Judge sentences 10 in immigrant smuggling case


By Steven Kreytak

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.

skreytak@statesman.com; 912-2946


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