Justice Department's lead anti-smuggling effort, which officials say has produced more than 486 arrests and more than 447 convictions, and of the nationwide Operation Take Back America initiative.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice