San Diego CBP officer sentenced to 15 years for allowing drugs through inspection lanes

A San Diego judge on Friday sentenced a former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to 15 years in federal prison for conspiring with a Mexican drug cartel and accepting payments from the group in exchange for allowing vehicles filled with fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin to pass through his inspection lanes at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.

Diego Bonillo, a 31-year-old U.S. Army veteran who grew up in San Diego and Tijuana, told the federal judge that he got caught up in the conspiracy because of threats he received. “If I didn’t do what I had to, consequences would have happened,” he told the judge Friday.

But prosecutors said Bonillo and his defense team produced no evidence that he or his family had been threatened. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Van Demark told the judge it was greed alone that motivated Bonillo to abuse his power.

“He fabricated the story about the threat,” Van Demark told U.S. District Judge Ruth Montenegro. “It never happened.”

In handing down the sentence, Montenegro said Bonillo understood the scope of his misdeeds, abused his position of trust and used that position to enrich himself while undermining CBP’s main goal.

More than 40 CBP officers and other federal agents attended Friday’s hearing, filling both the main courtroom and an overflow room. Van Demark told the judge they were there to support the government, not Bonillo.

“The defendant betrayed his fellow officers,” Van Demark said.

FBI agents arrested Bonillo and another CBP officer, Jesse Clark Garcia, in May 2024 on suspicion that they were both working for the same unnamed cartel to allow drug-laden vehicles through their inspection lanes in Tecate and Otay Mesa.

Garcia pleaded guilty in early July to nine counts of conspiracy and drug importation, admitting that he began allowing drugs through his inspection lanes as early as April 2021. Bonillo pleaded guilty a few weeks later to three similar counts.

According to court records, Garcia came under investigation first, and as agents were gathering evidence against him, they learned that a suspected drug courier who often crossed through Garcia’s lanes in Tecate also frequently crossed through Bonillo’s lanes in Otay Mesa.

In a sentencing memorandum and in court on Friday, Van Demark said Bonillo, who rose to the rank of sergeant while in the Army, originally joined CBP in December 2021 but left six months later for a more lucrative job with a private company. He rejoined CBP in April 2023.

Van Demark said that in applications to join CBP and the Drug Enforcement Administration after discharging from the Army, Bonillo failed to disclose that his father was a convicted drug trafficker and an uncle is also suspected of trafficking drugs.

Prosecutors believe Bonillo began working with the cartel around October 2023, because that’s when he started using a second phone with a Mexican number. Investigators learned about that phone through an interview with another CBP officer with whom Bonillo had a romantic relationship.

A search warrant for the iCloud account connected to that phone turned up a key piece of evidence in the case — an encryption code consisting of emojis that Bonillo and the drug traffickers used to communicate what times he would be working, and in which lanes.

For example, a chicken emoji, an icy face, a smiley face with heart eyes and an alien head all corresponded to the slightly different morning shifts he might work. Each inspection lane was denoted with different emojis as well — a peach meant he’d be stationed in lane 4, a smiley face with a cowboy hat meant he’d be working lane 6 and a brain signified he’d be in lane 13.

Prosecutors said they successfully cross-checked the encryption key with Bonillo’s actual work shifts and lane assignments.

Defense attorney Marc Carlos argued Friday that prosecutors failed to turn up evidence that Bonillo was being paid large sums of money by the cartel. He said prosecutors could only account for about $22,000 of suspicious money despite alleging that Bonillo was being paid tens of thousands of dollars for each drug-laden vehicle he ushered into the country.

“If money and greed were part of this, you’d see bigger purchases,” Carlos told the judge.

Carlos also argued that Bonillo took part in the conspiracy under duress after being threatened, arguing that Bonillo was scared of what would have happened if he reported the threat to his supervisors. Carlos said that Bonillo’s mother was killed late last month in a hit-and-run crash in Mexico and said Bonillo isn’t sure if his case may have played a role in what happened.

“He’ll live the rest of his life wondering if he had anything to do with her death,” Carlos told the judge.

Van Demark told the judge that while Bonillo’s mother’s death was a tragedy, it should have no impact on the sentence. The prosecutor also told the judge that in his time screening vehicles, Bonillo “never once caught a loaded vehicle,” while admitting in his plea agreement to allowing hundreds of pounds of drugs into the country.

Garcia, Bonillo’s co-defendant, is set to be sentenced next month. Meanwhile, prosecutors earlier this year charged three other San Diego-area CBP officers in a similar but apparently unrelated case. Those officers have pleaded not guilty to the charges pending against them.