Migrant case is rare for officers
May 3, 2008

A state trooper said it's not unusual to find illegal aliens here, but it's rare to determine that they are smugglers.

By Mike Gangloff
981-3336

The case of Pedro Antonio Antonio Mateo is an unusual one for Western Virginia's law enforcement officers: a window into the smuggling of human beings.

Mateo was the driver of a GMC Suburban that was pulled over on the morning of April 11 on northbound Interstate 81 in Botetourt County.

The initial stop was for having windows tinted too darkly. But soon Mateo, who authorities say was carrying 11 illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, was charged with unlawfully transporting aliens, or smuggling people.

"There's a pretty well-established underground railroad for this sort of thing," Bill Burleson, the services supervisor for the Botetourt County Department of Social Services, said this week. His office was left to care for three teenagers who were among the passengers.

"We do have smuggling going on across the country," added Ernestine Fobbs, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly called ICE, in Washington, D.C.

But cases like Mateo's are still rare for the region's police and courts. Virginia State Police Trooper Frank Figgers, one of several officers called after Mateo's vehicle was pulled over, said that it's not unusual to encounter people who are in the country illegally, but "very seldom are we ever able to determine they are smuggling."

The trooper who pulled over the Suburban found it crammed with people. There was little luggage and there were jugs of what appeared to be urine. More troopers were called, then agents from ICE.

Mateo was charged and his adult passengers, all men, were placed in federal custody as material witnesses -- except for one, who bolted as officers began taking people out of the Suburban.

Figgers said there were too many people to watch and too few officers present to give immediate chase. Once officers did pursue the man into woods and across a field, he had too great a lead. Figgers said he guesses the escaped man was a smuggler, rather than one of the people being transported.

Botetourt County social services was called to the side of the highway to pick up a girl, 13, and two boys, 15 and 16, who were riding in the Suburban. Two of the youths were cousins, but all three said they were not related to any of the adults in the vehicle.

Burleson placed the teens with foster families, including one in which a parent was from the same region of southern Mexico and spoke a similar dialect to the three.

The teens said they had spent four days traveling from Chiapas to the border near Phoenix, where they had crossed and spent the night before getting into the Suburban.

Then they rode for a day and a half, forbidden to leave the vehicle because Mateo feared detection.

Burleson said their plan had been to join their parents in Houston. But the smugglers said there was too much immigration enforcement going on there, and the teens would have to ride a great arc across the country, dropping off immigrants in New Jersey and Florida before heading back to Texas.

Because no one knew where the teens were and because illegal immigrants are vulnerable to being forced into sweatshops or the sex trade, "my fear is when they got these kids to New Jersey, they were never going to be seen again," Burleson said.

The teens were fed and given clean clothes and toothbrushes, and decongestants for a cold one of them had. It turned out they knew their parents' phone numbers and by the close of the weekend -- the traffic stop was on a Friday -- the parents had arrived to pick them up.

Burleson said he contacted federal authorities before the families reunited and there were no objections to letting the teens leave.

"If there's a flaw in the system, it's that none of the state agencies, none of the federal agencies, have a plan for what to do with the kids" in situations like the April 11 stop, Burleson said, calling it fortunate that social services was able to find appropriate foster care. "This isn't the last time this is going to happen."

Advocates for immigration reform called Mateo's case a symptom of a larger problem. Christine Poarch, a Salem lawyer who handles immigration cases, has urged lawmakers to create new routes for people to legally work in the United States.

"If we had a solution to undocumented immigration, we wouldn't have this subindustry of smuggling," Poarch said.

While Burleson was helping the teenagers, federal agents were questioning the adult passengers, who are now being held in the Central Virginia Regional Jail in Orange.

According to an ICE agent's report filed with the court, passenger Pedro Sebastian gave an account similar to that of the teens. The passengers paid for the trip before leaving Phoenix, though an amount was not specified in the report.

Sebastian said Mateo had not let anyone leave the vehicle and told them to duck whenever he saw a police car or when he stopped for gas. At one point, Mateo collected money from his passengers and bought chicken and bread for them, Sebastian said.

The passengers were not allowed to use bathrooms, instead using plastic containers inside the Suburban, the report said.

Sebastian told the ICE agent he "wanted the driver to suffer, that he treated us like animals."

Mateo is being detained in the Roanoke City Jail after an initial appearance in federal court on April 21. No date has been set for his next court hearing.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/160489