Smuggling boat with people from China, Ecuador, Cuba is stopped off Florida Keys

David Goodhue, Miami Herald on Sep 22, 2026

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MIAMI — The U.S. Coast Guard stopped a boat off the Florida Keys smuggling people from China, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic last week, federal agents say.

The Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Air and Marine Operations began tracking the twin outboard engine 27-foot cabin cruiser late last Tuesday, Sept. 15, as the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office radar picked it up heading east from Bimini in the Bahamas, according to a federal criminal complaint filed Monday.

A Coast Guard boat intercepted the vessel around 1:30 a.m. the next day about a mile offshore of the gated Ocean Reef Club in North Key Largo, the Homeland Security Investigations complaint states.

Three men were arrested.

The boat’s operator, 30-year-old Yunio Pelegrin Luis, is a Cuban national with no authorization to be in the U.S., the complaint states. Two other men, 32-year-old William Ortiz Romero and Flavio Lema Mayancela, 33, are from Ecuador, and had both been ordered removed from the U.S., according to the complaint.

All three face charges of encouraging and inducing “aliens” to enter the United States, a penalty punishable by up to five years in prison.

U.S. Customs said in a social-media post that there were six other people from Ecuador on the boat, 13 people from China and one from the Dominican Republic. They were transferred to the Coast Guard Cutter Pablo Valent and will be processed for removal from the country, Customs said.

Luis, Ortiz Romero and Mayancela were scheduled to appear before a judge on Tuesday afternoon in Key West. There was no information in court files about their legal representation.

The Bahamas-to-South Florida route remains active for human smuggling, and it is common for people from all over the globe to travel to the island country and pay boat captains thousands of dollars to take them to the United States.

Last month, Customs Air and Marine Operations agents stopped a boat about 22 nautical miles from Miami-Dade County carrying 19 people from Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

In early 2025, federal agents intercepted several boats smuggling Chinese nationals to South Florida from the Bahamas, and one boat made it to shore, offloading 26 people from China in Coral Gables.

This type of maritime migration is different from the once-common arrivals of rafts and other homemade vessels that Cubans are known to use to escape their homeland, and the overloaded freighters and sailboats used by people fleeing Haiti. South Florida, particularly the Keys, just a few years ago saw arrivals of Cubans weekly and sometimes daily.

There were also several arrivals of larger boats carrying hundreds of people from Haiti on the shores of Monroe and Miami-Dade counties between 2022 and 2023.

The DeSantis and Biden administrations increased enforcement of the Florida Straits after hundreds of Cuban migrants arrived at the Dry Tortugas National Park off Key West in January 2023, forcing federal authorities to briefly shut it down to visitors.

The combined effort significantly slowed maritime migration from Cuba and Haiti, and it dwindled much further with the immigration crackdown by the Trump administration, which also increased Coast Guard, Customs and Navy patrols in the Caribbean.