A Bangladeshi national has been awarded 46 months of imprisonment reportedly for smuggling fellow countrymen from Mexico to the United States.
Moktar Hossain, who was formerly residing in Monterrey, Mexico, has also been sentenced to three years of supervised release for his role in what was described as ‘a scheme to smuggle aliens’ from Mexico into the US.
A US Embassy statement issued in Dhaka on Sunday referred to a plea agreement and said Moktar Hossain admitted that from March 2017 to August 2018, he conspired to bring, and did bring, Bangladeshi nationals to the US at the Texas border in exchange for payment.
Mr Hossain reportedly operated out of Monterrey, Mexico, where he maintained a hotel that housed ‘aliens’ on their way to the US.
The statement added that the convict paid drivers to transport the aliens to the US border, and gave the aliens instructions on how to cross the Rio Grande river.
Undocumented migration through the US-Mexico border has been a contentious issue in American politics in recent years and most of the migrants are from Mexico, Central America and Latin America.
However, several hundred Bangladeshi people were reportedly in jails on either side of the border for trying to cross into the US via Mexico in search of opportunities there.
