The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas has announced 222 new immigration-related criminal cases in just one week.
Many of the cases stem from fraudulent identification and work documents.
Federal agents arrested two women at a San Antonio seafood company, Karen Y. Ordonez-Granados and Ledy Veronica Ordonez-Granados, after discovering they had allegedly purchased and used fake green cards and Social Security numbers to gain employment. Their employer, Groomer’s Seafood, was the subject of a court-authorized search warrant following an audit by Homeland Security Investigations, which discovered nearly 30 fake employment documents dating back to 2016. The defendants, if convicted, face up to 10 years in federal prison.
Many of the listed cases also involve defendants who were previously deported and illegally re-entered the country.
In Austin, law enforcement federally charged a Honduran national, Jose David Sifuentes, already serving five years in the Caldwell County Jail for sexually assaulting a child, for illegally re-entering the country after being deported in 2019.
In El Paso, several individuals from Guatemala and Mexico were arrested for returning to the U.S. just weeks after being kicked out, in some cases for the third or fourth time. One man, Samuel Meza-Escobedo, had already been deported from the country nine times and had multiple prior convictions for illegal re-entry.
In another arrest, Daniel Sauceda-Borrego, a Mexican national, allegedly attempted to pass through Customs using a fake identity and documents tied to someone else’s Social Security number. Agents later discovered he had been using a stolen identity for over half a decade, based on his fingerprints and a fake Texas birth certificate.
All of the 222 new cases occurred between the week of July 3 and July 10.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office says that these cases were the result of a new collaboration between multiple federal agencies, including ICE, Homeland Security Investigations, Border Patrol, the DEA, and the FBI.
Covering 68 counties and a population of over 7.6 million residents, the Western District of Texas encompasses vast metropolitan areas like San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso, and shares a 660-mile border with Mexico.