Texas alien-smuggling sentencings fell to a five-year low in FY 2025 as federal reentry cases rose

Two Guatemalan nationals pleaded guilty on June 11, 2026, in a Laredo federal court to a smuggling conspiracy that ended in a December 2021 tractor-trailer crash in Chiapas, Mexico, that killed more than 50 people and injured more than 100. Josefa Quino Canil De Zavala, 43, and Alberto Marcario Chitic, 32, recruited adults and unaccompanied minors in Guatemala, collected payment, and packed at least 160 people into the trailer that crashed near Tuxtla Gutiérrez. They face up to life in prison at a sentencing set for September 9, 2026. The Justice Department's announcement put the toll at more than 50; Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duvan put it at 56. The case carries one of the highest death tolls in a federal enforcement category that is shrinking. Federal courts sentenced 3,957 people nationwide under the alien-smuggling guideline in fiscal year 2025, down 16.4% from the 4,731 sentenced at the 2023 peak. In Texas the count fell to 2,388, the lowest in the five years through fiscal 2025 and below the 2,565 recorded in fiscal 2021.

Texas still accounted for 60.3% of all federal alien-smuggling sentences in fiscal 2025, down from 72.2% in fiscal 2021. The Western and Southern districts of Texas handle nearly the entire Texas caseload. The Northern District recorded zero smuggling-guideline sentences in fiscal 2025 and the Eastern District recorded 14. The enforcement surge that federal officials describe appears in the sentencing data as illegal reentry, not smuggling. Sentencings under the illegal-reentry guideline rose 57% nationwide between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2025, to 18,204, while smuggling-guideline sentencings contracted. Texas accounted for 10,734 reentry sentencings in fiscal 2025.

The two highest-casualty Texas smuggling prosecutions carry the same label as the far more numerous reentry cases. Both the Chiapas case and the 2022 San Antonio case, in which 53 migrants died in a tractor-trailer, fall under Operation Take Back America, the initiative the Justice Department describes as an effort to "repel the invasion of illegal immigration." In San Antonio, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia sentenced Felipe Orduna-Torres to life and Armando Gonzales-Ortega to 1,050 months on June 27, 2025, three years to the day after 48 people died at the scene and five more died at hospitals. In the Chiapas case, Acting U.S. Attorney John G.E. Marck said in the Justice Department announcement that the defendants "moved people across borders like a supply chain. The Western District's median prison sentence held at 18 months in fiscal 2025, while the Southern District's fell to 9 months, down from 12 months in fiscal years 2021 through 2023, against a national median of 12 months.

The Western District sentenced above the guideline range in 14.8% of its fiscal 2025 smuggling cases, 184 of 1,242, against 1.3% in the Southern District. The Southern District sentenced below the range in 42.1% of its cases, reflecting fast-track dispositions.

Among Western District smuggling defendants, 78.5% fell in the lowest criminal-history category in fiscal 2025, the highest such share among the Texas districts, against 69.9% in the Southern District. These are differences in sentencing practice, and the data does not establish their cause. Even as the caseload fell, the share of smuggling cases carrying a death enhancement climbed from 0.68% in fiscal 2021 to 1.19% in fiscal 2025. Federal courts sentenced 47 defendants nationwide and 25 in Texas under the smuggling guideline's death provision in fiscal 2025. That figure counts defendants sentenced under the provision, not the number of people who died, and a single event with many victims, such as San Antonio, can produce several such defendants. The share rose in part because the overall smuggling caseload shrank, and the annual counts are small.

All 114 Texas smuggling cases carrying a death enhancement over the five years came from the Southern or Western district, 49 in the Southern and 65 in the Western. The Eastern and Northern districts recorded none. In a Del Rio prosecution, Sebastian Tovar received 420 months after a 2021 crash that killed eight people. In June 2026, a Mexican national pleaded guilty to harboring 32 people in a stash house in conditions that killed one. Sentences in death cases run well above the floor: the national median reached 84 months in fiscal 2025 against 11 months for cases without a death, and in the Western District the death-case median reached 120 months. Those death-case figures rest on a few dozen sentencings a year and move from year to year. The sentencing totals lag enforcement by months or years, because a fiscal-year sentencing figure reflects charging decisions made earlier, some under the prior administration. A court sentence is also not a removal, and these numbers say nothing about deportations carried out. The June 2025 San Antonio sentences fall within the fiscal 2025 data. The court will sentence the Chiapas defendants on September 9, 2026, in fiscal year 2026, and they do not appear in the figures analyzed here.