Hudson – Leaning on her fence, retiree Ann Hoyt looked across at the dilapidated white barracks and winced. She had no clue they had held illegal Mexican workers who toiled on farms to pay smuggling debts.
“Remember Auschwitz and the people in Germany saying, ‘We didn’t know it was there’? Well, I didn’t know this was there, and it was in my backyard,” said Hoyt, a retired microbiologist who raises llamas half a mile away.
Today in federal court, Hudson residents Moises Rodriguez and his wife, Maria, are scheduled to be sentenced for transporting and harboring illegal immigrants in this case of migrants who were smuggled into the country and then worked to the bone.
Foremen bused them from the barracks to farms where they picked crops for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Supervisors deducted “smuggling fees” totaling $1,100 to $1,300 from the workers’ pay.
In October, when federal agents raided the fenced barracks compound at Hudson, 30 miles northeast of Denver, they found automatic weapons and cocaine in a trailer where a supervisor stayed, court records show.
This is one of several recent cases around the country involving smuggled foreign workers who labored under financial duress, owing money to those who sneaked them into the United States.
Moises and Maria Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty in May, face up to 40 years in prison for their role in transporting and harboring scores of illegal workers from Mexico, then deducting fees from their pay. Prosecutors say they supplied workers to agricultural employers around northern Colorado, including the state’s largest organic vegetable farm.
Their son, Javier Rodriguez, who lived in a trailer by the barracks, has agreed in a plea deal to share what he knows about smuggling, employment of illegal workers, drug trafficking, violent crime and gun dealing in return for leniency in sentencing.
Farm owners who used the illegal workers were not charged.
Attorney Jeff Edelman, representing Javier Rodriguez, said employers are key players who ought to be targeted.
For the workers, “it’s sort of an indentured servitude you can never get out from under,” Edelman said. “You ought to get the big shots. It’s against the law to hire illegal aliens knowingly.”
At Grant Family Farms, a large organic grower where Moises Rodriguez sent workers, owner Andy Grant said he has championed worker rights and pays at least $7.25 an hour.
“The whole thing about the smuggling, I have no knowledge of it, and as far as the housing, I don’t know where people live. We offer jobs,” Grant said.
Grant questioned federal priorities in targeting farms rather than other sectors of the economy that rely heavily on illegal workers.
“What’s going to happen is, agriculture is going to be driven out of the United States to Mexico,” he said.
Among other U.S. cases involving indebted foreign workers:
FBI and immigration agents just arrested 31 Koreans accused of running a trafficking ring that placed smuggled women at spas and brothels across the northeastern states.
Federal prosecutors in Seattle charged nine Koreans for their alleged role in an operation that smuggled women from Asia, often across the U.S.-Canada border, and put them to work as prostitutes in spas nationwide.
A Colorado court on Thursday sentenced Saudi Arabian immigrant Homaidan Al-Turki to 28 years to life in prison on charges of false imprisonment and unlawful sexual contact involving an illegal worker from Indonesia kept as a virtual slave. Federal charges are pending.
And federal immigration agents in Colorado are investigating several other cases involving smuggled foreign workers, said Jeff Copp, special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Denver district.
As in most of these cases, the Mexican men and women smuggled to Hudson apparently came willingly, agreeing to work and live at the barracks until free from their debts to smugglers.
First, the workers in Mexico telephoned Moises Rodriguez, court records show. He directed them to hotels at Palomas and Agua Prieta on the Mexico side of the border, where they met “coyote” guides who led them on multi-day treks across dry open land near Douglas, Ariz.
Then, after receiving cellphone calls from the guides on the U.S. side of the border, Rodriguez picked up the workers and drove them via Phoenix to Hudson, the records show.
Some Hudson townspeople never knew. But a few sensed an ugly situation.
Construction worker Loren Winstead recalled delivering surplus food from a supermarket to the barracks. “They would surround my truck and help unload it,” he said. “I didn’t think they were abused. But people took advantage of them.”
Others cringed at hearing regular automatic weapons fire from inside the compound, Hudson Mayor Neal Pontius said. Town leaders repeatedly complained to Weld County authorities, he said. “People didn’t like going to our town park in the evenings because you didn’t know if a stray bullet would come your way.”
Deporting the smuggled workers, as federal authorities have done, and jailing members of the Rodriguez family won’t make much difference in the overall immigration conundrum, Pontius said.
“There will be another person who takes their place in a heartbeat. It’s a never-ending cycle.”
Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com.
