Miguel Alemán’s top coyote sentenced to 12 years

McALLEN — For more than two years, Maximo Castillo-Jimenez sent countless undocumented immigrants to stash houses where they were locked up and held for ransom.

On Tuesday, he began his own 12 years of court-ordered confinement.

The 28-year-old Mexican national, who Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents once described as the top coyote operating in Miguel Alemán, Tamps., was sentenced to 151 months — more than 12 1/2 year — in federal prison for his role in one of the Rio Grande Valley’s largest human smuggling rings.

“I want to say that I am truly sorry,” Castillo-Jimenez said in a statement filed in U.S. District Court in McAllen. “I humbly ask the court for forgiveness and mercy.”

Between January 2004 and August 2006, Castillo-Jimenez organized trips for more than 100 migrants seeking passage from northern Mexico to Houston, according to court documents.

Managing a network of three to four stash houses in Miguel Alemán, he sent recruiters throughout the region looking for hopeful migrants, or pollos, willing to pay their way across the border, authorities said.

Castillo-Jimenez collected money for arranging their journeys and delivered them into the hands of a Roma-based smuggling ring led by 39-year-old Mexican national Jose Aguirre-Nuñez.

“(Castillo-Jimenez) ran all of Miguel Alemán,” San Antonio-based ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said. “(He) ran his business like a store, and Aguirre-Nuñez would buy the product from him.”

But for Castillo-Jimenez’s pollos, the real danger began on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.

In June 2005, U.S. Border Patrol agents discovered 26 undocumented immigrants from El Salvador and Honduras held under armed guard at a small home on the 800 block of Austin Street in Roma.

Once rescued, the men and women told authorities they had been held there against their will after paying Castillo-Jimenez to smuggle them across the border. Interviews with armed men guarding the home revealed that Aguirre-Nuñez would hold the migrants there until their families in Latin America agreed to pay a ransom, court documents state.

But purchased freedom didn’t necessarily secure their safety. One woman who made it out of the Roma stash house — Oneida Amparo Rodriguez, 30, of Honduras — was later left to die by Castillo-Jimenez’s guides after succumbing to dehydration while trekking around the Falfurrias checkpoint, U.S. attorneys said.

“It’s unfortunate that someone had to die for this man to go to jail,” Pruneda said.

In March, Castillo-Jimenez agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants in exchange for the dismissal of nine other charges against him. He has remained in federal custody since his arrest in August 2006.

“I got involved with the wrong crowd, and now I am paying the price,” he said in his statement. “I have never been in trouble with the law before.”

Federal agents have also arrested Aguirre-Nuñez and nine accomplices, who have pleaded guilty to multiple counts of money laundering and harboring and transporting illegal immigrants. They are set to face sentencing early next year.

Federal authorities credit the dismantling of Castillo-Jimenez’s smuggling operations with information gathered in the Aguirre-Nuñez case.

“Once we stop one smuggling organization we try to backtrack it to any others out there,” Pruneda said. “This sentence should send a strong message to those that think they will never get caught.”

____

Jeremy Roebuck covers courts, law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.