Salvadoran charged with smuggling after 30 illegal immigrants found

[peejay 327]

Salvadoran charged with smuggling after 30 illegal immigrants found

By SUSAN CARROLL, JAMES PINKERTON and KEVIN MORAN

2007 Houston Chronicle

A Salvadoran man on Tuesday was charged with smuggling after authorities found 30 illegal immigrants in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in southwest Houston, including three people needing medical treatment.

The news of the local arrest coincided with President Bush's announcement of plans to continue pushing for comprehensive immigration reform, despite the collapse of Senate negotiations last week.

With the failure of the latest push for reform, some local law enforcement officials, including Maj. Michael J. O'Brien of the Harris County Sheriff's Office, said it's time for the federal government to stop the influx over the border into Houston, a major distribution hub for human traffickers.

"Smugglers are bringing people across the border, and they're ending up in the Houston-Harris County area in what they're calling safe houses, and sometimes we're fortunate enough to find out about it, but for the most part, we aren't," O'Brien said. "And there's not a lot we can do about it because a lot of the community won't come forward because of threats from the smugglers."

"My personal opinion is that we need to enforce the laws that are already in place as far as federal immigration," he said, adding that the sheriff's office will offer any assistance possible to the federal anti-smuggling task force.

On Tuesday, Walter Martinez-Malgar, a 36-year-old Salvadoran, was charged in federal court in Houston with smuggling in connection with the discovery of the 30 illegal immigrants, said Leticia Zamarripa, an ICE spokeswoman

At 6:45 p.m. Monday someone called 911 to report that a large group of people was in the apartment and they "were being held against their will," said Houston Police Department spokesman John Cannon.

Inside the red-brick building in the 6500 block of Gessner, police found men, women and teenagers from Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras, Zamarripa said. She said three of the illegal immigrants were treated at a local hospital for "possible dehydration," and were scheduled to be returned to their home countries along with the remainder of the group.

On Tuesday afternoon, Zamarripa said she did not know whether Martinez-Malgar was armed at the time of the bust.

Immigrants sometimes held for money

Authorities at the federal and local level said it's difficult to quantify the prevalence of people smuggling and "stash houses" in Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city. For years, Houston has been considered a distribution hub for human traffickers, who sometimes hold immigrants in stash houses while family members try to raise thousands of dollars for their release.

In recent months, authorities have discovered illegal immigrants stashed across the city, using single-family homes as cover, or picking apartment complexes on the south side where new arrivals blended in quietly. On March 1, federal agents found 67 people in a single-family home off Interstate 45 near Griggs.

"What happens in many cases, [smugglers] tell them they'll bring them over for a price and when they get here, they change the price, hold them for a ransom until their family pays more money, or they're basically placed into servitude to work it off," O'Brien said.

At times, the smuggling business in Houston has turned violent. On April 17, the occupants of two trucks — one carrying at least 10 people — exchanged gunfire on the Southwest freeway, killing an El Salvadoran man. In April 2006, one man was wounded in a shootout at a house in northwest Houston.

ICE official Alonzo Pena, who directs the agency's Phoenix office and worked for years as a high-ranking official in Texas, said the smuggling trade is bustling in Houston.

''Houston is such a large city, it's easy to blend in, just like Phoenix, and it has the same diverse culture where they can fit in," he said.

''The roads leading to Houston and away from Houston are very good, and there's many commercial transportation methods available to them," said ICE official Alonzo Pena.''So there (are) plenty of opportunities for them to blend in, and if they want to move on, there's infrastructure through commercial transportation modes to help them further their journeys."

Nestor Rodriguez, a University of Houston sociologist and director of the Center for Immigration Research, said there are likely a number of stash houses authorities don't know about.

''It doesn't happen every day, but it's not rare either," Rodriguez said. "Houston is probably a place this happens more frequently, because it's like a hub for migrants coming from Mexico and Central America."

''This is a place people come to once they leave the border. Houston is a popular place because they have relatives here who can bail them out," he said. ''And this has been happening for a long time.''

Witnesses at the apartment complex on Gessner said they had watched the scene on Monday night, as ICE officials brought in a bus and processed the immigrants.

A woman from El Salvador, who identified herself only as "Carmen," said she has been living at the brick complex with wrought-iron balconies for more than a year. She said she returned from the store Monday night and saw a police car and plain-clothes officer and assumed the bust involved drugs. The woman added that she "felt fear" because she also is undocumented.

"We thought the police were investigating the sale of drugs," she said. "We never imagined there was human trafficking."

Oscar Moran, 39, was at the complex midday Tuesday, visiting his mother-in-law on a tourist visa from El Salvador. He said he saw the ICE bus roll into the parking lot Monday night, and "when I saw it, what impressed me was all the efforts these people made to come here...."

Elsy Martinez, an assistant manager of the sprawling 850-unit apartment, said "it's for their own good" that the police found the immigrants.

''I mean, they had to take three of them to the hospital," she said. "And I don't know what they were going to do with them."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headli...ro/4885074.html

[almaty 19]

just wrong