http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... sage01.DTL

SF massage parlors raided as part of smuggling probe

Friday, July 1, 2005

Hundreds of state and federal law officers descended on massage parlors in San Francisco and other California cities Thursday night in a wide-ranging investigation into immigrant smuggling, authorities said today.

Federal authorities would not discuss the probe before a press conference later this afternoon, but a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles told the Associated Press more than three dozen search warrants were issued in southern California alone.

In addition to the San Francisco probe, a second investigation netted an unknown number of arrests in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Anaheim and elsewhere, authorities said.

Further details were not immediately available. The Bay Area is a key port of entry for foreign women and children kidnapped or lured here under false pretenses to work in prostitution or pornography, officials have said, and federal authorities routinely join San Francisco police in breaking up immigrant smuggling operations and shutting down brothels that employ undocumented women.

The most recent raid came in October, when authorities raided a massage parlor in an alley off Mission Street, just a short hop from some of San Francisco's biggest hotels, and found 17 young Asian women believed to have been trafficked into the country for sex and slave labor.

Such investigations highlight the festering and vexing problems facing those trying to curtail the nation's $9 billion-a-year trade in human flesh. The potential profits are so large, investigators say, that new sex businesses using smuggled women spring up almost as soon as the old ones are shut down, officials said.

Law enforcement authorities and those who counsel women rescued from sexual slavery say the sex trade smuggles 18,000 to 20,000 undocumented sex workers into the United States each year. Typically, sex slave victims pay tens of thousands of dollars to get here, only to be forced into prostitution to pay off their debts. In some cases, the girls or women have been kidnapped from their home countries.