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Entrant-smuggling ring 'significant'; Tucson role major

Seven members of a "significant" migrant smuggling ring that operated in Tucson and Mammoth were arrested by federal agents Monday. The seven people arrested are part of a larger group that moved hundreds of people across the Arizona border to states as far away as Florida. The organization used at least four Tucson homes to stash people, and used Western Union to collect a fee from family members of the illegal border crossers it smuggled across. The migrant smugglers admitted to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that they collected $430,000 in wire transfers, the criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Tucson shows. In an investigation that started in early 2004, federal agents used informants and wiretaps to stop multiple rental cars filled with illegal entrants coming in from Naco to Tucson, the complaint shows. Over the course of the year, more illegal entrants were arrested at different rental properties in Tucson. Investigators began to see a pattern as the names of some of the people in the smuggling organization kept coming up. Immigration and Customs Enforcement served 10 federal search warrants in Tucson and Mammoth on Monday. One person, Rose Marie Chavez, was released on her own recognizance Tuesday. The other six remain in federal custody, said Sandy Raynor, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix. All seven were charged with conspiring to smuggle people, a felony charge that carries a maximum 10 years in prison. Seven more people are still at large, officials said. The smugglers had also been operating on the north side of the Catalina Mountains, said Mammoth Police Chief Neal Mullard. U.S. officials offered little information into the smuggling operation, but the criminal complaint offers a rare look at how an elaborate smuggling network operates - using rental cars, apartments and wire transfers to shuttle illegal entrants into and throughout the United States. It also describes the sting operation used to identify and eventually shut down the smuggling ring. How many people were smuggled into the U.S. is not known, but in a tape-recorded conversation, a smuggler within the organization said he had more than 100 people waiting to be crossed over. In another tape-recorded conversation, there were so many people waiting to be moved, the smugglers were having to recruit more people to rent cars for transporting illegal entrants. According to the criminal complaint: The case started in January 2004 when Border Patrol agents stopped a smuggler in a car belonging to Sergio Limon Salcedo, now in federal custody. Two more vehicles were stopped; each time the cars were registered to people in the smuggling organization. Then in April 2004, 27 illegal entrants were picked up from a house in the 1100 block of Edison Street and the same day, seven more were apprehended from a house in the 1600 block of East Broadway. Informants and people arrested in the busts told the agents the houses were being rented for Cipriano Reyes Gaona. His name would surface again in the allegations against the smuggling ring. In a June stash-house bust, in the 1500 block of East Bantam Road, five more people were arrested for sneaking across the border. Cell-phone numbers belonging to Reyes Gaona and Limon Salcedo were found. The sting started in July, when an undercover agent posing as a smuggler called Reyes Gaona to arrange for the man to hold a group of illegal entrants for the agent. The following September, yet another car belonging to Limon Salcedo was seized, this one holding eight entrants. Renting and buying cars eventually became a problem for the smuggling ring. Each time a car was stopped, it was impounded by the Border Patrol. In October, one of the suspects, Rose Marie Chavez, was recorded as she contemplated attending a Border Patrol auction to buy the seized cars back. The movement of money was the next key, because each time money changed hands, the transactions were made through Western Union. In December, yet another name emerged, Juan Ramirez Lieres. Combined with other smugglers, he accumulated more than $300,000 in Western Union transfers. He is not in custody. The smuggling ring started working in Mammoth about three years ago, said Russell Ahr, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The group came in from the Mexican state of Nayarit at that time, then eventually moved the operations to Tucson, he said. The agency viewed the organization as an important smuggling group, said Michael McCool, deputy special agent in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Arizona office. "Any type of group that has that many people in it is going to be significant," he said. In the most efficient smuggling organizations, individuals are structured "to rent homes, some to rent vehicles, some to drive vehicles; this group had that ability," McCool said.