OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:51 AM – Saturday, April 25, 2026
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) partnered to arrest 60 people onboard three intercepted smuggling boats off the California coast.
CBP announced on Friday that its Air and Marine Operations (AMO) crews worked from April 17th to the 21st, first interdicting a 24-foot boat near San Clemente Island with 13 people on board, including seven men and six women, one of them a juvenile. The boat was brought to Ballast Point Naval Base on the Point Loma peninsula for processing.
The agency’s news release said that the next day, April 18th, it apprehended another boat located 80 nautical miles southwest of San Diego. The AMO’s Long Beach Marine Unit crew worked with the USCG’s fast response cutter Florence Finch to intercept the vessel near San Nicolas Island and arrest 29
Mexican nationals. The individuals and the boat were transported by the Coast Guard to Newport Harbor and handed over to U.S. Border Patrol.
The third operation on April 21st involved a 25-foot cuddy cabin boat that contained 18 Mexican nationals detected a day earlier near the coast of Ensenada, Mexico. The USCG’s cutter Terrel Horne transported this last interdicted group to the U.S. Border Patrol for processing.
CBP said that many of the 60 individuals now in custody have criminal histories with past offenses, including driving under the influence, felony hit-and-run, making false police reports, drug possession, active warrants for resisting arrest, trespassing, burglary, possession of burglary tools, receiving stolen property, drug trafficking, aggravated assault with a weapon and domestic violence.
“These interdictions show the great lengths dangerous criminals will go to avoid apprehension, including taking to the open ocean in unsafe, overcrowded vessels,” said AMO Southwest Region Executive Director Hunter Robinson. “Their desperation puts lives at risk. Our crews are dedicated to stopping these dangerous individuals far from shore to keep our communities safe.”
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