Thread: Authorities rescue aliens; arrest 4 suspected smugglers

Authorities rescue aliens; arrest 4 suspected smugglers

By Anita Miller
News Editor

San Marcos — Law officers from eight jurisdictions swarmed a San Marcos mobile home Wednesday night, arresting four people for kidnapping and rescuing 26 illegal aliens from a sweltering trailer.

Those arrested, Guzman Ortega Alejandro, Cesar Selgado Julio, Rosalinda Alvarez Trevino and Maria Garcia Luz are in custody at the Hays County Law Enforcement Center.

The illegal aliens, 18 men and 8 women, including one pregnant woman, are in custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement at an undisclosed site.

San Marcos Police Chief Howard Williams said the men were dressed only in underwear, apparently to keep them from running away. The women were wearing T-shirts and shorts.

Nine of the aliens were taken to Central Texas Medical Center from the scene to be treated for open wounds and dehydration. The pregnant woman was later taken to the hospital from police headquarters after she began having abdominal pains.

Williams said the raid on the home at 518 Iris Street in the San Marcos Regency Mobile Home Park off Post Road went down around 8 p.m. Wednesday, within two hours after authorities were able to pinpoint the exact trailer involved.

“We were concerned about the lives and safety of those inside,â€

[quote]
As for what will happen to those in ICE custody, Figlio said “some may be witnesses, some may be persecuted, some may be victims who will be returned to their country of origin.â€

Judge sentences 10 in immigrant smuggling case

By Steven Kreytak

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Published: 10:39 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010

Members of one of the largest human smuggling operations busted in Central Texas in recent years were sentenced Wednesday in federal court in Austin, bringing to a close part of an investigation that began months before authorities stormed a San Marcos mobile home packed with unauthorized immigrants in July 2008.

The group smuggled people originally from Central America and Mexico from stash houses along the U.S.-Mexico border into Central Texas and beyond from 2003 to 2008, according to court documents. Those stash houses in the Tamaulipas cities of Ciudad Ordaz and Reynosa — the latter across the Rio Grande from McAllen —were operated by Los Zetas, one of the biggest drug cartels in Mexico, prosecutors said in court documents.

The immigrants were taken to a trailer on Iris Street in San Marcos, where they were stripped to their underwear to prevent escape and guarded by men carrying pistols until their relatives paid their smuggling fees, which some witnesses told authorities were raised after their arrival in the United States, according to court documents.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Brown told U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel on Wednesday that investigators tracked wire transfers that were made or received by members of the smuggling ring that totaled more than $1.1 million.

Nineteen people from across Central and South Texas — including at least five Mexican citizens — were indicted in the case in federal court in Austin. Three of them are fugitives. The rest have pleaded guilty to charges including conspiracy to smuggle, transport and harbor aliens and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

By the end of the day Wednesday, Yeakel had doled out sentences to 10 defendants that ranged from probation to 12 1/2 years in prison. Five are scheduled to be sentenced today.

The sentencing of the woman described as the ringleader, Rosalinda Trevino-Alvarez, was postponed because she is in the hospital. Trevino-Alvarez, 34, who lived in Staples, which is between San Marcos and Luling, agreed with prosecutors on a 20-year sentence, her lawyer said Wednesday.

One of the men sentenced Wednesday was Argeo Salgado-Ortega, a 32-year-old Mexican man who had previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to smuggle, transport and harbor aliens and to possessing a firearm during a crime of violence.

On May 26, 2008, Salgado-Ortega and another worker from the organization drove with one of the men they had been holding for fees to a CVS parking lot in San Marcos to meet the man's relatives, who were to pay $2,000 for his release, court documents show.

The meeting resulted in a shootout between the man's family and the smugglers, who were arrested, the court documents show.

In July 2008, after fielding complaints from family members of those who had been smuggled, authorities executed a search warrant on the San Marcos trailer. Four smugglers were arrested, and 26 people being held there were also detained. The investigation later broadened.

William Ibbotson, the public defender representing Trevino-Alvarez, disputes the government's contention that the group mistreated the people who paid about $2,000 each for transport across the border.

"The immigrants... were willing participants in being smuggled," he wrote.

Most of those immigrants found in the trailer were deported, but four of them were kept as witnesses in the case. Ibbotson wrote in a court filing that those four were interviewed by defense investigators and "stated that the San Marcos smugglers never threatened them, and they also stated that they never overheard the smugglers threaten to harm anyone in telephone conversations with their relatives." They also never saw the smugglers with guns, Ibbotson wrote.

Ibbotson wrote that those four people all said a group of armed men — the ones identified by prosecutors as Los Zetas — just across the border had threatened them, pointed guns at them and beat some of them.

Ibbotson said those men also collected their portion of the smuggling fee as well as the portion that was supposed to be paid on arrival in the U.S.

The relatives of the men "only contacted law enforcement after the San Marcos smugglers, who had actually undertaken the work of smuggling the immigrants, called and asked for the fee," he said.

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