Indian National is Sentenced to 5 Years for Using Belize as Human Trafficking Route

A final report is still not ready in the inquiry by the Senate Special Select Committee which held hearings between 2016 and 2017 on the findings of the Auditor General’s Special Audit Report of the Immigration and Nationality Department 2011-2013.  But there is a recent news report circulating that between 2013 and 2015, Belize was among a group of countries used as a spring board for foreign nationals to get to the United States. They travelled from India through other countries such as Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Iran, Panama, Venezuela, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. According to the report from the U.S. Department of Justice, ring leader Yadvinder Singh Sandhu pleaded guilty early this year, admitting that he personally assisted around four hundred persons to unlawfully enter the U.S. between that two-year period, which if after the period under inquiry, which would suggest that the immigration irregularities continued. Sandhu has now been sentenced to five years of imprisonment on charges of smuggling foreign nationals into the United States, an overwhelming majority of whom were from India. At least one death was recorded in the human smuggling and the lives of many were endangered. Sandhu used multiple names including Yadvinder Singh Bhamba, Bhupinder Kumar, Rajinder Singh, Robert Howard Scott and Atkins Lawson Howard. He also admitted that he had a leadership role in a human smuggling conspiracy operating out of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, India and elsewhere and oversaw and directed co-conspirators operating out of the Caribbean. These persons reportedly paid between thirty to eighty-five thousand U.S. dollars to be smuggled to the U.S.  Now, in the height of the immigration scandal years ago, various charter flights full of Chinese, Sri Lankan and Indian nationals arrived from Haiti at the P.G.I.A.   At the time, the hub was Havana, Cuba from where most of these nationals would be picked up and transported to Haiti and then on to Belize.