Federal agents last week stopped another boat smuggling migrants into South Florida, according to court documents.
That brings the number of illegal human smuggling operations at sea in the corridor between Key Largo and Key Biscayne to three in one week.
On Friday, Miami-Dade County Police Department marine patrol officers stopped a 60-foot yacht off Key Biscayne carrying 31 people from Haiti stowed beneath the deck, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which also participated in the boat’s interception . .
The FWC said in a news release that the boat was manned by two smugglers. Although no one has been arrested or charged in that case yet, according to court records.
Officials still have not confirmed whether the boat traveled from Haiti to South Florida, or whether the migrants went elsewhere, such as the Bahamas, where the smugglers picked them up.
Four days earlier, a boat traveling from the Bahamas was stopped by U.S. Customs agents about three miles offshore from a Key Largo neighborhood with 14 people from Ecuador on board, according to a federal complaint.
Agents arrested two men manning the boat who, according to the complaint, are Cuban nationals on parole in the United States.
A complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. Southern District Court shows that another smuggling voyage was intercepted by customs agents off the coast of Key Largo on Friday. This is a 10 meter long boat with 18 people from different countries on board.
Two of the migrants were arrested because authorities said they had previously been deported from the United States. These men – Jesus Reyes and Francisco Rodrigo Lojano Benegas – are citizens of the Dominican Republic and Ecuador, respectively, the complaint said.
Agents say the boat’s driver, Jose Valdes Amador, is a Cuban citizen with lawful permanent residence in the US. He is now accused of encouraging and persuading people to enter the country illegally, according to the complaint. His lawyer declined to comment.
According to the complaint, Amador left Miami earlier in the day and picked up the people in Gun Cay in the Bahamas.
The complaint does not list the nationalities of the other migrants aboard the boat, and customs officials did not immediately respond to questions about the countries or origins.
