MIAMI — In Coral Gables, the tree-canopied streets remain as pristine as ever, the Mediterranean-style homes just as grand, and the city’s police officers make regular rounds through the neighborhoods. It seems an unlikely place for a human smuggling operation.
Yet, in recent weeks, two major busts resulted in nearly 50 migrants—mostly Chinese—being detained after arriving by boat from The Bahamas. Their arrests, along with seven men suspected of being smugglers, took place just blocks from the city’s most expensive homes, where real estate ads boast eight-bedroom, 10-bath mansions bedecked with tennis courts, infinity pools and no bridges to the bay.
Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak said his department has fortified patrols along the city’s coastline, including dispatching marine patrol units and manning officers with drones and night-vision goggles.
“We continue to work with state and federal partners in the apprehension of smugglers and to protect those trying to come ashore,” Hudak said.
The saga began on Jan. 17, when a woman was driving south on Old Cutler Road near Snapper Creek Lakes.
As she was driving, something caught her eye. A U-Haul van sat parked with its doors open—yet there were no fishing supplies or gear inside, despite its proximity to R. Hardy Matheson Preserve, a fishing spot just south of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Next to the van was a Toyota Corolla with Texas license plates.
Sensing something was off, she took down the license plate numbers and recorded a video to show a Coral Gables police officer. Just moments earlier, she had passed an officer near Sierra Circle off Old Cutler. He had mentioned that Marine Patrol had intel on human smuggling in the area. She had laughed, “There’s no way.”
But as she neared the van, she saw a tall man, over 6 feet, forcing a woman into the backseat of the Toyota Corolla. She turned around, sped back to find the officer and showed him the video.
“I was obviously worried that he was going to think I was crazy, saying that somebody’s being kidnapped at 9:30 in the morning on Old Cutler Road,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified due to her safety concerns.
She says the officer immediately went after the U-Haul and Corolla. The department issued a “be on the lookout” order and officers soon pulled them over.
Inside the U-Haul, police found 23 people, including driver Jose Luis Villares, a Cuban citizen, according to a Homeland Security Investigations complaint. The passengers, migrants from China and Ecuador, were crammed into the cargo area with no seats or ventilation, concealed by cardboard taped over the windows.
Two other Cuban citizens were in the Corolla: driver Lucas Sedeno Rodriguez and passenger Keiner Cicilia Rodriguez. Also in the car: two Ecuadorians and a Brazilian woman, seen earlier being shoved into the Toyota, according to the federal complaint.
Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 28, Gables cops stopped two white vans, also off Old Cutler Road. This time, they found 26 Chinese migrants and charged four men with smuggling.
Last Sunday, Feb. 9, a Customs and Border Protection patrol boat crew stopped a 25-foot vessel traveling from Bimini to South Florida, carrying 20 migrants and two men, whom agents say are smugglers. The 20 passengers were 12 Chinese nationals, seven Haitians and one Jamaican, according to the criminal complaint filed last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
One of the alleged smugglers, Bahamian national Demetrius Luciano Kemp, admitted to agents that he was paid $2,000 for the trip and was expecting an additional payment after dropping the migrants off “anywhere he could, whether at a beach or an inlet.”
The Bahamas has long served as a departure point for migrants heading to Florida, particularly Cubans and Haitians. But the recent uptick in Chinese nationals using the island nation as a launching pad is drawing scrutiny from Bahamian and U.S. officials, a Bahamian official told the Miami Herald. Among their questions: Whether this is part of a larger smuggling operation or a growing wave of Chinese migrants who’ve been seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border and are diverting to the sea.
“We are trying to gather some intelligence to find out what’s going on,” said the Bahamian official, who believes the recruiters are U.S. based. “We are trying to bring this to a head.”
Florida has seen an influx of Chinese nationals since 2020, the start of the pandemic. In 2020, Florida Border Protection officers interacted with 406 Chinese migrants, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. By 2024, that number jumped to 723 — a 78 percent increase.
Multiple reasons are leading to the surge, experts say. For one, China’s stringent lockdowns during the pandemic, coupled with a weak housing market and high unemployment, has accelerated the Chinese exodus, say China experts. President Trump’s tightening of the U.S. borders has made the land-based route much more difficult, leading smugglers to turn to the sea. Finally, Ecuador, which has been a jumping-off point for migrants, no longer allows visa-free travel for Chinese nationals, something The Bahamas does.
“Human smugglers are now trafficking Chinese migrants through new routes through the Bahamas and ending up in [places like] Coral Gables,” said Leland Lazarus, associate director of national security at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy.
Smugglers’ paradise
With its labyrinth of canals, bays, waterways and lakes, and close proximity to The Bahamas and Cuba, South Florida long has been a favorite landing spot for smugglers.
“From the pirate days until now, South Florida and its water boundaries have been used for smuggling,” said Paul Petruzzi, a criminal defense attorney representing some of the alleged smugglers. “Whether it’s liquor, marijuana, cocaine or people. The smuggling routes never closed. Smuggling is like whack-a-mole. If there are enforcement operations in one place, the smugglers move somewhere else.”
