3 Charged in Immigrant Smuggling

Federal officials announced criminal smuggling charges Wednesday against three alleged operators of a small Watts house where authorities discovered 110 people from Mexico, Ecuador and Guatemala last week.

Marvin Raul Soto-Chavez, Fernando Morocho and Silvia Espinoza-Fajardo were charged in federal court with smuggling illegal immigrants and holding them in the Hickory Street bungalow until family members paid fees ranging from $3,000 to $10,000.

The announcement followed a meeting of representatives from the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Los Angeles Police Department and state legislators at the Watts office of Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn.

Hahn organized the meeting after the Watts raid led to interagency accusations and complaints that federal and local authorities weren’t working together.

The discovery of such a large operation highlighted the scale of the human smuggling trade in Los Angeles and the government’s limited resources to combat it.

Hahn pledged to seek additional help from Washington.

“I still think the scale of the problem has not been met with adequate resources from the federal government,” she said after the meeting.

“And I’m going to try to change that. I don’t think that 20 [federal immigration] agents is enough to handle the problem in Los Angeles.”

Hahn said she would lobby California representatives for more funding and increased staffing for immigration agency offices here.

Police officials have said the federal agency failed to respond to some of the drop houses they had discovered in the past and that the immigrants found there frequently were released after questioning. Local authorities said the agency had become especially lax about immigration enforcement following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the government’s increased focus on security threats.

Immigration officials have said they needed more help from local law enforcement, which has a long-standing policy against investigating people’s immigration status.

Loraine E. Brown, head of the immigration agency’s office in Los Angeles, said it was vigorously tracking human smuggling.

Brown said there were not enough agents in the area to respond to every referral from the much larger Los Angeles Police Department.

Assistant Police Chief George Gascon said that “if you look at the scope of the problem and the resources available, it’s unrealistic to anticipate that they would respond to every call.”

The April 21 raid in Watts came after a smuggled immigrant contacted a relative and complained about being imprisoned pending payment to the smugglers, according to federal court documents. The relative called police.

Officers found 110 people packed into the 1,100-square-foot home. The doors and windows had been barred and lightbulbs had been removed. Investigators also found firearms.

Authorities said that alleged smuggler Soto-Chavez told investigators he had been smuggled into the country and had been working in the operation to pay off a $5,000 smuggling fee and get a flight to Boston.

Immigration agency spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the three suspects were low-level “bit players” in what is likely a much larger operation.

“The goal is always to get the guys farther up in the organization,” she said.