Woman Says Ex-INS Agent Raped Her : Courts: James Edward Riley is charged in seven assaults. All of the victims were illegal immigrants.

A 25-year-old North Hills woman tearfully testified Monday that she was abducted off a San Fernando Valley street, threatened with deportation and raped by a former agent for the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The agent, James Edward Riley, 34, is on trial in Van Nuys Superior Court in connection with seven alleged assaults against Latina women. He is charged with 17 counts of rape, rape under color of authority, kidnaping and false imprisonment

All the victims were undocumented immigrants and Riley took advantage of their fear of the INS, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carolyn L. McNary said.

The 25-year-old woman, the only victim to testify Monday, said Riley stopped her on a Van Nuys street April 11, 1990, flashed his INS badge and got her to admit that she was an illegal alien.

He drove her to his Reseda apartment, threatened to kill her if she cried out and then raped her at gunpoint, the woman testified as she sobbed quietly.

Afterward, Riley drove her home, she said. She told her uncle that she had been raped and they drove back to Riley’s home and took pictures of the agent’s car.

They then contacted police, who searched Riley’s apartment and found dozens of identification cards belonging to young women, which led them to six other women, McNary said. Three of the seven, who range in age from 19 to 33, resisted Riley’s threats and were not raped, the prosecutor said.

The assaults occurred during the nine months before the raid on Riley’s apartment. None of the other women had reported the assaults to police.

In opening statements Monday, Riley’s attorney, Otha Standifer, told jurors that he will prove that the seven victims are lying. “You’ll know why they lied by the end of the case,” he said.

Under questioning from Standifer, the 25-year-old witness admitted that she was illegally in the United States from El Salvador. But she heatedly denied that she told police what they wanted to hear in the hope of avoiding deportation.

“The immigration is the immigration and the police are the police,” she said.

The trial continues today with the other women scheduled to testify.

If convicted on all counts, prosecutors say Riley, who is in jail without bail, faces 73 years in prison.