Sam Cooper

Case details a pipeline from China through Mexico, trapping trafficked illegal migrants as indentured workers in a sweeping drug network.

In a sweeping indictment that tears into an underworld of Chinese narco infiltration of North American cities — including the smuggling of impoverished Chinese nationals across the Mexican border to work as drug debt slaves in illegal drug houses — seven Chinese nationals living in Massachusetts stand accused of running a sprawling, multimillion-dollar marijuana trafficking and money laundering network across New England.

The backdrop of the human smuggling allegations stretches back to 2020, as an unprecedented wave of illegal Chinese migrants surged across the U.S. border with Mexico — a surge that peaked in 2024 under the Biden administration before the White House reversed course. This explosive migration trend became a flashpoint in heated U.S. election debates, fueling concerns over border security and transnational organized crime.

Six of the accused, including alleged ringleader Jianxiong Chen of Braintree, were arrested this week in coordinated FBI raids across Massachusetts. The border exploitation schemes match exactly with decades-long human smuggling and Chinese Triad criminal pipelines into America reported by The Bureau last summer, based on leaked intelligence documents filed by a Canadian immigration official in 1993. A seventh suspect in the new U.S. indictment, Yanrong Zhu, remains a fugitive and is believed to be moving between Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.

The case paints a striking portrait of China-based criminal organizations operating behind the quiet facades of upscale American suburban properties. Prosecutors allege the defendants owned or partnered with a network of sophisticated indoor grow houses hidden inside single-family residences in Massachusetts, Maine, and beyond, producing kilogram-scale shipments of marijuana. According to court documents, the marijuana was sold in bulk to distributors across the Northeast, and the profits — amounting to millions — were funneled into luxury real estate, cars, jewelry, and further expansion of their illicit operations.

“During a search of [ringleader Chen’s] home in October 2024, over $270,000 in cash was allegedly recovered from the house and from a Porsche in the driveway,” the indictment alleges, “as well as several Chinese passports and other identification documents inside a safe.”

According to the indictment, Chen’s cell phone data confirmed his personal role in orchestrating smuggling logistics and controlling workers. Additional searches of homes where co-defendants lived yielded over 109 kilograms of marijuana, nearly $200,000 in cash, and luxury items including a $65,000 gold Rolex with the price tag still attached.

A photo from the indictment, humorously but damningly, shows alleged ring member Hongbin Wu, 35, wearing a green “money laundering” T-shirt printed with an image of a hot iron pressing U.S. dollar bills on an ironing board — a snapshot that encapsulates the brazenness of the alleged scheme.

Key to FBI allegations of stunning sophistication tying together Chinese narcos along the U.S. East Coast with bases in mainland China is a document allegedly shared among the conspirators.

Investigators say the conspiracy reveals a human smuggling component directly tied to China’s underground migration and debt bondage networks, mirroring exactly the historic intelligence from Canadian and U.S. Homeland Security documents reported by The Bureau last summer.

The alleged leader, 39-year-old Jianxiong Chen, is charged with paying to smuggle Chinese nationals across the Mexican border, then forcing them to work in grow houses while withholding their passports until they repaid enormous smuggling debts.

“Data extracted from Chen’s cell phone allegedly revealed that he helped smuggle Chinese nationals into the United States — putting the aliens to work at one of the grow houses he controlled,” U.S. filings say.

“This case pulls back the curtain on a sprawling criminal enterprise that exploited our immigration system and our communities for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Leah Foley. “These defendants allegedly turned quiet homes across the Northeast into hubs for a criminal enterprise — building a multi-million-dollar black-market operation off the backs of an illegal workforce and using our neighborhoods as cover.”

The arrests come amid a surge of Chinese migrants entering the U.S. through Mexico, part of a pattern previously exposed in Canadian diplomatic and intelligence reporting. In 1993, a confidential Canadian government study, “Passports of Convenience,” warned that Chinese government officials, in collusion with Triads and corrupt Latin American partners, were driving a multi-billion-dollar human smuggling business. That report predicted that tens of thousands of migrants from coastal Fujian province would flood North America, empowered by Beijing’s tacit support and organized crime’s global reach.

It also warned that mass migration from China in the 1990s came during a time of political upheaval, a trend that has apparently re-emerged while President Xi Jinping’s economic and political guidance has been increasingly questioned among mainland citizens, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and lockdowns inside China.

The 1993 report, obtained and analyzed exclusively by The Bureau, described how the Triads — particularly those connected with Chinese Communist networks in Fujian — would leverage human smuggling to extend their influence into American cities. The migrants, often saddled with debts of $50,000 or more, became trapped in forced labor, prostitution, or drug networks, coerced to repay their passage fees.

Citing legal filings in one U.S. Homeland Security case, it says a Triad member who reportedly smuggled 150 Fujianese migrants into New York stated that if fees aren’t paid “the victims are often tortured until the money is paid.”

Supporting these early warnings, a 1995 U.S. Department of Justice report echoed the Canadian findings, stating that “up to 100,000 Chinese aliens are smuggled into the United States each year,” with 85 percent originating from Fujian. The DOJ report also cited allegations of “negotiations between the Sun Yee On Triad and the Mainland Chinese Government,” suggesting that smuggling and criminal infiltration were tolerated — if not orchestrated — to extend China’s economic and political influence abroad.

That report added American investigators and immigration officials concluded it was nearly impossible to counter waves of illegal immigration from China with deportation orders, and the government should focus on “the larger menace working its way into U.S. cities: Chinese transnational criminal organizations.”

“To combat the growing threat of Asian organized crime in the West,” it says, “law enforcement officials must tackle this new global problem through an understanding of the Triad system and the nature of its threat to Western countries.”

