A 40-year-old Laredo man was sentenced Tuesday to 110 months in federal prison for conspiring to distribute fentanyl, capping a case that began with a 2024 raid uncovering 10 firearms, including a machine gun, stashed inside his home. U.S. District Judge John A. Kazen also ordered Rolando Soliz to serve four years of supervised release once his prison term ends.
According to the Department of Justice, Soliz pleaded guilty on September 16, 2025, months before facing the judge in a Southern District of Texas courtroom. The sentencing followed a lengthy investigation that traced back to July 31, 2024, when federal agents executed search warrants on Soliz's apartment and his mother's residence in Laredo after observing hand-to-hand drug transactions and stopping a customer found carrying fentanyl.
What agents found inside those two properties painted a picture of an armed and well-funded operation. The DOJ reports that agents recovered 24.8 grams of fentanyl that had been flushed into a toilet bowl, more than $16,000 in cash, and 10 firearms — including an un-serialized short-barreled rifle that had been illegally converted to fire as a fully automatic machine gun.
A Felon Barred From Owning Any Firearms
The weapons cache carried extra legal weight because Soliz was not supposed to have access to any firearms at all. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Kazen noted that Soliz had four prior felony convictions and was legally barred from owning firearms under his criminal record, according to the same DOJ account. Federal law, specifically 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), prohibits convicted felons from possessing any firearm or ammunition, while separate federal weapons statutes strictly ban illegal machine gun conversions like the one found in Soliz's arsenal.
Judge Kazen also pointed to the broader toll of Soliz's dealing, noting that he distributed fentanyl during a period when the drug was actively driving up death tolls in the Laredo community, per the DOJ. The un-serialized machine gun conversion was serious enough on its own to trigger a formal indictment; a federal grand jury charged Soliz with four counts, including possession of a machine gun, back in August 2024, and he originally faced up to 20 years in prison on that indictment alone.
Task Force Cooperation Across Local and Federal Lines
The case against Soliz was built through cooperation among the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Webb County District Attorney's Office, and Webb County Constables, the DOJ says. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew P. Hakala-Finch prosecuted the case for the federal government.
Soliz's sentence lands amid a string of similarly aggressive federal prosecutions targeting armed fentanyl dealers around Laredo. In January 2025, federal prosecutors secured a 240-month sentence for 23-year-old Jose Antonio Carlos III after he distributed fentanyl that caused the fatal overdose of a 15-year-old, a case investigated by the DEA Laredo Overdose Taskforce. And in July 2025, U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison sentenced 33-year-old Laredo resident Raul Garcia Jr., identified as a member of the Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos gang, to 100 months after search warrants at his residence turned up fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine, cash, and a stolen firearm.
Border Corridor Sees Even Larger Sentences
Street-level cases like Soliz's sit alongside far larger prosecutions tied to the drug corridor running through the Laredo port of entry. In August 2025, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Texas secured a 480-month sentence for a gang member affiliated with the Partidos Revolucionarios Mexicanos, tied to large-scale fentanyl and heroin smuggling that moved product from Laredo to major cities across the country.
The pattern reflects a national sentencing trend as well. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission's Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report, federal firearms offenses ranked as the third most common federal crime category with 8,131 cases, while average federal sentence lengths for fentanyl trafficking have climbed compared to prior years. Methamphetamine trafficking still carried the single highest average federal sentence length, at 100 months, per the commission's data.
Open questions remain about how weapons like the converted machine gun found in Soliz's home make their way into street-level distribution networks along the U.S.–Mexico border, an issue federal investigators continue to examine as similar cases surface across South Texas.
