A man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for his involvement in one of the deadliest human smuggling incidents in US history.
53 migrants died in June of 2022 after being left inside of a locked tractor trailer in San Antonio, Texas. 49-year-old Rigoberto Ramon Miranda-Orozco of Guatemala was sentenced on Tuesday, October 20th, 2026.
According to Fox San Antonio, Miranda-Orozco returned to Guatemala after the incident and was arrested there in 2024 during an international operation aimed at arresting individuals involved in the fatal smuggling incident. He was extradited back to the United States in March 2025, where he pleaded guilty to charges related to conspiracy to bring people into the country resulting in death, as well as helping bring people into the country resulting in death and serious bodily injury.
“Alien smuggling organizations rely on people like Miranda-Orozco to facilitate their criminal conspiracies and put people on the dangerous path of illegally entering the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
“By refusing to secure our borders, the Biden administration empowered human smugglers across the globe to take advantage of our country and break our laws for financial gain. These smugglers value profits over people, and their disregard of the risks or dangerous conditions in which they carry out their schemes too often result in tragic consequences like in this case with 53 people dead.”
“Of the dozens of deceased aliens found in the tractor trailer in June 2022, 21 of those were from Guatemala — a country that Mirando-Orozco called home and a place where he thought he could hide from justice,” said U.S. Attorney Justin R. Simmons for the Western District of Texas.
“He was wrong. Miranda-Orozco was personally responsible for smuggling two Guatemalans who died in that horrific tragedy, and thanks to our law enforcement efforts and our strong partnership with the Office of the Attorney General of Guatemala, he was found, extradited, and will now spend the rest of his life in a U.S. federal prison. To those who believe they can avoid accountability by cowering in a foreign country, Miranda-Orozco thought the same. Because of this Administration’s commitment to holding accountable all of those who support transnational criminal organizations, he now knows otherwise.
