A British woman who was caught at O’Hare International Airport with nearly 100 pounds of cocaine was sentenced to six years in prison on Monday, resolving the case after a bizarre interlude in which prosecutors accused her of trying to induce Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport her in order to flee the country.
Kimberly Hall, 29, appeared before a judge at the Leighton Criminal Court Building and admitted to a drug offense in exchange for the minimum sentence on the count. She spoke softly to indicate she understood the proceedings, but otherwise declined to make a statement.
Hall’s case was splashed across her hometown British tabloids in the wake of her arrest in August of last year after she landed in Chicago, where she was connecting between Cancun, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. As she tried to clear customs, officers searched her bag and found 21 bundles of cocaine weighing around 43 kilograms, according to court documents. They had an estimated street value of around $6.2 million.
She admitted she agreed to deliver the bags to someone in Manchester, the documents say.
A judge initially ordered Hall to surrender her passport and report to the county’s electronic monitoring program, court records say, but she was later detained in Cook County Jail after prosecutors — scrambling after they learned she was booked for a deportation flight back to the United Kingdom — sought to jail her, according to records.
After a foreign national is charged with a crime, normally federal officials put what is known as an immigration hold on the case so that the immigration issue can be handled after the case is resolved. Earlier this year, though, USA Today reported an increasing number of cases in which ICE did not wait for the justice system to resolve a case before deporting an individual.
Hall, according to prosecutors, tried to use the Trump administration’s attempts to increase deportations to secure a free flight home to the United Kingdom in order to avoid standing trial on serious charges. Her attorney, though, disputed that account, arguing that overzealous immigration officers tried to deport her when she went to a federal immigration facility to ask for information about how to obtain authorization to work.
“I have to say, it’s all new for me,” Judge Michael McHale said during an earlier hearing, where he ordered she stay in jail due to the deportation risk.
Whether on purpose or by accident, Hall was taken by federal agents to a facility in Indiana and ticketed for an airline flight before prosecutors realized what happened. They were notified when the Cook County sheriff’s office received back her electronic monitoring band, according to court records.
According to the agreement, Hall has about two more years to serve because the offense is served at 50% time and she already has credit for about a year.
Her attorney, Brandon Carter, previously said Hall brought in the drugs under duress.
“Kimberly is obviously a very small fish in a grander scheme of things,” he said.