In New England, the Braintree indictment shows how those old predictions have not only materialized but scaled up.

These networks operate by embedding Chinese nationals into illicit industries in North America, from black-market cannabis cultivation to high-end money laundering. Once inside, they channel profits back through complex underground banking channels that tie the North American drug economy to China’s export-driven cash flows and, ultimately, to powerful actors in Beijing.

In recent years, Maine has emerged as a strategic hotspot for illicit Chinese-controlled marijuana operations. As The Bureau has reported, the state’s vast rural areas, lax local oversight, and proximity to East Coast urban markets have made it a favored location for covert grow houses.

Texas Department of Public Safety brush team apprehends gotaways and smuggler in Hidalgo County.   Texas Department of Public Safety

From The Center Square

By Bethany Blankley

Prior to President Donald Trump authorizing targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday, federal agents and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers have been arresting Iranian nationals, nearly all men, in the U.S. illegally. In the last few months, federal prosecutors have also brought terrorism charges against Iranians, including those in the U.S. working for the Iranian government.

Iran is a designated state sponsor of terrorism. Iranian nationals illegally in the country are considered “special interest aliens” under federal law.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Sunday issued a warning to all Americans to be on a heightened threat alert.

“The ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States,” DHS warned. “Low-level cyber attacks against US networks by pro-Iranian hacktivists are likely, and cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian government may conduct attacks against US networks.

“Iran also has a long-standing commitment to target US Government officials it views as responsible for the death of an Iranian military commander killed in January 2020.”

U.S. officials have no idea how many Iranians are in the U.S. illegally because at least two million “gotaways” were recorded entering the U.S. during the Biden administration. Gotaways are those who illegally entered the U.S. between ports of entry who were not apprehended.

Key arrests include an Iranian living in the sanctuary jurisdiction of Natick, Mass., who is charged “with conspiring to export sophisticated electronic components from the United States to Iran in violation of U.S. export control and sanctions laws,” The Center Square reported. Authorities accuse the Iranian of illegally exporting the technological equipment to a company in Iran that contracts with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a US-designated foreign terrorist organization (FTO). The company allegedly manufactured drones used by the IRGC that killed U.S. soldiers stationed in Jordan.

Texas DPS troopers have arrested dozens of Iranian special interest aliens. Last October, DPS troopers questioned Iranians who illegally entered the U.S. near Eagle Pass, Texas, who said they came through Mexico and were headed to Florida, Las Vegas and San Francisco, The Center Square reported.

Last November and December, DPS troopers arrested Iranians in Maverick County after sounding the alarm about an increase of SIAs they were apprehending, The Center Square reported.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers also apprehended an Iranian with terrorist ties who illegally entered the U.S. near Buffalo, New York, The Center Square reported.

More recently, in April, two Iranians were charged in New York with conspiring to procure U.S. parts for Iranian drones, conspiring to provide material support to the IRGC and conspiring to commit money laundering. They remain at large. The charges “lay bare how U.S.-made technology ended up in the hands of the Iranian military to build attack drones,” DOJ National Security Division chief Sue Bai said.

Also in April, two Iranians and one Pakistani, were indicted in Virginia “for conspiring to provide and providing material support to Iran’s weapons of mass destruction program resulting in death and conspiring to commit violence against maritime navigation and maritime transport involving weapons of mass destruction resulting in death.” The Pakistani is awaiting trial; the Iranians remain at large.

Their involvement in maritime smuggling off the coast of Somalia led to the death of two Navy SEALs, according to the charges.

Also in April, a naturalized citizen working for the Federal Aviation Administration as a contractor pleaded guilty to charges of “acting and conspiring to act as an illegal agent of the Iranian government in the United States” for a period of five years. He was indicted last December in the District of Columbia for “infiltrating a U.S. agency with the intent of providing Iran with sensitive information,” including exfiltrating sensitive FAA documents to Iranian intelligence.

“The brazen acts of this defendant – acting against the United States while on U.S. soil – is a clear example of how our enemies are willing to take risks in order to do us harm,” U.S. Attorney Edward Martin said. “We want to remind anyone with access to our critical infrastructure about the importance of keeping that information out of the hands of our adversaries. I want to commend our prosecutors and law enforcement partners who secured a guilty plea that will keep our country safer.”

Also in April, an Iranian national was indicted in Ohio for operating a dark web marketplace selling methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl, heroin and oxycodone and other drugs; and for stealing financial information, using fraudulent identification documents, counterfeit currencies, and computer malware. Working with German and Lithuanian partners, he was charged, servers and other infrastructure were seized, and drugs and other contraband were stopped from entering the U.S., DOJ Criminal Division head Matthew Galeotti said.

Also in April, ICE Homeland Security Investigations in New York announced a civil forfeiture action halting an Iranian oil sale scheme that went on for years under the Biden administration.

The scheme involved facilitating the shipment, storage and sale of Iranian petroleum product owned by the National Iranian Oil Company for the benefit of the IRGC and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, designated FTOs. The facilitators allegedly claimed the Iranian oil was from Malaysia, manipulated tanker identification information, falsified documents, paid storage fees in U.S. dollars and conducted transactions with U.S. financial institutions. The federal government seized $47 million in proceeds from the sale.

The complaint alleges they provided material support to the IRGC and IRGC-QF because profits support “proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, support for terrorism, and both domestic and international human rights abuses.”

Last December, a federal court in the District of Columbia ordered the forfeiture of nearly $12 million connected with Iran’s illicit petroleum industry, involving Triliance Petrochemical Company, the IRGC and Quds Forces. FBI Tampa and Minneapolis were involved in the investigation.

Examples also exist of Iranians making false statements when applying for naturalization, including an Iranian in Tampa indicted last year.