Maksoud, a liquor distributor, traveled from Lebanon to Mexico on a legal visa in late 2000, he told investigators in Mexican court documents. Two compatriots passed along Boughader's name for help crossing the U.S. border.
Boughader informed his newest client the fee would be $2,000 up front, plus another $2,000 once Maksoud was in the U.S. In January 2001, Maksoud was taken to a house on the Mexican side where migrants of "different nationalities" were awaiting passage, he told investigators. One morning, he was crammed into the trunk of a vehicle and driven through the border port of entry.
Other people-couriers, including convicted smuggler Mohammed Hussein Assadi, use altered passports to fly clients to the United States. Assadi schooled his Iraqi customers to carry nothing identifying them as Arab. He advised one migrant to shave his mustache, still another to get a "European" haircut, U.S. court records showed.
Central and South America are popular transit points. Assadi, an Iranian, worked from Ecuador.
Bribery also is common. Boughader's clients told U.S. and Mexican investigators they paid thousands to obtain fraudulent visas from Mexico's consular office in Beirut.
Former U.S. immigration supervisor Maximiano Ramos admitted taking $12,500 to smuggle immigrants from the Philippines, home of the Al Qaeda-linked militant group Abu Sayyaf. From 1996 to 2002, at least 40 migrants were diverted from connecting flights at Los Angeles International Airport and escorted out by security guards while Ramos was on duty.
Linda Sesi, an assistant ombudsman for the city of Detroit, is awaiting trial on charges of conspiring with four others to smuggle more than 200 migrants from Iraq, Jordan and other Middle Eastern countries into the United States from 2001 until last September.
Some say human smuggling is too risky to be used by terrorism operatives. But a former Sept. 11 commission counsel, Janice Kephart, said smuggling already was a chosen transportation mode for such groups.
Intelligence suggests that since 1999 human smugglers have facilitated the travel of terrorists associated with more than a dozen groups, according to the Sept. 11 commission travel report that Kephart helped write.
Terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, "use human smugglers and document forgers to a great extent," Kephart said. "It only makes sense that they would transfer that to infiltrate the United States."
