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A Pakistani man admitted in federal court to running a four-year smuggling operation that brought migrants into the US disguised as film crew workers.

Getting into it: According to the DOJ, Abbas Ali Haider, 49, from Sialkot, set up two sham Pakistani businesses (Diamond TV World Productions and Multimedia Advertising Ltd) and spent the next four years (September 2019 through September 2023) using them to score travel visas for Pakistani nationals heading to Ecuador, Cuba, and Colombia. On paper, they were film workers headed abroad for jobs. In reality, every trip ended at the southern US border.

After landing in Latin America or the Caribbean, the migrants were handed off to Haider’s crew, who moved them north and walked them across the border into California, Texas, and Arizona. Each migrant paid up to $40,000 to make the trip. Prosecutors stopped short of putting a number on how many people Haider actually moved, but estimates put it in the hundreds.

A federal grand jury first indicted Haider in May 2024 after a multi-agency investigation led by Homeland Security Investigations. He traveled to Mexico from Pakistan in late 2024 and was arrested there in January 2025, then extradited to Arizona in July 2025. After pleading guilty, he is now scheduled to be sentenced July 30 and faces a minimum of three years in prison and a maximum of 10 years, with a federal district court judge determining the final sentence based on US sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors.