Charges Filed After 56 Held Captive

Two men have been charged with harboring 56 illegal immigrants found last week in Riverside County, crammed into an abandoned trailer with no running water, plumbing or electricity.

The 720-square-foot trailer near Corona apparently was serving as a “hold house” where smugglers held the illegal immigrants until they could be moved to another site or until their families paid smugglers’ fees to retrieve them, Border Patrol officials said.

“It was wall-to-wall bodies,” said Jim Jones, assistant agent in charge in San Bernardino and Riverside counties for the Bureau of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Immigrants had been forced to sit on the floor so long that agents had to assist many of them as they tried to stand, Jones said.

“Some of them, their legs were almost locked up.”

Their captors fed them two tortillas and a scoop of rice each day, and they were allowed to leave the trailer only to relieve themselves outside while under guard, officials said.

The immigrants’ shoes were confiscated so that they could not escape.

One of the two men charged, Jose Antonio Madrigal-Corso, told investigators that he had been smuggled into the United States but still owed the smugglers $2,000, so he worked to pay off the debt by serving as one of the guards.

One of the immigrants reported that Madrigal would sit by the door with a police baton, ordering them to sit down and not look out the window.

The other man charged, Luis Carreto-Perez, made telephone calls to relatives of the captive immigrants and instructed them to wire funds through Western Union, according to a court affidavit.

Border Patrol agents learned about the “hold house” Thursday, when two immigrants escaped. One of the escapees contacted authorities and said guards had held them at gunpoint.

The agents raided the trailer that evening, with help from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and the San Bernardino office of the immigration bureau.

They arrested the remaining immigrants and questioned some of them.

While searching the trailer, they found a semiautomatic .22-caliber pistol, ammunition, a BB gun, cellular telephones and ledgers containing names and financial records.

The immigrants had entered the United States illegally from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, and most were bound for the East Coast, the affidavit states.

In a raid two days earlier in Watts, police found 110 illegal immigrants in a 1,100-square-foot bungalow. A raid in Perris on Feb. 11 led to the discovery of 64 immigrants crowded into a small home.

Officials say they cannot estimate how many “hold houses” are operating in the Los Angeles area, but they urged people who know of such operations to report them to authorities.

If they don’t speak out, immigrants may remain in dangerous situations where they can be victimized or sexually assaulted by their captors, Jones said.

He noted that a few days after the Corona raid, temperatures in the area soared above 100 degrees.

If the escaped immigrants had not called the police, the others would still be trapped in the trailer, he said.

“With the heat wave that hit this weekend,” he said, “there’s a good chance they saved someone’s life.”