Last week, Alexander Rivas, 18, was arrested by Alexandria police, following an investigation that began in November, when the father of a 14-year-old runaway told police his daughter was living with Rivas. Court documents state that the girl was found in the gang member’s apartment and she was being used as a prostitute.
According to prosecutors, Rivas ran a prostitution ring, operating in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, using underage runaways. The affidavit states that the business catered to “construction workers and illegal immigrants.â€
On a typical Friday or Saturday night, the operation would see about 100 customers paying for sex.
Rivas typically charged $50 for sexual intercourse with the girls.
Rivas is charged with sex trafficking of children by force, fraud or coercion.
A17-year-old girl told detectives that Rivas carried a machete, he nicknamed “his wife,†when taking her to have sex with his clients. He reportedly used the machete to intimidate anyone who tried to avoid paying.
Rivas admitted to once robbing a group of men of $1,200, and telling them: “What are you going to say? That you got robbed after having sex with a minor?â€
Rivas remains in custody at this time.
Cases such as this one are becoming more commonplace due to a largely unprotected border, the lack of immigration enforcement and the consequential spread of gang crime.
The following is a list of other similar cases:
- On June 2010, Donald Castilblanco-Hernandez, 27, pleaded guilty in a federal court to transporting a woman across state lines for prostitution. The Nicaraguan national admitted to the U.S. Attorney’s Office that in January, he traveled to Georgia to pick up a woman and returned her to Alabama to work for him as a prostitute.
According to court documents, ICE agents entered the illegal alien’s Northport residence on Jan. 15 and found the woman and a man who told the agents he paid money to have sex with her. Castilblanco-Hernandez was arrested as he approached the house.
In August, Castilblanco-Hernandez was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Abdul K. Kallonto ten months in prison.
-In March 2010, Mario Alberto Laguna-Guerrero, 25, was arrested by deputies with the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, on sexual battery charges, after he allegedly forced one mentally disabled girl into prostitution and raped another.
According to the affidavit, the Mexican national told investigators that he had been “dating†the 17-year-old girl, who has an IQ of 58, and asked her to become a prostitute for him. He also admitted that he took the girl to so-called migrant labor camps where she performed sex acts with men for a fee of $25.
The girl told ICE agents that she would be with up to nine “johns†a night.
Laguna-Guerrero told detectives that he asked the 17-year-old to recruit her classmates into prostitution as well.
The girl said she tried to recruit a mentally disabled 16-year-old on her school bus. According to her mother, the 16-year-old has the mental capacity of a second-grader.
When the young woman refused to become a prostitute, an angry Laguna-Guerrero allegedly raped her in front of the other girl.
The U.S. Attorney's Office charged the illegal alien with sex trafficking of a minor, if convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Laguna-Guerrero has been in the country illegally since 2002.
-In January 2010, three illegal aliens were arrested in Philadelphia and charged with running two brothels in a South Philadelphia neighborhood.
According to the federal indictment, Jose Claudio Corona Cotonieto, 27, Raymond Gonzalez Salazar, 31, and Nicolas Gonzalez Salazar, 22, were trafficking Hispanic women from New York, New Jersey and Delaware to work in the brothel for a week at a time.
Investigators say the Mexican nationals had been running the brothels since August 2009, making about $9,000 per week.
In a press release, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement issued the following statement on the case: “As part of the ongoing criminal investigation and in addition to the criminal arrests, ICE special agents identified and administratively arrested 50 individuals believed to be in the U.S. illegally. Those arrested include 39 males from Mexico, nine males from Honduras, and two females from Mexico. Those administratively arrested will be placed into removal proceedings and their cases will be adjudicated in immigration court.â€
A neighbor living near one of the brothels told Fox News Channel 29: "Two brothels â€" two of them? And they're getting $9,000 in one week. OK."
Grateful for the arrests, she continued: "I think that's great because that would bring a lot of crime and, to me, it isn't safe at all.â€
-In July 2009, illegal alien and convicted felon Emma Tlacoxolal-Perez was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 33 months in prison for running brothels in eastern Virginia, in Chesapeake, Newport News, James City County and Williamsburg.
The Mexican national was the head of a prostitution ring which employed women smuggled into this country from Mexico, and only catered to other illegal aliens.
Tlaccoxablal-Perez, along with co-conspirator Felipe Vargas-Ortega, passed out business cards to advertise for the brothel known as El Nopal (The Prickly Pear).
Two more alleged co-conspirators, Francisco Sanchez-Martinez and Juan Carlos Vargas-Ortega, were also prosecuted.
Tlacoxolal-Perez, 37, who has operated brothels in Virginia since 2004, was actually deported in 2006, but easily found her way back across the largely unprotected border.
Customers paid $30 for 15 minutes with one of the prostitutes, the ring leaders kept half of it.
The Newport News location was in a suburban neighborhood and Mexican men typically went through the neighborhood at all hours, often knocking on neighbors’ doors looking for the brothel.
Managing Assistant U.S. Attorney Howard J. Zlotnick told the court: “The poor people living on Eastwood Drive,†had to live with "strange men knocking on their doors looking for girls."
All of those involved were illegal aliens from Mexico, El Salvador, and Ecuador.
-In February 2009, local police and federal agents raided a brothel run by Mexican nationals in Glen Burnie, MD
-In September 2008, police in Baltimore, MD shut down a Mexican brothel and arrested Carlos Silot, who ran the operation, along with two prostitutes, all were illegal aliens. Court documents show that at this particular brothel, the women would work for seven days and then sent back to North Carolina, and exchanged for new prostitutes.
-In June 2007, police in San Antonio arrested a mother and her two daughters for smuggling two minors out of Mexico to use them as prostitutes. Once in the U.S., the girls ages 15 and 17, were told they would have to work as prostitutes for five years to pay off their smuggling fees of $3,000. They were threatened at gunpoint and told that if they did run away, that their families back in Mexico would be killed.
Isabel Ochoa, 60, received time served. Consuelo Ochoa, 34, was sentenced to 18 months for sex-trafficking and an additional 39 months for a separate drug case. Maria Ochoa, 32, was sentenced to 12 months and one day.
-In March 2007, police in Madison, TN raided a Mexican brothel in a residential area and arrested Mexican nationals Santos Perez and Jose Garcia who ran the operation, along with two Mexican prostitutes.
Again, the brothel charged $30 per customer. The women were forced to have sex with dozens of men every day.
A Madison Police detective told News Channel 5: "It's pretty terrible. I don't think these girls want to be there. These girls don't want to be forced to do 30 customers a day.â€
At the time of the raid, police told reporters that they were investigating at least 10 Mexican brothels in the Nashville area.
-In January 2006, police in Charlotte, NC raided two brothels run by Mexican nationals, both were crowded with women smuggled into this country and held against their will.
The Charlotte Observer reported that the leaders of these prostitution rings bring Mexican and Central American women in and out of Charlotte, exchanging them for women in Raleigh and Greensboro. One of these women could typically be sold between the pimps for $130 each.
This country is currently experiencing an epidemic of sex trafficking, with children all too often being used as the commodity.
Most of these women and young girls are confined in locked rooms with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and frequently beaten. Of course, even if they are able to escape, they are afraid to, as they are often told that if they leave, their families will be harmed.
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