An American woman has pleaded guilty to helping migrants sneak into the United States from Canada last year. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Stacey Taylor, 43, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., was stopped by border patrol agents as she tried to smuggle migrants from India across the border in the early morning hours of Jan. 20, 2025. Agents stopped her vehicle near Churubusco, N.Y., about five kilometres south of the border with Quebec, and found three men from India and one from Canada who had just crossed into the U.S. “without inspection, in the freezing cold” in a wooded area. After searching her cellphone, they found coordinates for the migrants and instructions on picking them up. She later admitted to driving them further into the U.S. and was to be paid. “Additional review of Taylor’s phone revealed text messages that indicated that she had been involved in multiple other human smuggling events in the days prior. Following her January 2025 arrest, she was subsequently stopped in a suspected alien smuggling venture in August 2025 and was again implicated in alien smuggling in September 2025,” the DOJ said. Taylor pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiracy to engage in alien smuggling and four counts of alien smuggling for profit. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 3 and faces a minimum penalty of five years in prison. She is the latest person to plead guilty to human smuggling over the Canada-U.S. border in recent months. Last July, another human smuggler, Stephanie Square, 53, a dual Canadian-American citizen from the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, pleaded guilty to the same offence. According to court documents, Square was a U.S. leader of a human smuggling organization that regularly trafficked migrants across the U.S.-Canada border in Akwesasne, the First Nations territory on the Quebec-Ontario border that also straddles the New York state border. Square played a key role in an operation that ended with the death of a family of five, including two kids under three years old, in the St. Lawrence River in March 2023.