Typically, Cubans have crossed the Florida Straits on hand-built boats and makeshift rafts and come ashore in the Florida Keys and south Miami-Dade. Haitians often arrive on overloaded sailboats.
And while migrants have long been smuggled to Florida from The Bahamas, the destination is usually farther north like Haulover Inlet at the northern tip of Miami-Dade and up to Palm Beach County.
That’s why the recent landings in Coral Gables gained so much attention.
Sneaking through the mangroves
The witness to the Gables incident is a lifelong boater who said she started to piece together all the oddities she’s noticed in the last few years. A Chinese migrant asleep in a homeowner’s guesthouse, a friend told her. A man by the preserve crying, “Help me, help me,’’ only to be gone by the time police got there.
The Snapper Creek Canal runs parallel to R. Hardy Matheson Preserve, a dense, wooded area bordered by mangroves in Biscayne Bay. The 813.8-acre preserve, operated by Miami-Dade County, is thick with gumbo limbos, strangler figs, slash pines, cabbage palms and other native trees, a secluded spot perfect for smugglers.
Smugglers can sneak a boat into the mangroves, where people can slip into the muddy, swampy waters. They can hide in the preserve until it’s clear for them to trek the nearly two-mile trail to Old Cutler Road, where vehicles are waiting for them near the preserve’s entrance.
The witness to the Gables incident says smugglers bring in people in small groups, disguising their movements with props like fishing rods and buckets. “Five or six go in and 20 come out.”
The trail from the bay leading to the preserve’s entrance is rough, rocky and messy. Last week, plastic soda bottles, rusted fishing gear, dirty plastic bags, worn-out shoes, and a sun-bleached hat were strewn along the trail. One item stood out: a laminated page from a 2013 Cuban passport, belonging to a 5-year-old girl.
The area has gotten more attention from law enforcement. On a recent Wednesday, Miami-Dade and Coral Gables marine patrol boats were patrolling the canal; last Saturday, Feb. 8, federal boats were out there.
First big Gables bust
The driver who reported the U-haul and Toyota Corolla incident was asked by police to come back to the scene that day to make a statement. She was shocked to learn what came of her tip.
“The lady was sitting right in front of my car, the one that was pushed into the Toyota,” she said. “She seemed exhausted. Her eyes were glassy. I gave her a bottle of water. She was a very pretty woman with simple jewelry.”
Investigators later determined the migrants had arrived in South Florida by boat from The Bahamas. None had proper documentation to enter the United States, and their lack of luggage or personal belongings further suggested they were being smuggled rather than traveling as tourists, according to the federal complaint.
During post-arrest interviews, federal investigators said Sedeno Rodriguez, the Corolla’s driver, admitted to being recruited by a smuggler known as “Miggy” to transport the migrants for $5,000. Villares said Sedeno promised him $500 to drive the U-Haul. And Cicilia Rodriguez, accused of renting the U-Haul, admitted traveling with the other two men that morning to pick up the migrants, the complaint said.
The trio planned to drop off the migrants “near a hardware store in Miami-Dade County,” according to the federal complaint.
One of the Chinese migrants told NBC News that she chose to leave China after facing government retaliation for criticizing the country’s “zero-Covid” policy.
“China has no rule of law, no human rights and the people are governed by an emperor,” she told NBC News in Mandarin, referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “All our freedoms have been stripped away and there’s nothing left.”
She traveled a dangerous route, flying from China to London, then to the Bahamas, before taking a boat from the island archipelago to Coral Gables to seek asylum. She paid a $10,000 deposit and was meant to pay another $22,000 upon safe arrival. Authorities detained the migrants and transported them to the Dania Beach Border Patrol station.
“A lot of times, any sort of smuggling, particularly that is going to be such a long way, is going to be several thousand dollars,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a researcher with the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
“We know, too, that if people in the community are looking to leave, it’s very common that communities, families kind of come together and almost raise this money for people to leave. So it’s not necessarily that someone is funding their own travel,” she said.
Second group picked up in Gables
Eleven days after the first bust — on Jan. 28 — Coral Gables Police received a 911 call about people being loaded into a van on Snapper Creek Bridge along Old Cutler Road.
Police stopped one van at the intersection of Old Cutler Road and Kendall Drive and another at 11600 Old Cutler, shutting down parts of the two-lane road during the morning rush hour. Inside the vans, officers found 26 migrants from China.
Tom Cookson, an attorney who has lived on Sierra Circle since 1994, was on his daily commute to downtown Miami when he found himself stuck in standstill traffic on Old Cutler. Spotting numerous Coral Gables Police vehicles, he assumed there had been an accident.
However, as he continued north, he noticed a group of people—mostly dressed in black—sitting against a wall surrounded by police near the intersection of Old Cutler and Kendall Drive.
