28 Florida men charged with smuggling Cubans - The number of Cubans arriving in the U.S. illegally has risen by double digits in each of the last four years as the multimillion-dollar human-smuggling industry has flourished.

Federal grand juries in Key West and Miami have indicted 28 South Florida men on charges of smuggling immigrants into the United States, the U.S. attorney’s office said Tuesday.

The dramatic move was apparently aimed at the thriving industry in which speedboat operators charge Cubans thousands of dollars apiece to be spirited out of their homeland.

The indictments stem from 13 smuggling operations intercepted over the last two years. The charges — involving the thwarted smuggling of more than 225 foreign nationals, all but 11 of them Cuban — could send each defendant to prison for as long as 10 years. “*

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