Thread: Agents Find More Than 70 Undocumented Immigrants In Home

Invite 70 illegals to John McCain's office.

NOOOOOOOO He's probably got one of the machines to make fake green cards. LOL

Originally Posted by JuniusJnr

Invite 70 illegals to John McCain's office.

NOOOOOOOO He's probably got one of the machines to make fake green cards. LOL

Looks as if MS-13 had a hand in this operation.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... california

70 Illegal Migrants Found in Raid
Agents find the captives locked in 'utter squalor' in Willowbrook duplex. Efforts to find leaders of human smuggling rings have proved futile.
By Andrew Blankstein and Anna Gorman
Times Staff Writers

March 4, 2006

Nearly 70 illegal immigrants packed into a small "drop house" in Willowbrook were discovered Friday by law enforcement officers, underscoring the difficulty authorities have faced in cracking down on human smuggling in Southern California.

Immigration agents have made some strides but acknowledge that they continue to encounter obstacles. The biggest problem is getting beyond the men who operate the drop houses and finding the kingpins who actually run the smuggling rings.

Friday's bust points up that difficulty: Authorities said the five men apparently operating the house appeared to be gang members hired by the smuggling ring to keep the immigrants from escaping. At least one of the guards has been identified as belonging to the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, gang, agents said. All of the guards, now in custody, are believed to be illegal immigrants.

Southern California is considered a hotbed of human smuggling. After a widely publicized case in Watts two years ago, federal officials announced a major crackdown that included operations at Los Angeles International Airport and greater cooperation with local law enforcement. They also started going after the money behind the smuggling rings by tracking fund transfers and freezing bank accounts.

As federal authorities have beefed up enforcement at the border, the smuggling rings have become more powerful, expensive and elusive. As a result, it has become riskier for migrants to cross the border and harder for authorities to find safe houses and the smugglers who run them.

"Because the smuggling fees have gone up astronomically, there is more money to be made and it is attracting increasingly sophisticated and ruthless organizations," said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice. "They are trying to stay one step ahead of us, and it's our job to outmaneuver them."

In the last two years, ICE has discovered approximately one dozen major drop houses throughout Southern California. The agency is seeing an increasing number in the Inland Empire. In December, authorities found 25 illegal immigrants in a drop house near downtown Riverside.

Although arrests have been made, officials have said it's difficult reaching the upper echelons of the rings, the kingpins who are for most part based in Mexico or Central America. The ringleaders use a network of underlings, including illegal immigrants and gang members, to operate the houses.

Even when safe houses are found, law enforcement often cannot track down the smugglers who run them because they distance themselves from daily operations, often running the rings from their native countries. So after a raid, a smuggling ring can hire new guards, find a new house and start operations again.

In the most recent case, federal agents received a tip Wednesday from a relative of a migrant about a possible hostage situation. With the help of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department SWAT team, immigration agents executed a federal warrant at 6 a.m. Friday.

They discovered the immigrants crammed into four bedrooms with no light fixtures and no furniture except for unplugged televisions. On the walls were a red painted cross and scrawled phone numbers. Clothes were piled in the bathtub, and the immigrants' shoes had been taken from them, authorities said. The immigrants had been fed chicken, tortillas, hot sauce and orange juice, authorities said.

The windows were barred and covered with blankets, and surveillance cameras monitored the outside of the 1,500-square-foot converted duplex in a neighborhood of homes costing roughly $300,000 to $400,000 just south of the 105 Freeway. There were two entrances, both guarded. Authorities also found a loaded .357 magnum handgun under a bed in one of the rooms where the guards slept.

"They were obviously held against their will," said Frank Johnston, ICE assistant special agent in charge. "The conditions were utter squalor."

One of the illegal immigrants has active tuberculosis, agents said. The immigrants, including 13 minors and nine women, came from Nicaragua, Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, Honduras and Guatemala.

The immigrants told agents they had paid between $3,000 and $10,000 to be guided across the U.S.-Mexico border, authorities said, but smugglers demanded more money after they arrived in Los Angeles County.

Some had been in the house for as long as eight weeks; others had arrived Thursday. Agents said smugglers took new illegal immigrants into the house through the side entrance.

"The coming and going of the immigrants was in the dead of night," said Kevin Jeffery, acting special agent in charge for ICE.

Neighbors said they didn't notice anything unusual except for residents frequently taking in bags and bags of groceries, and the wooden barriers on the side of the house, apparently meant to block views from the street.

"I've never seen anything out of the ordinary there," said Irene Martinez, 37, who has lived in the neighborhood for four years. "I've never seen [lots of] people coming in and out of the house."

Amy Mendoza, who lives next door, said the house appeared quiet. "Everything was normal," she said.

