A court document cited by La Presse in prior reporting on the case.

A major figure in an alleged Mexican cartel human-trafficking network pleaded guilty in a Montreal courthouse last week and now faces removal from Canada for conspiring to organize and facilitate the illegal entry of migrants into the United States.

The conviction targets Edgar Gonzalez de Paz, 37, a Mexican national identified in court evidence as a key organizer in a Montreal-based smuggling network that La Presse documented in March through numerous legal filings.

According to the Canada Border Services Agency, Gonzalez de Paz’s guilty plea acknowledges that he arranged a clandestine crossing for seven migrants on January 27–28, 2024, in exchange for money. He had earlier been arrested and charged with avoiding examination and returning to Canada without authorization.

Breaking the story in March, La Presse reported: “A Mexican criminal organization has established itself in Montreal, where it is making a fortune by illegally smuggling hundreds of migrants across the Canada-U.S. border. Thanks to the seizure of two accounting ledgers, Canadian authorities have gained unprecedented access to the group’s secrets, which they hope to dismantle in the coming months.”

La Presse said the Mexico-based organization ran crossings in both directions — Quebec to the United States and vice versa — through roughly ten collaborators, some family-linked, charging $5,000 to $6,000 per trip and generating at least $1 million in seven months.

The notebooks seized by CBSA listed clients, guarantors, recruiters in Mexico, and accomplices on the U.S. side. In one April 20, 2024 interception near the border, police stopped a vehicle registered to Gonzalez de Paz and, according to evidence cited by La Presse, identified him as one of the “main organizers,” operating without legal status from a René-Lévesque Boulevard condo that served as headquarters.

Seizures included cellphones, a black notebook, and cocaine. A roommate’s second notebook helped authorities tally about 200 migrants and more than $1 million in receipts.

“This type of criminal organization is ruthless and often threatens customers if they do not pay, or places them in a vulnerable situation,” a CBSA report filed as evidence stated, according to La Presse.

The Montreal-based organization first appeared on the radar in a rural community of about 400 inhabitants in the southern Montérégie region bordering New York State, La Presse reported, citing court documents.

On the U.S. side of the line, in the Swanton Sector (Vermont and adjoining northern New York and New Hampshire), authorities reported an exceptional surge in 2022–2023 — driven largely by Mexican nationals rerouting via Canada — foreshadowing the Mexican-cartel smuggling described in the CBSA case.

Gonzalez de Paz had entered Canada illegally in 2023, according to La Presse. When officers arrested him, CBSA agents seized 30 grams of cocaine, two cellphones, and a black notebook filled with handwritten notes. In his apartment, they found clothing by Balenciaga, a luxury brand whose T-shirts retail for roughly $1,000 each.

Investigators have linked this case to another incident at the same address involving a man named Mario Alberto Perez Gutierrez, a resident of the same condo as early as 2023.

Perez Gutierrez was accompanied by several men known to Canadian authorities for cocaine trafficking, receiving stolen goods, armed robbery, or loitering in the woods near the American border, according to a Montreal Police Service (SPVM) report filed as evidence.

The CBSA argued before the immigration tribunal that Gonzalez de Paz belonged to a group active in human and drug trafficking — “activities usually orchestrated by Mexican cartels.”

As The Bureau has previously reported, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Cabinet was warned in 2016 that lifting visa requirements for Mexican visitors would “facilitate travel to Canada by Mexicans with criminal records,” potentially including “drug smugglers, human smugglers, recruiters, money launderers and foot soldiers.”

CBSA “serious-crime” flags tied to Mexican nationals rose sharply after the December 2016 visa change. Former CBSA officer Luc Sabourin, in a sworn affidavit cited by The Bureau, alleged that hundreds of cartel-linked operatives entered Canada following the visa lift.

The closure of Roxham Road in 2023 altered migrant flows and increased reliance on organized smugglers — a shift reflected in the ledger-mapped Montreal network and a spike in U.S. northern-border encounters.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Emily Kopp

A close collaborator of virologists who studied coronaviruses in Wuhan frequently advised America’s top spy agency in the lead-up to the pandemic, and that same agency suppressed intelligence on the parallels between COVID-19 and their research.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.

Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.

The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”

The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.

“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”

Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.

Protecting Their Own

Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.

Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.

What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.

One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.

When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”

Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.

Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.

But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.

Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.

Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.

Unanswered Questions

Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.

An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.

The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.

In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.

Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”