Florida Woman is Being Charged With Leading a Group of 16 People to Drown While Trying to Escape Cuba
U.S. police say that in November 2022, a woman from Florida led an operation to bring Cuban migrants into the country using a boat that was overloaded with people who did not have life vests.
It is believed that sixteen Cuban passengers killed when the ship sank 30 miles off the coast of Cuba on its way to South Florida.
The U.S. Coast Guard found the bodies of four of the refugees who had died in the Florida Straits. One of the two people who made it out alive told the police that the ship wasn’t safe.
Yaqulelin Dominguez-Nieves, 25, is being held at the Federal Detention Center in Miami on charges of smuggling migrants related to the tragic crossing. On Friday, a magistrate judge in Sebring found the woman to be a flight risk and put her in jail.
She also said she wasn’t guilty of a 10-count indictment that said she planned to bring the Cuban migrants to South Florida on November 16, 2022, where 16 people died, and other crimes connected to that.
Dominguez-Nieves, who is being defended by the federal public defender’s office, could get the death sentence or up to life in prison for most of the counts in the indictment. These counts include the deaths of three migrants whose bodies were found at sea by the Coast Guard.
Since Dominguez-Nieves wasn’t on the boat during the illegal trip, it will be up to the Justice Department to decide if he should be put to death.
Her lawyer, Victor Van Dyke, who works for the public defender’s office, could not be reached for comment on Monday.
People smugglers take advantage of refugees’ hopes for a better life, U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe said in a statement after the arraignment on Friday in federal court in Miami. “Immigrants are in grave danger because of what smugglers do,”
As Cuba’s economic and political problems get worse, a huge number of people have left the country in the last two fiscal years. U.S. border numbers released in October show that nearly 425,000 Cubans have tried to enter the U.S., mostly through Mexico.
In fiscal year 2023, which ended in September, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said they met 200,287 Cubans at U.S. ports across the country. CBP said they had another 224,607 interactions with Cuban citizens in fiscal year 2022.
In a different case involving migrants who were killed, a man from the Bahamas is being held in Miami until he can be extradited. He is being charged with planning to bring a boat full of people from Colombia, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti to South Florida.
Vandrick Nelson Smith, 33, also known as Muggy and Vans, was caught in March on suspicion of planning three trips to bring illegal goods across the sea in 2021 and 2022. Five migrants died on one of these trips.
An accusation says that on the evening of January 22, 2022, many migrants got on a boat in the Bahamas that was going to South Florida for an illegal crossing that Smith set up. Soon after leaving, the engines stopped working, and the boat flipped over.
The indictment says that three days later, the Coast Guard found the only migrant still alive clinging to the top of the capsized boat and saved him. The Coast Guard also found the bodies of several travelers who had died at sea.