A boat carrying 22 people was intercepted about one mile offshore of Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo on Sept. 16, and federal authorities have since arrested three men accused of piloting or organizing the crossing. The vessel had been tracked overnight from the Bahamas, and the people aboard included migrants from China, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, according to a federal criminal complaint.
The U.S. Coast Guard stopped the boat off the Florida Keys, according to the Miami Herald, after Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office radar detected it heading east from Bimini in the Bahamas on Sept. 15. The Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations then tracked the 27-foot twin-outboard cabin cruiser as it made its way from Bimini toward South Florida before agents moved in near Ocean Reef Club.
Federal agents reported the boat was smuggling 22 people from the Bahamas to South Florida, per the same account, though the detailed passenger breakdown in the complaint lists six people from Ecuador, 13 from China and one from the Dominican Republic. U.S. Customs transferred the 20 migrants to Coast Guard Cutter Pablo Valent, and those aboard will be processed for removal from the United States.
Three Men Charged With Encouraging Illegal Entry
Federal authorities arrested Yunio Pelegrin Luis, William Ortiz Romero and Flavio Lema Mayancela in connection with the operation. Per the criminal complaint, Luis is a 30-year-old Cuban national identified as the operator of the boat who has no authorization to be in the United States. Ortiz Romero, 32, and Lema Mayancela, 33, are both from Ecuador and had previously been ordered removed from the country, the complaint states.
All three face a charge of encouraging and inducing aliens to enter the United States, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison. The article notes that Luis, Ortiz Romero and Mayancela were scheduled to appear before a judge in Key West Tuesday.
A Well-Worn Route Through the Bahamas
The Bahamas-to-South Florida route remains active for human smuggling, with boat captains reportedly receiving thousands of dollars to transport people from the islands to the United States. Just last month, Customs Air and Marine Operations agents stopped a boat carrying 19 people about 22 nautical miles from Miami-Dade County — a case in which the operator, identified as 36-year-old Bahamian citizen Henryk Erris Walkes, was found to be unauthorized to enter the country himself, according to the Miami Herald. Authorities said that boat's passengers included eight people from Ecuador, six from the Dominican Republic and one from Venezuela.
The same route has carried other nationalities in recent memory. Federal agents intercepted several boats smuggling Chinese nationals from the Bahamas to South Florida in 2025, including one vessel that offloaded 26 people from China in Coral Gables. People from around the world travel to the Bahamas with enough money to pay boat captains for passage to the United States, per the same account, even as combined enforcement efforts under the DeSantis and Biden administrations, and later increased Coast Guard, Customs and Navy patrols in the Caribbean under the Trump administration, have slowed maritime migration specifically from Cuba and Haiti.
Echoes of the 2023 Keys Surge
The current case is a far smaller episode than the crisis that gripped the Florida Keys in early 2023, when landings spiked to as many as five to 10 per day following the Christmas holiday. The Coast Guard had stopped more than 4,000 Cubans at sea since Oct. 1 of that year, and U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard crews described it at the time as the largest escalation of boat migrations in South Florida and the Keys in nearly a decade, according to WTSP.
That surge briefly shut down Dry Tortugas National Park to visitors after hundreds of Cuban migrants arrived there, with 427 landing since the New Year's holiday weekend and 337 later transported by Coast Guard Cutter Maple to Key West for processing, per the Miami Herald. Separately, 130 Haitian migrants arrived in Key Largo on an overloaded sailboat that same week. Since August 2022, Task Force partners had interdicted 7,784 refugees at sea and recorded 4,401 landed refugees, including 65 confirmed deaths in fiscal year 2022, according to WGCU.
