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Ghanaian Man Sentenced to 5 Years for Smuggling East Africans
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Ghanaian Man Sentenced to 5 Years for Smuggling East Africans

A Ghanaian man was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in smuggling East Africans into the United States.

Mohammed Kamel Ibrahim, a 27-year-old native of Ghana and naturalized citizen of Mexico, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy and three counts of bringing aliens to the United States for profit.

According to his plea, Ibrahim operated an alien-smuggling organization in Mexico City that moved unauthorized aliens from East Africa across the southern U.S. border beginning as early as 2005.

Ibrahim and co-defendant Sampson Lovelace Boateng conspired to smuggle unauthorized aliens to the United States by providing the aliens with fraudulently obtained Mexican visas.

The visas, which Boateng obtained through a corrupt employee of the Mexican embassy in Belize, enabled East African aliens to travel into Mexico, then be smuggled across the southern U.S. border by Ibrahim’s Mexico City-based organization.

Ibrahim’s organization smuggled the aliens by various means, including by concealing them for more than 12 hours in the sleeper compartments of commercial buses.

Ibrahim admitted to smuggling between 25 and 99 aliens into the United States.

Boateng, who was arrested at Miami International Airport on Nov. 5, 2007, after arriving on a commercial airline flight from Belize, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and alien-smuggling charges in the District of Columbia on April 22, 2008.

Ibrahim was arrested by Mexican authorities in Mexico City on Dec. 5, 2007, and extradited to the United States on April 24, 2008.

Both men will be removed from the United States upon completion of their sentences.