IN - Deputy stops human smuggling run, finds 12 men packed in van in Hancock Co.
Jordan Fischer
2:53 PM, Sep 10, 2018
4 hours ago
INDIANAPOLIS -- After days locked in a Phoenix room packed with other men – all of them illegally in the country, none of them allowed to leave the cramped space – Julio Fuentes-Barrientos agreed to pay off the debt the cartel said he owed by ferrying more than a dozen others across the U.S. in a van.
Fuentes-Barrientos, a 28-year-old native of Guatemala, had crossed the Arizona desert on foot after paying $7,000 to a “coyote†– a professional human smuggler – to get him into the United States from Mexico. It was his third time making the more than 2,200-mile journey from Guatemala to Arizona. Fuentes-Barrientos had previously been encountered by immigration officers in December 2016 and again in January, both times in Arizona, and deported back to Guatemala.
https://www.theindychannel.com/news/...-in-hancock-co
