This Week, Mexican Human Smuggler Gets Nine Months More In Prison Than Caucasian Guilty of Same Crime

While on routine patrol just after 4 a.m. on Oct. 19, 2011, the crew of the United States Coast Guard Cutter Petrel spotted an open-bow, panga boat operating without lights in rough waters near San Diego.

The boat weaved through commercial freightliners in an attempt to avoid detection, but the Coast Guard followed it for 70 miles up the California coast toward San Clemente Island.

The U.S. government agents eventually stopped the boat and found 15 Mexicans and one El Salvadorian onboard.

None of the boat occupants had valid U.S. immigration entry documents, according to a Homeland Security report obtained by the Weekly.

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Federal agents arrested boat occupant Hector Martinez Fregoso in the scheme and charged him with “bringing illegal aliens to the United States for private financial gain.”

Occupants of the boat had paid $6,500 each for the trip from Mexico, and Fregoso eventually pleaded guilty for a sentence reduction.

This week, U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney sentenced Fregoso, who was born in 1983, to a serve a federal prison term of 30 months.

Yesterday, we reported that U.S. District Court Judge James V. Selna, Carney's colleague inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana, sentenced Timothy John Sweeney, a recidivist human smuggler who committed his latest crime while on probation, to a lower term of 21 months.

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R. Scott Moxley

CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.

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