A Bahamian has been charged with repeatedly trying to struggle migrants into the US by boat. To make the case worse, one trip resulted in the deaths of three people.
UPI reports that Vandrick Nelson Smith was arrested on March 6 in the Bahamas at the request of the United States. The US is currently requesting his extradition to face some charges.
The multi-count indictment was unsealed on Tuesday. Smith is accused of being involved in three maritime attempts to smuggle migrants by boat from the Caribbean nation to the United States between March 2021 and August 2022.
Migrants from Colombia, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, among other countries, paid the man to be taken across the ocean to the United States.
However, on January 22, 2022, during one of the trips to the United States, the engines of a boat with several migrants aboard stopped working and began to capsize. Some three days later, the US Coast Guard rescued a sole survivor who was found clinging to the side of the boat. They also retrieved the corpses, according to the Principal Attorney General Nicole Argentieri.
Argentieri said, “Pursuing human smugglers who endanger migrants and place their lives in jeopardy is a top priority for the criminal division, wherever those smugglers may operate. The charges announced today should serve as a warning that human smuggling is not only criminal, it is dangerous.”
