3 Mexicans Arrested in Head Shaving and Robbery of Migrants

San Diego police arrested three Mexican men Thursday who they believe shave the heads and destroy the clothes of illegal immigrants when they can’t pay a smuggler to be ferried farther north.

The three men, all Mexican citizens, were arrested after an illegal immigrant who had just had his head shaved flagged down a passing police car and led the officers to the house where it happened, said police spokesman Bill Robinson.

All three were booked into County Jail on suspicion of robbery and assault with a deadly weapon and are being held in lieu of $25,000 bail, a jail spokeswoman said.

They are Romero Montecinos Varcenas, 30; Martin de la Cruz Sanchez, 23, and Geraldo Ortiz Perez, 22.

Police said they believe Thursday’s incident is tied to a string of seven similar assaults where undocumented immigrants have reported being taken to a house somewhere in San Diego, being robbed, having their heads shaved and then having their trousers ripped apart.

“It’s to humiliate them so that any smuggler who sees them says, ‘I’m not going to transport this guy, he doesn’t pay,’ ” said Sgt. Art Palmer. “The word’s out on the street that if you see a guy with a shaved head, he made an arrangement with a smuggler to smuggle him and then wouldn’t pay.”

When officers went into the house, 60 other illegal immigrants were found inside.

“It’s a drop house,” Palmer said. Carloads of illegal immigrants are smuggled across the border, he said, and taken to the house, where financial arrangements are made to farm them out to other smugglers who can take them north.

But those who have no money, instead of simply being put out to make their own way, are “marked” by the head shaving and ripped trousers.

The arrests pleased local activists, who say the head shaving is just another indignity heaped on the immigrants.

“These are sick thrill seekers getting their kicks out of humiliating people,” said Roberto Martinez, head of the American Friends Service Committee in San Diego, a Quaker service organization. “These migrant workers are subjected to so much humiliation as it is, and to add this on top of it is just sick.”

Police say they were able to make the arrests Thursday because 20-year-old Javier Garcia Robles of Juarez, Mexico, came running out of a house at 42nd and Market streets with his head shaved and flagged down officers Jack Knish and Kurt Grube, who were patrolling in their police cruiser.

The men in the house had tried to take money from Robles but when they found out he didn’t have any, they shaved his head, cut off his trouser legs and were getting ready to dump him somewhere in San Diego when he managed to escape, Palmer said.

Two barber shop-type electrical shavers were found in the house. The illegal immigrants were turned over to U.S. Border Patrol agents, Palmer said.

San Diego police were also able to track down four other immigrants from Mexico who had apparently been victimized at the same house.

The four, who had their heads shaved, had been picked up by Border Patrol agents Wednesday night after being dumped off in Chula Vista wearing nothing but their underwear. They were sent back to Mexico, and at the Mexican immigration office in Tijuana, San Diego Police Lt. Raul Bejarano, who was handling other police business, noticed them.

The men are scheduled to be returned to San Diego to testify in the case, Robinson said.