A San Diego federal judge sentenced Isaac Jimenez to 12 years in a migrant-kidnapping case.

A 12-year sentence after a guilty plea is the judgment on the counts he admitted. It is not a finding that Jimenez held anyone captive himself. Times of San Diego reported prosecutors said he did not abduct the victims or hold them. The same story calls the woman 20. A U.S. Attorney's Office account calls her 21. Courthouse News names her Vivianna Aguirre and names the man Carlos Cabrera. The office's release uses the initials C.G.C. for the man and does not print those names.

Times of San Diego, publishing a City News Service story on Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026, and updating it Sunday, reported that a San Diego man was sentenced Friday to 12 years in prison for taking part in a scheme that held migrants and demanded ransom from their families. Courthouse News Service reported the same Friday hearing. Both identified the defendant as Isaac Jimenez and the judge as U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino, and both reported she ordered $24,500 in restitution for funeral expenses and a portion of the ransom payments. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California, in its sentencing release, lists him as 30, a U.S. citizen living in Tijuana who previously lived in Escondido, and gives the case number as 25cr2648-JLS. Courthouse News also reported he is 30. Times of San Diego did not print an age. Courthouse News reported he pleaded guilty in June. Times of San Diego reported he pleaded guilty earlier this year and did not give the month. A sentence imposed on a guilty plea is the judgment on the admitted counts.

The two kidnapped people are not described the same way. Courthouse News named 20-year-old Vivianna Aguirre and 30-year-old Carlos Cabrera, and identified Cabrera's wife in court as Jennifer Martinez. Times of San Diego did not print those names. It described a man who is a father of four and a 20-year-old woman from Tijuana, and it attributed that account to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The office's own release describes a father of four U.S.-citizen children, identified there as C.G.C., and a 21-year-old woman from Tijuana. Twenty and twenty-one are both in the weekend coverage. They are not the same age. Courthouse News reported Aguirre's father, identified as Jose, told the court the call came on the night of Dec. 5, 2024. Times of San Diego placed Jimenez's agreement to coordinate her smuggling in December 2024 and put the fee at $7,000.

What the government says Jimenez did is a money role, not a holding role. Times of San Diego, citing the U.S. Attorney's Office, reported that in September 2024 he collected $15,000 from the kidnapped man's family and delivered it to co-conspirators in Mexico, that more money was demanded, and that contact stopped when the family could not pay. The office's release says the same $15,000 pickup and says that when the family could no longer pay, the kidnappers threatened to give the location of C.G.C.'s body. Times of San Diego reported that after the woman was abducted, the kidnappers demanded $30,000, that video calls showed guns pointed at her and kicks to her head and chest, and that the family sent $10,000 and she was not released. Times of San Diego reported prosecutors said Jimenez did not personally abduct the victims or hold them, and that to the best of his knowledge both were killed in Mexico. Courthouse News reported prosecutor Robert Miller told the court Jimenez knew by September 2024 that co-conspirators were holding people. The office's release says that as he became more involved he learned migrants were being held for more money, that he received photographs and videos of kidnappings and murders, and that he kept participating. The release also says he was convicted of alien-smuggling offenses in 2015 and 2017 and arrested again in 2022. Courthouse News, citing the Department of Justice, reported he had been involved in human smuggling since at least 2015. Those earlier cases are not Friday's sentence.

The hearing is where the accounts of the bodies split. Times of San Diego reported both people remain missing, and it also reported the woman's father said a clandestine grave held two teeth later confirmed to be hers and other bones that match her DNA, and that the search for her complete remains continues. Courthouse News reported Aguirre's family recovered teeth and bone fragments believed to be hers, and that neither family has the body. The office's release describes one victim as dead and another as missing. Its account says the woman was found dead in Tijuana and that the man is believed to have been killed in Mexico by Jimenez's co-conspirators. A missing-person account, a partial-remains account, and a found-dead account are all in the coverage of the same Friday. Jimenez told the families, "I don't know what happened to your family members. I don't know where they are," Courthouse News and Times of San Diego reported. He told the judge, "For a long time, I thought I was helping people. Now, I realize that it was never that way," Times of San Diego reported. Defense attorney Douglas Brown wrote that no one had been extorted or harmed in his earlier smuggling, that Jimenez expected these two people to cross safely, and that he turned himself in, Times of San Diego reported. Courthouse News reported Brown said cartel activity had made the work more dangerous and that his client had been threatened with death if he refused. Miller told the court Jimenez came in only after the families posted his picture, and that he kept smuggling after he knew about the abductions, Times of San Diego reported. Courthouse News reported Sammartino called the killings the most deliberate and unnecessary loss of life she had seen in a long time. The 12 years and the $24,500 are what she imposed.