Two men were arrested in the Florida Keys when one of them was preparing to travel to Cuba in search of rafters, police sources reported Tuesday.
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, on the southern tip of the peninsula, identified the detainees as Víctor Manuel Ríos Castillo, 29, a resident of West Palm Beach, and Jorge Luis Fernández Rodríguez, 53, a resident of Tampa. .
The former was charged with attempted human smuggling and the latter with illegally transporting fuel. Both admitted being responsible for the crimes they were charged with.
Authorities received information Monday that a truck towing a boat was blocking traffic on a road in Marathon Key. Agents found the truck and trailer at the nearby boat ramp. Border Patrol personnel and the Homeland Security Investigations team also responded to the scene.
Incursions by US vessels in search of migrants who want to cross north by sea are not uncommon on the island, and have sometimes led to altercations with Cuban authorities.
The trailer had a flat tire and a damaged tire, and on board the boat were three 55-gallon fuel drums (624 liters total), as well as a fuel transfer pump, satellite phone, a GPS with waypoints to Cuba, a large supply of water and soft drinks and numerous life jackets.
Ríos Castillo admitted that he was on his way to Cuba to smuggle people, and Fernández Rodríguez admitted that he was aware of the fuel drums on the boat he was towing.
“Smuggling attempt averted! Excellent work and interagency coordination,” he wrote on Twitter. Walter N. Slosar, head of the Border Patrol in the South Florida sector. “Smugglers often overload these boats with migrants and excess fuel, putting anyone on board at serious risk while at sea.” The officer attached a photograph of the fuel drums aboard the boat to his tweet.
In the midst of an unprecedented exodus, incursions by US vessels in search of migrants who want to cross north by sea are not uncommon on the island, and have sometimes altercations with Cuban authorities. The last one, reported in networks by The Page of Mauro Torresrelated to the regime, on September 6, in the town of Coloma, Pinar del Río.
According to that source, close to the government, on that occasion the Cuban coast guard detained “two citizens residing in the United States” the previous afternoon.
Last June, the Ministry of the Interior itself reported of an incident in which an officer was injured during a confrontation with armed human traffickers who entered Cuban waters through the province of Villa Clara on a speedboat, and also described a similar event in which, during the pursuit of a vessel American registration whose crew members carried firearms, one of them died in the confrontation with the Cuban border guards.
On Monday, agent Slosar reported that during the weekend Border Patrol agents, with the support of other government agencies, acted against five migrant landings in the Florida Keys, in which they stopped to 78 Cubans.
Since October 2021, when the current fiscal year began, more than 177,000 Cubans have arrived by land in the United States and more than 5,000 by sea, a migration crisis that exceeds those of 1980 and 1994.
With this new group, there are 6,485 undocumented Cubans returned by the United States through the western Cuban port of Orozco through 129 operations.
On the other hand, the governments of the United States, Mexico and the Bahamas have returned to Cuba a total of 8,566 illegal migrants from January 2022 to this date.
In recent days, the United States Coast Guard Service repatriated 239 Cuban rafters who tried to reach the coast of that country by crossing the Florida Straits.
With this new group there are 6,485 undocumented Cubans returned by the United States through the western Cuban port of Orozco through 129 operations, according to data from the Cuban immigration authorities, cited in a state television report.
This Tuesday, the latest repatriations of a group of 76 irregular Cuban migrants from Mexico and another 36 from the Bahamas were also reported, bringing the total to 1,733 and 348, respectively this year, those returned by the governments of those countries.
Last week, authorities from the Cuban Border Guard Troops and the US Coast Guard Service celebrated in Havana a technical meeting to exchange on migration issues in search of increasing bilateral cooperation in confronting the smuggling of migrants.
In these conversations, both parties also discussed illegal departures, illicit drug trafficking, and maritime search and rescue operations, according to the Island’s Ministry of the Interior.
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