Given the Trump administration’s recent promises of mass deportations, Cookson couldn’t help but wonder if a raid had taken place.
Cookson was surprised to learn about the smuggled Chinese migrants. Since he doesn’t live on the water, it’s easy to forget about the canals and waterways surrounding his neighborhood.
“Coral Gables is generally pretty quiet,” Cookson said.
Authorities identified the van drivers as Eustacio Francisco Eusebio, 56, a citizen of the Dominican Republic, and his son Joel Benjamin Eusebio, a U.S citizen, according to a federal complaint.
Eustacio told federal agents he received a call from a man asking him to pick up the individuals—whom he referred to as “tourists”—and drive them to Orlando, according to the complaint. He said he was to be paid $200 per person.
Boat used by alleged smugglers found
On the same day as that incident, Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Marine Patrol deputies stopped a 29-foot Wellcraft center console boat near Crandon Channel Marker 9 in Biscayne Bay, off Key Biscayne.
The boat was the one used to transport the migrants to the Snapper Creek Canal; it had been launched that same morning – Jan. 28 – near Crandon Park Marina in Key Biscayne, according to the Homeland Security Investigations complaint.
Deputies found mangrove leaves matted to the boat’s floor and its Bimini top, along with branch scratches on the hull. Most incriminating: A candy wrapper with Asian writing—matching candy carried by some of the migrants found in the vans, the complaint said.
Guillermo Elias Victor Lopez, 60, the man piloting the boat, told agents he was instructed to pick up the migrants from another boat and transfer them onto his boat in Biscayne Bay. He was to “drop them off at the bushes.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Eduardo Sanchez denied bond for Eustacio Eusebio, the Dominican, and Lopez, from Cuba, citing them as flight risks.
The flight from China
A growing number of Chinese nationals are leaving due to China’s faltering economy, said June Teufel Dreyer, a political science professor at University of Miami and an expert on China’s economic and political system.
“Unemployment among college graduates is very high, and they’ve heard that high-paying jobs are plentiful here,” Teufel Dreyer said. “Even the uneducated have heard that life is easier in America.”
Added Lazarus of FIU: “The anemic housing market, high youth unemployment, and burgeoning debt in provincial and municipal governments have combined to cause the most significant economic challenges that China hasn’t seen in decades,” he said.
COVID-19 — and the Chinese government’s response to it — is also a significant factor, Lazarus said.
“The draconian lockdowns during COVID forced many small business owners to close down their businesses. Many of them still haven’t recovered,” Lazarus said.
‘Low risk, high reward’
Joel Leppard, an Orlando criminal defense attorney, has spent years defending accused smugglers. They’re often recruited through word of mouth, meeting the right people at the right time in a restaurant or bar, Leppard said.
“Any kind of organized crime is typically a friend-of-a-friend situation,” he said.
Those brought in as low-level members— such as van or boat drivers —are often financially desperate.
“They perceive it as low risk and high reward,” he said. “But they typically don’t understand the severe consequences they might be facing.”
The judge who denied bond for Eusebio and Lopez said they face up to 10 years if convicted.
The Bahamas connection
Chinese migrants have long used The Bahamas as a smuggling route. But their numbers have been small and under the radar. Typically, they would travel by go-fast boats from Bimini and Grand Bahama’s West End, often landing in Palm Beach County.
But over the past few years, Chinese migrants, like other immigrant groups, have tried to enter the country at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In the 2024 fiscal year, 38,000 undocumented Chinese encounters were registered at the U.S.-Mexico border by Border Patrol, a soaring 1,627 percent increase from 2,200 such encounters in the 2022 fiscal year, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
With Trump focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, however, Chinese nationals desperate to flee their country are turning to other routes.
The Bahamian official who spoke to the Herald said smugglers may be trying to outsmart Bahamian immigration authorities who have increased scrutiny at airports. The Bahamas, in a bid to get more Chinese visitors, lifted visa restrictions for Chinese citizens, which the official said may be driving the illegal migration.
The majority of those caught in smuggling operations, he said, arrive via flights from Cuba, Panama and Jamaica and then overstay while waiting for their route out of the country to the United States.
Bahamian officials began seeing “a noticeable increase in Chinese and Ecuadorian nationals” arriving in the island nation at the end of 2023, according to a Bahamian immigration report.
Lazarus, the FIU expert, said the migration trends have been influenced by increased U.S. enforcement at the southern border with Mexico. Chinese migrants often would take a route from China to Turkey, onto Ecuador and then trek across the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama before traversing through Central America to the southern border.
However, that changed when Ecuador ended visa-free travel for Chinese nationals in July.
An added concern for law enforcement, according to Lazarus, is whether any of the migrants have ties to Chinese crime syndicates that have taken over money laundering and illegal marijuana markets in the Western Hemisphere.
“These Chinese criminals often rely on illegal Chinese migrants to work on massive marijuana farms from Maine to Oklahoma,” Lazarus said.
