A Texas woman pleaded guilty on Tuesday to smuggling unaccompanied illegal immigrant children into the United States from Juarez, Mexico.
Dianne Guadian, 33, together with three other members of a smuggling organization, transported foreign children aged 5 to 13 into the country, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a July 28 statement. Candy laced with THC, the major psychoactive constituent in cannabis, was sometimes used to sedate the children.
Drivers and co-conspirators would claim to be their parents and show the inspecting officers false U.S. documents. Once the group entered the United States, the children were transported to El Paso. In one instance, a child had to be taken to a local hospital after being diagnosed with THC poisoning.
Guadian pleaded guilty to four counts of aiding and abetting bringing in illegal immigrants without authorization for profit. If convicted, she could face a maximum prison term of 15 years. One of her co-defendants was sentenced earlier this month to five years for being part of the child smuggling operation.
“This defendant and her co-conspirators engaged in serious and dangerous conduct,” Assistant Attorney General Andrew Tysen Duva of the DOJ’s Criminal Division said in the statement.
“The smuggling of unaccompanied children can expose them to the additional crimes and societal ills of human trafficking and sexual assault. This robs them of their innocence and youth, and it must be stopped.”
The Epoch Times was unable to reach the legal representative for Guadian.
The indictment is part of Joint Task Force Alpha (JTFA), which was launched under the Biden administration to stop human smuggling activities.
The task force had initially focused on stopping such activities in Central America. In September 2025, the DOJ announced that JTFA was being expanded to districts along the northern and maritime borders to target cartels and transnational criminal organizations.
JTFA’s work has so far led to more than 465 arrests of people involved in human smuggling and trafficking, and more than 424 convictions, the DOJ said.
In another case, a dual Canadian American citizen pleaded guilty this past week for being part of a smuggling conspiracy over the St. Lawrence River that ended up killing a Romanian family, including two children less than 3 years old, according to a July 23 DOJ statement.
On July 22, the Justice Department announced that another defendant pleaded guilty to smuggling individuals, including young children, over America’s northern border with Canada.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), smugglers charge vulnerable people a lot of money to illegally bring them into the United States, with the journey often made under unsafe conditions.
In addition to transporting people illegally into America, human smuggling networks pose other major security risks, such as being linked to terrorism, weapons smuggling, and drug trafficking.
In fiscal year 2025, 17 percent of cases reported to the United States Sentencing Commission involved illegal immigrant smuggling, up 11 percent from 2021, according to agency data. The majority of smugglers—64 percent—were U.S. citizens.
The Western District of Texas had the highest number of illegal immigrant smuggling offenses, followed by the Southern District of Texas, the District of Arizona, and the Southern District of California.
Deaths occurred in around 1 percent of smuggling offenses. The average sentence for smuggling illegal immigrants was 15 months.
To tackle the problem, the Combating International Drug Trafficking and Human Smuggling Partnership Act was introduced in the House of Representatives in June 2025.
The bill allows officers and agents from the Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations to support foreign governments in certain activities, such as monitoring and locating people being smuggled into the United States.
The bill passed the House in November 2025 and is under review in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
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