Following up on a post from last January, a press release by Thom Mrozek of the DOJ Central District of California Office reports that…
LOS ANGELES – Five defendants, all members or associates of an extended family, face potential life prison sentences after being found guilty today of international sex trafficking for participating in a scheme that lured young Central American women and girls into the Los Angeles area and forced them into prostitution, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Loretta King for the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien for the Central District of California.
The defendants, four Guatemalan nationals and one Mexican national, were convicted of conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion; and importation of aliens for purposes of prostitution. The jury in the case was unable to reach unanimous verdicts on additional charges.
During a six-week trial, the government presented evidence that the defendants targeted young, uneducated, impoverished undocumented women and girls from Guatemala, and conspired to lure and smuggle them into the United States, where they were put to work as prostitutes. All but one of the victims were enticed with bogus promises of legitimate jobs. But after arranging for the victims to be smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border, the defendants used a combination of threats – deception, rape, physical violence and witchcraft – to compel the victims to perform acts of prostitution.
In my original post I mentioned one of the victims who pretty clearly believed she was being voluntarily smuggled into the U.S. to do domestic labor despite the defendants claims that all their victims had agreed to be smuggled for sex work. Mrozek’s press release suggests only one victim had arrived with the intention of doing sex work.
But as I also mentioned in the original post it doesn’t really matter what their intention was: the victims agreed only to be smuggled — transported across the border for a fee. The perpetrators instead trafficked them, withholding their incomes, forcing them to work without compensation, and keeping them physically and psychologically captive —including with threats to… wait for it… turn them over to immigration service for imprisonment and deportation.
Trafficking would still occur without restrictive immigration and border-migration policy. And sex trafficking might still occur if sex work was legal and socially destigmatized. But the motivation to trust one’s luck to someone who might only smuggle you but… might not would nearly evaporate. And so would the opportunities for traffickers to hook their victims in.
