306 Illegal Chinese Migrants Arrested : Border: Seizures in Mexico strike at worldwide network smuggling immigrants to U.S.

The toll of their grueling odyssey still etched on their faces, dozens of Chinese immigrants emerged into the sunshine Wednesday to take stock of their temporary home--the Ensenada city jail.

They were among more than 306 illegal immigrants, apparently from mainland China, found by Mexican police on Monday crammed in a safehouse on the outskirts of this Baja California port city about an hour’s drive from the U.S.-Mexico border.

As some of the migrants smoked cigarettes in the jail yard, shot baskets and communicated in hesitant sign language with Mexican police cadets assigned to guard them, a group of the young men made a desperate appeal to police commanders and city officials.

Speaking through an interpreter, 22-year-old Thiang Huang said he is willing to work in construction, a restaurant or any other job in the United States or Mexico. Above all, he said, “I don’t want to go back to my country.”

The mass detention dramatizes the presence in Mexico of a lucrative, highly organized worldwide network dedicated to smuggling Chinese into the United States through a variety of routes, authorities said. After months in which U.S. and Mexican border authorities noticed an increase in the numbers of Asians crossing illegally into San Diego from Tijuana, this was reportedly the largest apprehension of Chinese migrants in years.

“It is clearly a big and well-organized smuggling ring,” said Cmdr. Raymundo Rodriguez Morales of the Ensenada municipal police, whose officers assisted federal immigration officers in the raid after neighbors reportedly phoned them with a tip.

Like numerous shiploads of Chinese rescued or discovered in U.S. waters during the past year, the migrants in Ensenada came mainly from the capital city of Beijing and China’s Fujian province. Apparently bound for San Francisco, they were smuggled abroad via Taiwan on a Taiwanese ship and may have stopped in Panama, according to interviews with migrants and Mexican authorities.

A small boat met the ship off the Baja coast within the past weeks and took the migrants ashore about 25 miles from Ensenada at an inlet called Punta China (Chinese Point), where Mexican smugglers spirited them to the ranch house about 11 miles inland.

When police moved in, they found the group of more than 300, 14 of them women, crowded in “deplorable conditions” in the house and an adjacent trailer. Police arrested five Ensenada-based smugglers.

Migrants complained of abuse during the month they spent stowed away on the ship, Rodriguez said.

“They were hungry and dehydrated and a few had infections from the long voyage,” said Roberto Vera, a doctor and city councilman who moved through the crowded jail Wednesday dispensing medicines.

Nearby, a migrant with long hair falling over his glasses conducted an impromptu interview with a Mexican television crew through an interpreter.

“The gentleman says he has come here to seek new horizons and look for work, because the economic conditions in China are difficult,” the interpreter said. But when asked his name and how much he had paid for the voyage, the man abruptly stopped talking and glanced at the others crowded around him.

Organized Asian criminal networks control much of the smuggling business, estimated to bring about 100,000 illegal Chinese immigrants a year into the United States by sea and land. The smugglers charge clients up to $30,000 apiece and often make them work off the debt through years of indentured servitude.

In the past few months, Mexican officers have seen or apprehended groups of 20 to 40 Chinese near the Tijuana crossing points favored by Mexican smugglers and migrants, officials said.

Investigators identified four men who acted as leaders or “enforcers” during this latest smuggling attempt, Mexican officials said.

Preparations are under way to transport the migrants to Mexico City and deport them, a fact not lost on residents of a state where thousands cross north illegally each day without interference from the Mexican government. Ensenada residents responded to television images of the migrants by donating food, medicine and blankets.

“It makes me sad to see these people with so much desire to better themselves reach this point,” said Eduardo Gutierrez, 24, one of the police cadets pressed into crowd control duties in the jail yard. “They came so close. But that’s the way the law is.”

Gutierrez engaged in energetic, if limited, discussions with a group of men near the jail yard basketball hoop, exchanging names, ages and other bits of information.

“You like music? Madonna?” he said hopefully in Spanish, and a thin 19-year-old named Huang Su Chi said cheerfully in English, “I understand.”

There was more laughter when a Chinese youth patted the stomach of a husky police cadet and Gutierrez led the group in a chorus of “Gordo.” (Fat).

“I think at first they were very frightened and shocked by their ordeal,” Gutierrez said. “I think they were afraid we would hurt them. But little by little, we have been getting along.”