45 Illegal Aliens Discovered in House

Forty-five illegal aliens, including a 2-month-old baby, were discovered inside a filthy, sparsely furnished house in Valinda on Tuesday, shortly after an East Los Angeles woman told authorities that her sister was being held for ransom inside the home.

The tip led officers to a one-story frame home in the 18400 block of Hurley Street about 12:30 a.m., sheriff’s deputy Van Mosley said. Inside, deputies discovered the immigrants from Central and South America who had, for an unknown number of days, shared a five-room house that has a single bathroom and is furnished with mattresses, chairs and a television set.

“It is believed that all of them arrived in the U.S. within the last week,” said Mosley.

Deputies were alerted to the home after a woman called the station saying that her sister, a Salvadoran immigrant, was being held captive inside the house, Mosley said. Officials discovered the woman, Maria Zuniga, 40, along with other illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Ecuador, said Mosley.

Sheriff’s deputies said Tuesday’s raid led to the second such discovery in Valinda, a Los Angeles County community 28 miles east of Los Angeles, in less than two months.

Aggressive Patrol of Border

Harold Ezell, the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Western regional commissioner, said the California border will be “very aggressively” patrolled to stop any increase in illegal immigration by Central Americans fleeing a clampdown in Texas. California and Florida are the primary destinations for the flood of immigrants coming into the United States through Texas.

Hundreds of Central Americans seeking asylum face arrest and deportation in Texas if their applications are denied under a new get-tough policy that seeks to send economic refugees home instead of giving them work permits while their requests are processed.

Asserting an absolute “right to control our borders,” Ezell said at a news conference that “economic refugees” will not fare any better at the California border. He also said he does not expect any increase of asylum applicants in either Los Angeles or at the California border.

“We’re not going to stand back and let our borders be overrun,” Ezell said. “The message has to get down to Central America that you can’t use this (asylum) to get into America.”

On Dec. 8, the immigration service started interviewing asylum applicants on the day they applied, before granting work permits. Until then, employment authorization was granted for up to a year without an assessment of the applicant’s request.

The number of applications surged last summer to 500 a day, Ezell said, but have dropped to about 100 since the new policy began.

Most of the immigrants detained Tuesday were held for Border Patrol officers, and Zuniga was taken into protective custody. She told deputies that she had been held for $1,400 ransom. Although sheriff’s deputies were uncertain whether others in the house had also been held captive, immigration officials said such ransom demands are common.

Frequently, smugglers will increase the price after escorting aliens across the border; and their families, who are expected to pay, sometimes contact police.

‘A Way Station”

Charlie Geer, head agent in charge of the San Clemente Border Patrol station, said the residence was probably a “drop house, a way station where aliens are placed until (their smugglers) can farm them out to wherever they’re going.”

The house’s front door, the lock of which was broken, led into a front room littered with beer cans, a few blankets and a baby food jar tossed next to two dirty mattresses. A baby’s shirt lay near a television set, the only furniture in the room besides a wooden chair, lamp and water cooler.

No suspected smugglers are in custody. Staff writer Michael J. Ybarra contributed to this article.