It seemed like a harmless exchange of tasks.
Jesse Garcia, a U.S. Border Patrol officer, was monitoring the pedestrian lane at the Tecate border crossing on Aug. 22, 2023, when he asked a fellow officer to switch assignments so Garcia could work the main vehicle lane.
While working the vehicle lane, Garcia admitted Amanda Mancera, who was driving a Toyota Camry. At a U.S. checkpoint later that day, border agents discovered nearly four kilograms of fentanyl and 216 kilograms of cocaine in Mancera’s vehicle.
Federal prosecutors said it was no coincidence that Mancera crossed the border while Garcia was working that lane. Between 2021 and this year, Garcia and another Border Patrol agent working the Otay Mesa crossing, Diego Bonillo, helped a Mexican drug trafficking organization move massive amounts of drugs across the border. In exchange, the agents received tens of thousands of dollars for each vehicle they admitted into the country.
In May, Bonillo and Garcia were charged with 11 counts of importing methamphetamine, fentanyl and cocaine. They face more than a decade in prison.
The arrests were first reported by the San Diego Union Tribune after a search warrant was unsealed Tuesday in the case. Garcia and Bonillo have pleaded not guilty. Their attorneys did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The agents were arrested in May following an investigation by the FBI's Border Corruption Task Force. The cartel that allegedly paid the agents was not named in legal documents, but prosecutors said the two men “profited handsomely” from the tens of thousands of dollars they received for their help.
Garcia was a far bigger spender than a Border Patrol agent, buying $2,000 worth of Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags and clothing, prosecutors say. He also owned a $65,000 GMC Yukon, a home in San Diego and a horse racing business, all while building a large ranch in Mexico, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California. Despite all his purchases, Garcia reported income of about $5,000 a month.
Bonillo, whose annual salary as a border agent was about $65,000, spent more than $13,000 on travel expenses between November and March. Bonillo was arrested in May in Las Vegas, where he was staying at the Aria Resort and had $2,000 in tickets to a Canelo Alvarez boxing match.
The case closely resembled that of Leonard Darnell George, who was convicted in June of working for two separate drug trafficking organizations and allowing them to move cars full of drugs through his border lane in 2021 and 2022. George was paid about $17,000 per vehicle, according to investigators.
Prosecutors say Bonillo and Garcia followed a similar strategy.
Garcia began allowing drugs into the facility in 2021, according to prosecutors.
On April 18, 2021, Vanessa Valdovinos attempted to enter the United States through the small Tecate border crossing. There were two open lanes for crossing and Valdovinos moved into Garcia’s lane even though the other lane was empty. Valdovinos was instructed to use the empty lane and hesitated before “ultimately yielding,” prosecutors said. When they searched her car, agents found dozens of kilograms of cocaine and methamphetamine.
Of the seven times Valdovinos crossed the Tecate border before his arrest, four were through Garcia's lane, prosecutors said.
A video on his phone shows Valdovinos discussing which lane to cross so he could enter the United States through Garcia's lane, according to federal agents.
In February 2024, Garcia allowed Nayeli Viridriana Servin Vega to cross the border at Tecate even though she had been flagged as “high risk.” She claimed she received the alert late, but an audit of her computer showed she received the alert 55 seconds before admitting her into the country, prosecutors said. She was later arrested in Chula Vista with kilos of methamphetamine in her car, according to federal authorities.
Records show that Servín not only crossed in the Garcia lane at Tecate, but just months earlier, she also made a selective attempt to cross in the Bonillo lane at the border at Otay Mesa, prosecutors said. She crossed 32 times at the Otay Mesa crossing and five of those times were in the Bonillo lane, according to prosecutors. Of the other 27 crossings, she went through 25 different officer lanes.
“The telephone evidence reflects that [Servin] She was charged and in contact with known co-conspirators on the dates she crossed [Bonillo’s] lanes, and not at other times when he crossed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Shauna Prewitt wrote in court documents.
Since their arrests in May, Garcia and Bonillo have been held without bail, accused of being a danger to the community and a flight risk, according to a federal magistrate judge.
The duo are due back in court on October 25.