On Friday morning, Mendoza, 18, said she saw about a dozen law enforcement officers, guns drawn, descend on the property. Outside, law enforcement officers talked to people in the rain, many barefoot, some sitting or standing on the curb. Two buses retrieved most of them, but a small group was taken away in a van, she said.

Because drop houses are usually in residential neighborhoods, they can go undetected for months or even years.

Federal agents also frequently have trouble persuading the illegal immigrants to cooperate with law enforcement. Many fear retaliation or plan to hire the smugglers again.

"Once they are sent home, they will try to come back in," Johnston said. "They'll use the same smugglers."

"Once they are sent home, they will try to come back in," Johnston said. "They'll use the same smugglers."

Not a very bright group I'd say.

How do these people get $3000-$10000 to pay smugglers if they're so poor?

Originally Posted by JuniusJnr

El Paso has found almost 300 in the past week but for some odd reason the stories don't show up in the paper so I can post them. Fox News has great coverage but all their articles say we can't reprint or redistribute them. GRRRRR

But progress is being made. Chances are, from now until November they will all start doing something useful.

This sounds like the story you were referring too.


http://www.kfoxtv.com/bordersecurity/74 ... etail.html

200+ Illegal Immigrants Found In El Paso

UPDATED: 12:49 pm MST February 27, 2006

-- KFOX News has learned that authorities are processing the identities of at least 232 illegal immigrants they say were found early Friday evening.

El Paso County sheriff's deputies made a traffic stop around 6:30 p.m. Friday. Eleven illegal immigrants were found riding in the vehicle that was pulled over. Authorities say upon further questioning, the immigrants led them to the Gateway Hotel in Downtown El Paso, where several rooms full of illegal immigrants were discovered. There were also several other undisclosed locations in the El Paso area where undocumented immigrants were found.

During an emergency press conference Friday night, sheriff officials announced that an undocumented woman from El Salvador, who was apprehended made an outcry that she had lost sight of her 7-year-old son and husband.

Authorities say this latest human smuggling discovery is the largest of its kind in recent years. They say the bust is part of "Operation Linebacker," a coordinated effort between the local sheriff's department and federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection.

This is a developing story that KFOX News is committed to following. We will have more information on kfoxtv.com as well as KFOX News at Nine with Patricia Maese on Sunday.

Neighbor Eddie Brim, 47, said he saw nothing out of the ordinary that would lead him to believe the house was being used to keep illegal immigrants.

"They were everyday people," Brim said. "We're all neighbors."

WHAT!! Bars on all the windows, blankets covering the windows, surveillence cameras trained on the outside, and guards - yep, sounds normal to me!

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... s0304.html

61 immigrants discovered in 2 apartment units

Josh Kelley
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 4, 2006 12:00 AM


Police on Friday arrested five suspected human smugglers, and federal officials detained 61 undocumented immigrants who were being held in two units of a Mesa apartment complex, according to the state Department of Public Safety.

Two DPS officers were injured at a Wal-Mart when they confronted two people suspected of being smugglers, or "coyotes."

The suspected "coyotes" were arrested. Police were then led to the Sun Crest Apartments in the 100 block of North Lesueur near Main Street and Mesa Drive, DPS spokesman Frank Valenzuela said.

There, investigators found 15 immigrants being held in one apartment, and 46 in another, along with three more "coyotes," Valenzuela said.

The five "coyotes" were arrested by DPS officers and could face charges under state law, he said.

A state law enacted in August gives the state's prosecutors a way to go after "coyotes," a job typically handled by federal law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

WHAT!! Bars on all the windows, blankets covering the windows, surveillence cameras trained on the outside, and guards - yep, sounds normal to me!

I hate to tell you this but my house is the only house on this street that DOESN'T have bars on the windows. In fact 9 out of every 10 houses in this city has them.

Lots of people cover the windows with blankets, tin foil, paint and other assorted odd things. (I don't do that, either) The sun is so hot in the summer that it costs about 300 bucks a month for air conditioning for a thousand square foot house if they don't. And that cheap labor to do all these home improvements isn't cheap here, either.

The cameras might or might not make me wonder depending on what part of town it's in. I want to put cameras on my NC property because people like to dump their trash in my driveway. Here, I had a neighbor once who had motion sensor lights all over the outside of his house as well as cameras. Turned out he was a drug dealer and that all came out in the wash when a deal went bad and someone firebombed his car!

Another thing they do here is build stone walls all around their houses. The city has an ordinance that the front wall can't be but so high so taht the cops could see through so they put wroguht iron bars on top of the low walls. So if you live in a place that all of a sudden has an eight or ten foot wall around it, be suspicious.

The guards would definitely be the clincher, though.