Two soldiers pleaded guilty this week to trying to smuggling illegal immigrants through a Border Patrol highway checkpoint while wearing their Army uniforms to try to fool the agents on duty.
The soldiers, Ralph Gregory Saint-Joie and Emmanuel Oppongagyare, said the person who recruited them to drive told them to wear the uniforms to avoid getting questioned by the agents and said the same tactic had worked for other smuggling attempts.
But an agent at the checkpoint in Hebbronville, Texas, figured something was fishy when Oppongagyare said they were headed from Zapata to San Antonio — a route that shouldn’t have taken them near the checkpoint.
Oppongagyare said the GPS had misdirected him, which was a red flag, as agents say smugglers often use that excuse. A dog then alerted to the vehicle, and agents checked and found two illegal immigrants in the trunk of the sedan.
Oppongagyare, a dual citizen of Ghana and the U.S. and a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard, said he and Saint-Joie were paid $100 up front and were going to get paid more when they delivered the two illegal immigrants to San Antonio.
Both Oppongagyare and Saint-Joie, a U.S. citizen and active-duty soldier, were stationed at Ft. Hood at the time of the June 13 smuggling attempt.
The two face up to 10 years in prison each, though first-time smuggling convictions usually earn far less time.
Less than a week after the Texas attempt, Border Patrol agents nabbed an active-duty Marine from Camp Pendleton in California on charges of alien smuggling.
The cases are the latest in a string of incidents involving members of the U.S. military.
Marines stationed at bases in California were arrested in 2019 and 2020 on smuggling charges too, in what authorities came to believe was a large smuggling ring operating at Camp Pendleton.
After the initial arrests in July 2019, two dozen Marines were arrested during a battalion formation later that month, all deemed to have been part of smuggling operations.
All of them were eventually ousted with less-than-honorable discharges, the NBC affiliate in San Diego reported.