Illegal Aliens - Alien Smuggling And Trafficking

Aliens often pay smugglers to help them enter the United States illegally. In cases of trafficking the smugglers then use the aliens for forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation. ICE makes a distinction between alien smuggling and human trafficking. Alien smuggling produces short-term profits, while trafficking garners profits over both the long and short term.

A Growing Problem

According to an ICE press release, Agent Thomas Homan asserted in a statement before the House Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Border Security, and Claims Subcommittee on June 24, 2003, that the international trade in men, women, and children is a growing and lucrative business, generating an estimated FIGURE 5.6
Estimated number of people trafficked annually into the U.S., by region^a
SOURCE: "Estimated Number of People Trafficked Annually into the U.S. by Region," in Assessment of U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of Justice, June 2004, http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/crim/wetf/us_assessment_2004.pdf (accessed March 21, 2005 $9.5 billion each year (http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/articles/humanTraf062403.htm, June 24, 2003). The international smuggling trade is highly organized, consisting of a sophisticated network of persons who set up smuggling transactions, forge documents, transport aliens, and handle aliens at the destination.

The State Department estimated that 600,000 to 800,000 persons are victims of global trafficking each year ("Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons," http://www.state.gov/g/tip/). Likewise, according to 2004 U.S. Department of Justice estimates, 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States annually. About 40% (5,000–7,000) come from East Asia and the Pacific and 31% (3,500–5,500) come from Latin America. (See Figure 5.6.) Table 5.6 summarizes the Justice Department's trafficking cases for fiscal years 2001 through 2003. During that time a total of 56 defendants were charged and 28 were convicted of trafficking. Twenty-three (82%) of the convictions were for sex-related trafficking charges.

TABLE 5.6
Trafficking prosecutions, FY 2001–03
SOURCE: "Trafficking Prosecutions, FY 2001–2003," in Assessment of U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of Justice, June 2004, http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/crim/wetf/us_assessment_2004.pdf (accessed March 21, 2005)

TVPA prosecutions	FY01	FY02	FY03
Cases filed
Total	5	7	9
Sex (subset of total)	2	5	7
Defendants charged
Total	11	21	24
Sex (subset of total)	6	13	20
Convictions
Total	5	6	17
Sex (subset of total)	3	6	14

On February 21, 2003, the Justice Department announced that a federal jury delivered a guilty verdict in the human trafficking case against Kil Soo Lee ("Garment Factory Owner Convicted in Largest Ever Human Trafficking Case Prosecuted by the Department of Justice," http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/February/03_crt_108.htm). According to the announcement, from March 1999 through November 2000 Lee and his underlings used threats, starvation, confinement, and beatings to hold over two hundred Vietnamese and Chinese garment workers in servitude in Lee's factory in American Samoa. The women had paid $5,000 to $8,000 (the equivalent of five to ten years' salary in their home countries), what they believed was a legitimate fee for a new job that would lead to a better way of life.

A Dangerous Journey

In order to avoid detection, persons who smuggle illegal aliens into the United States often use transporting methods that are not safe. Aliens who cross the U.S.–Mexico or U.S.–Canada borders might travel in enclosed, packed trucks with little ventilation. Others, who travel by sea for thousands of miles from such countries as the People's Republic of China and India, might be stowed on cargo ships and subjected to extreme conditions, including lack of comfort facilities and stifling heat.

In the deadliest illegal border-crossing in more than fifteen years, nineteen men, women, and children died of suffocation, heat exposure, and thirst while locked inside an unventilated trailer in May 2003. The victims were among at least seventy-four illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America abandoned at a truck stop about one hundred miles southwest of Houston. The driver of the truck that brought the aliens across the U.S.–Mexico border was Tyrone M. Williams, a Jamaican citizen and resident of New York state. Williams had received $7,500 to smuggle the group across the border and deliver them to Houston. Indicted on 58 counts of conspiracy, and harboring and transporting illegal immigrants, Williams became the first person to face possible execution for human smuggling deaths under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. While fourteen people were indicted, including ring-leaders of the Brownsville, Texas, smuggling ring, prosecutors said Williams was the only one facing the death penalty because he alone had the power to release the immigrants from the airless tractor-trailer.

After a series of appeals based on Williams's charges of discrimination, the trial began March 8, 2005, in federal district court in Houston. Williams testified that he turned off the air conditioning in the truck so that he could say that he was hauling an empty trailer when he went through a Border Patrol checkpoint. He also contended that he did not hear the passengers pounding on the sides of the trailer and screaming for help. A passenger in the cab, Fatima Holloway, testified that Mr. Williams ignored the sounds of the desperate passengers. On March 23, 2005, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on thirty-eight counts of transporting illegal aliens. However, they were deadlocked on twenty potential death penalty charges of conspiracy and harboring, resulting in a mistrial on those counts (trial coverage from the New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and National Public Radio, March2005).

Some illegal aliens have drowned while trying to swim across the Rio Grande, which forms the border between Texas and Mexico. Others have fallen prey to border bandits who stole from them and injured or killed them. Some illegal aliens who brought in drugs as payment for their entry into the United States put themselves in harm's way because of the dangerous nature of their undertakings.

Between October 2002 and July 2003, 123 illegal aliens died in Arizona from the heat, accidents, and other causes (Anabelle Garay, "Immigrant Death Toll in Ariz. Near Record," Newsday, July 24, 2003). William Aceves, a professor of international and human rights law at the California Western School of Law, estimated that between 1994 and 2003 more than 2,200 migrants died while trying to cross the southwestern border through remote passages (Summary of Migrant Civil Rights Issues Along the Southwest Border, Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 2003).

Tucson's Arizona Daily Star newspaper established a searchable database (http://regulus.azstarnet.com/borderdeaths/search.php) of deaths occurring on the U.S.–Mexico border. The database not only counts the death toll but can be used by relatives searching for missing family members who left to cross the border and were never heard from again. The Coalición de Derechos Humanos/Alianza Indigena sin Fronteras, a Tucson human rights organization, also maintains a list of migrant border deaths including name (if known), sex, age, date discovered, location where discovered, and cause of death. Between October 1, 2003, and September 30, 2004, the Coaliciónadded233 people to its list. Approximately 47% (110 bodies) were unknown—found with no identification papers. Many were only bones. Attesting to the risks of dealing with some of the guides who led illegal aliens across the border for a fee, nineteen of the dead suffered blunt trauma injuries and one had a gunshot wound.