A Border Patrol agent charged with enforcing immigration laws was secretly flouting those laws, prosecutors said Thursday as they unsealed a criminal case accusing the agent of hiring illegal immigrants to work as truck drivers for a business he ran.
Ricardo Gonzalez and two accomplices drafted fake documents to sneak the migrants into the U.S. then underpaid them for the work they were doing as commercial truck drivers, prosecutors said.
He, his wife Natalia A. Chavez de Gonzalez and a third person, Alex Lopez, were all arrested Thursday in the case.
They face charges of alien smuggling and immigration-document fraud.
Mr. Gonzalez was a Border Patrol agent from 2007 to 2019. The unsealed indictment says he was sneaking immigrants into the country on false pretenses as far back as 2017, using his knowledge as an agent to game the system.
