A Bangladeshi national, arrested last year on charges of smuggling undocumented immigrants into the United States, has pleaded guilty for his role in the illegal scheme, according to the US Department of Justice.

Mohammad Milon Hossain, 39, admitted in the Southern District of Texas court that from March 2017 to June 2019, he conspired to bring, and brought Bangladeshi nationals to the US at the Texas border in exchange for payment.

Hossain was residing in Tapachula, Mexico, where he maintained a hotel that housed undocumented immigrants on their way to the United States.

“Hossain provided plane tickets and other assistance for the aliens to travel from Tapachula to Monterrey, Mexico where a co-conspirator Moktar Hossain assisted their illegal crossing into the United States,” said the statement from the DoJ on Friday.

As reported by Bangla Tribune earlier, co-conspirator Moktar Hossain, too, had pleaded guilty to the charges.

US District Judge Diana Saldana has accepted Milon Hossain’s guilty plea. His sentencing has not been scheduled yet.

“Hossain’s brazen scheme to smuggle Bangladeshi aliens into the United States put our national security at risk,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

“This guilty plea underscores the Department’s commitment to working with our law enforcement partners here and abroad to disrupt the flow of illegal aliens into the United States and bring human smugglers to justice,” he added.

Hossain was arrested last August at the Houston airport, but the case was later transferred to Laredo, Texas for further criminal proceedings.

Laredo, a town along the US-Mexico border in Texas, accounts for the maximum number of arrests of undocumented Bangladeshis compared to other Border sectors.

Court documents suggest that Hossain, from his base in the Mexican city of Tapachula near the Guatemala border, occupied only one segment of interlocking networks to smuggle Bangladeshi nationals from South Asia all the way through to the American border.

Hoping for a better life in the US, many of the immigrants pay tens of thousands of dollars to agents in Bangladesh to fly into South America, where they then tap into a series of smaller smuggling networks that keeps them moving through Central America and then Mexico.

It was in Mexico, the final segment of the long and arduous journey, where Hossain reportedly worked to move his Bangladeshi customers to the US border.