MARION, Ohio — The thousand-mile journey to the Texas border was supposed to bring the Guatemalan teenagers to a better life. Instead, it was the beginning of a terrible ordeal.
Prosecutors say they were fraudulently plucked from U.S. custody by conspirators posing as friends or family who forced them to work as virtual slaves.
As the country’s immigration system was being overwhelmed by an unprecedented flow of unaccompanied children fleeing unrest in Central America, one of their countrymen orchestrated the scheme to force them to work on egg farms in Ohio, prosecutors said.
Arodolo Rigoberto Castillo-Serrano pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Cleveland to single counts of forced labor conspiracy, forced labor, witness tampering and encouraging illegal entry into the country.
Castillo-Serrano, a 33-year-old Guatemalan, has been in the U.S. illegally for much of the past decade, prosecutors say. In some cases, prosecutors say, he made victims’ family members sign over deeds to their property in Guatemala to pay for transporting the boys, with assurances they would be enrolled in school here. That never happened.
U.S. immigration policy dictates that unaccompanied minors trying to escape dangerous situations can’t be turned away. Once the teens were in federal custody, false paperwork was submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to the indictment issued in July. Then the conspirators took custody, promising to provide shelter and get them to court dates that would determine their immigration status.
Instead, paid drivers known as “coyotes” whisked the boys to Ohio, where they essentially went underground, forced to work long hours, live in dilapidated trailers and hand over most of their earnings to pay for their passage to the U.S.
Federal agents found 10 victims — eight teens and two men in their 20s — in this case, but witnesses say many others had been brought to the U.S. from Guatemala through Castillo-Serrano’s pipeline.
The teens were put to work at Trillium Farms which relied on a contractor, one of the people charged in the case, to recruit and hire the workers. Trillium said it was unaware of what was happening with the contractor and the workers and hasn’t been charged.
