A 39-year-old Bangladeshi national, Saifullah Al-Mamun, made his first court appearance in Laredo, Texas, on Monday following his extradition from Brazil.
Per the U.S. Department of Justice, a federal indictment alleges that Al-Mamun served as a key figure in a transnational criminal organization that smuggled individuals from Bangladesh into the United States.
The operation reportedly moved migrants through a network of safe houses spanning São Paulo, Brazil, to Tapachula and Monterrey in Mexico. According to court documents, Al-Mamun’s co-defendants, Mohamad Milon Hossain and Moktar Hossain, assisted in housing migrants and providing instructions for crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States.
The investigation found that migrants paid as much as tens of thousands of dollars to facilitators in Bangladesh to secure their illegal passage.
While Al-Mamun now faces the U.S. legal system, his co-conspirators have already been processed through the courts. Both Mohamad Milon Hossain and Moktar Hossain pleaded guilty to their roles in the conspiracy and were each sentenced to 46 months in prison.
If Al-Mamun is convicted on all counts of bringing an alien to the United States for financial gain, he faces a mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum of 15 years in federal prison.
The Justice Department provided a legal disclaimer regarding the status of the ongoing criminal proceedings: “An indictment is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law”.
The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations Phoenix with support from the Joint Task Force Alpha, a partnership designed to combat high-impact human smuggling and trafficking by transnational criminal organizations.