An 85-year-old woman was sentenced to two and a half years in a federal prison last Thursday for her role in an immigrant smuggling operation. Felicitas Gurrola, a resident of the San Diego area near the border between the United States and Mexico, headed up an immigrant smuggling operation for several decades that also included her 54-year-old daughter. Gurrola or her associates would meet with immigrants wishing to enter the United States at a hotel in Tijuana, Mexico. The immigrants would be provided with identification documents for other, legal immigrants. Gurrola and her associates would grill the immigrants to make sure they knew every necessary bit of information on their assumed and stolen identities, then a guide would lead them through the San Ysidro border crossing and load them on a commercial bus headed to the Los Angeles area. Gurrola collected $3,500 per person for her services. Gurrola's methods were markedly safer than many of the more popular immigrant smuggling operations that included leading immigrants through remote desert or mountain crossings, or even stuffing people in cars trunks or engine compartments. Gurrola's family-run operation was something of an anomaly amongst more recent immigrant-smuggling operations which tend to be more violent and run by larger, more violent criminal operations. Gurrola's daughter, Hilda Moreno, was also sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

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