Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced federal indictments Thursday against three illegal immigrants from Guatemala accused of running a child-smuggling operation that exploited the federal government's own program for unaccompanied minors, and revealed that a fourth defendant had already pleaded guilty after sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl he fraudulently claimed as his sister.
The cases, centered in Northern Ohio, lay bare what prosecutors describe as a years-long scheme to game the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement vetting system. Defendants allegedly smuggled children across the southern border, filed bogus sponsorship applications with fake names and fabricated family ties, and took custody of minors for their own purposes, including, in at least one case, sexual exploitation.
The indictments span activity from December 2020 through October 2023, a period that falls almost entirely within the Biden administration's management of the Unaccompanied Alien Children program. That timeline gives the charges a political dimension that federal officials did nothing to downplay.
At the center of the case are siblings Maritza Azucena Cahuec Coc, 38, and Carlos Agustin Cahuec Coc, 33. Federal prosecutors allege the pair helped operate an international smuggling ring that trafficked migrant children across the U.S.-Mexico border, then submitted fraudulent UAC sponsor applications to HHS. The applications used fake names and forged documents to claim familial relationships with the children, relationships that did not exist.
In several instances, prosecutors say Maritza Cahuec Coc successfully gained custody of unaccompanied minors through this process. The siblings allegedly communicated with each other to coordinate the fraudulent operations.
When law enforcement arrested Carlos Agustin Cahuec Coc on May 28, he was traveling in a car with a 16-year-old UAC.
A third defendant, Gladys Marina Caal Chen, 20, was also indicted Thursday. Her case adds another layer. Prosecutors say Caal Chen was herself fraudulently sponsored as a UAC by one of Maritza Cahuec Coc's co-conspirators and resettled in the United States through the same pipeline she later allegedly joined. In January 2024, Caal Chen allegedly sought to sponsor a UAC through fraudulent means. When arrested, she lied to law enforcement about her identity, prosecutors say.
The most disturbing case involves Juan Tiul Xi, 27, also an illegal immigrant from Guatemala. Blanche announced Xi's guilty plea alongside the new indictments. The facts prosecutors laid out are grim.
Xi allegedly helped smuggle a 14-year-old girl into the United States, then falsely told authorities he was the child's brother. He took custody of the girl in September 2023. He then sexually abused her.
Xi was convicted of sexual battery of a child in state court and sentenced to eight years in state prison. He also received a 26-month federal prison sentence.
Blanche drew a direct line between Xi's crime and the federal program that placed the child in his hands. In a statement, the acting attorney general said:
"For too many years, under the prior administration, unaccompanied children were smuggled to the United States and then taken in by a mismanaged government program guided by reckless policy direction."
He continued:
"Instead of protecting children, these defendants and others allegedly took advantage of the program and used it to entice the illegal smuggling of unaccompanied children to the United States and, as the sentence of Tiul Xi shows, leave them vulnerable to sexual assault, trafficking, and other exploitation."
U.S. Attorney David Toepfer, whose office is handling the prosecution, framed the cases as a warning. His statement made clear the Justice Department views the alleged conduct not as an isolated incident but as a business model built on exploiting weak immigration enforcement.
"We will not tolerate criminals that use deceptive and fraudulent practices to deliberately abuse our immigration programs for their financial gain. If your business plan is to smuggle others into our country for a profit, especially children, you will come face to face with a federal judge for violating our country's laws."
Toepfer credited federal investigators for uncovering what he called a "dark truth" taking place in Northern Ohio and pledged aggressive prosecution.
The financial motive is worth pausing on. Prosecutors allege the defendants were not driven by humanitarian concern for the children they claimed as relatives. They were in it for profit. The UAC program, designed to protect vulnerable minors, became, in prosecutors' telling, a revenue stream for smugglers who treated children as inventory.
Blanche went further than the specific indictments during his Thursday announcement. He suggested that the Biden administration, and particularly former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, willingly allowed migrant children to be trafficked into the United States through the UAC program. The acting attorney general's language was pointed: he described the program under Biden as "mismanaged" and driven by "reckless policy direction."
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made similar accusations. Kennedy accused the Biden administration of becoming the "biggest facilitator for child abuse" in American history through its UAC policies.
The indictments do not name any former Biden administration officials as defendants. But the timeline prosecutors allege, December 2020 through October 2023, with additional fraudulent activity in January 2024, places the entire alleged conspiracy squarely within the period when the prior administration controlled border policy and the UAC resettlement pipeline.
The ORR vetting system was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of abuse. Sponsors who applied to take custody of unaccompanied minors were meant to be screened for legitimate family connections. What prosecutors describe is a system so porous that illegal immigrants could file applications with fake names, fabricated documents, and invented family relationships, and walk out with custody of children.
The indictments raise questions that the Justice Department has not yet addressed publicly. The specific federal charges, statutes cited, and case numbers have not been detailed in available reporting. The identity of the unnamed co-conspirator who allegedly helped Caal Chen enter the country through the same fraudulent sponsorship pipeline remains unclear.
Nor is it known how many children passed through this particular ring. Prosecutors say Maritza Cahuec Coc "successfully gained custody" of UACs in multiple cases, but the total number of children affected has not been disclosed. The state court jurisdiction where Xi was convicted of sexual battery has not been specified.
Perhaps the most important unanswered question is the broadest one: how many similar operations exploited the same vetting failures during the same period? If a single ring operating out of Northern Ohio could allegedly run this scheme for nearly three years, the scale of the national problem may be far larger than any single set of indictments can capture.
The UAC program exists because the federal government recognized that children arriving at the border alone are uniquely vulnerable. They need protection, not exploitation. The entire moral weight of the program rests on one premise: that the government will place these children with people who will keep them safe.
What prosecutors allege happened in Northern Ohio is the inversion of that premise. The program became the mechanism of harm. Smugglers used it to move children across the border. Fraudsters used it to take custody. And in at least one case, a man used it to gain access to a 14-year-old girl he then sexually abused.
The defendants face serious federal charges. The legal process will determine their guilt or innocence. But the systemic failure that allegedly made their scheme possible is not on trial in any courtroom.
When a government program designed to protect children becomes, in prosecutors' own words, a tool for smuggling and exploitation, the question is not just who committed the crime. It is who built the conditions that made the crime so easy to commit, and whether anyone in a position of authority will ever be held to account for it.