Two Men Sentenced to 29 Years in Deadly Del Rio Smuggling Conspiracy

A single-vehicle crash that killed three people near Del Rio in October 2022 ended last Friday with federal prison sentences totaling more than 29 years for two men prosecutors say were central to the alien-smuggling network that caused it.

Jerry Lee Anderson, 29, of Spring, Texas, and Orlin Wilfredo Padilla-Murillo, 25, a Honduran national, were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Del Rio on April 3 after both pleaded guilty to charges stemming from a conspiracy that operated from April 2022 through January 2023. The October 2022 crash, a single-vehicle accident, killed the load driver and two people being smuggled and left two others seriously injured.

Court records describe Padilla-Murillo as a recruiter who arranged load drivers to collect migrants in Eagle Pass and transport them toward Houston, earning roughly $3,500 for each person moved and splitting proceeds with co-conspirators. Anderson's phone numbers and payment records placed him repeatedly inside the same network of smuggling events that investigators traced across south-central Texas over the course of nearly nine months.

The case was built in significant part on digital evidence. WhatsApp messages and CashApp transaction records recovered from co-conspirators' phones linked both defendants to numerous smuggling runs, connecting them through communications and payment chains that prosecutors say ran throughout the conspiracy.

Investigators documented a series of interdictions tied to the operation. An immigration inspection near Brackettville found 10 people concealed inside a recreational vehicle. In November 2022, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers stopped a horse trailer and found eight illegal aliens packed inside. Galveston County sheriff's deputies and U.S. Border Patrol agents made additional stops that prosecutors connected to the same network.

The investigation was led by ICE Homeland Security Investigations out of the Del Rio office, with U.S. Border Patrol, Texas DPS, and local law enforcement contributing across multiple counties. The case is filed as U.S. v. Michael Desmond Kennedy et al., Case No. 2:22cr2324, in the Western District of Texas, Del Rio Division, with additional co-defendants named in the indictment.

Anderson and Padilla-Murillo were arrested together on November 1, 2023, more than a year after the crash that made their prosecution a federal priority. The combined sentence reflects a push by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Texas to hold accountable the organizers behind smuggling operations that have repeatedly killed the people they profit from transporting.