by Henry Jones
Last week, police officers in Los Angeles county rescued thirty-five illegal immigrants who were being held for ransom by their smugglers. The Los Angeles Times reports:
An Ecuadoran man told investigators he was held in an 800-square-foot Baldwin Park house while his captors demanded $2,500 above the $10,500 he had already paid to be smuggled into the United States.
Another man traveled from New York to pay $12,000 for the release of his 12-year-old son sequestered in the house. Smugglers then kidnapped the man and demanded another $1,000 from his family for his release.
The immigrants, most of whom came from Central America, had been detained in the house for about a week before “one of them managed to get a cellphone and call 911.”
The case underscores the vulnerable position many illegal immigrants must put themselves in when traveling through human smuggling networks. Our third book Underground America features the story of Mr. Lai, a Chinese immigrant who arranged to be brought to the US for $30,000.
He expected the journey to last only about ten days. Instead, he was held by smugglers in safe houses for months at a time, first in Thailand, then in Cuba, Mexico and Los Angeles. It wasn’t until arriving in Los Angeles that he was told his fee would be twice the amount he expected, and that he couldn’t leave until he paid up.
I had only been prepared to borrow thirty thousand dollars from the loan sharks in China, so there was no way I could come up with the extra money just like that. Those snakeheads, they just tell lies, they never tell the truth. But one thing is true: if you don’t pay up, you’re not going to live.
At the time, I was staying with three others in an apartment near a Hawaiian supermarket. One woman and two men. They hadn’t paid the snakeheads yet, either. The people guarding us were young men; one of them was younger than me by five or six years. They were Chinese. If these enforcers went out, sometimes they would take us out with them. If they didn’t go out, we didn’t go out. We were never allowed to leave the apartment by ourselves. It was better than being locked up before, because they took me out a few times. Most of the time we were indoors, watching TV and videos all day.
It was three of us men in one room, and the woman in her own room. The enforcers stayed in another room downstairs. We slept on the floor. They gave us blankets, but we still had to sleep on the floor. We couldn’t really talk. If you spoke loudly, the enforcers would hit you. They kept saying, “Hurry up and get the money. If you don’t get the money, we’ll beat you to death.”
I was constantly phoning home to try and raise more money. I called family, friends, whoever, to get them to help me. I was desperate to pay off the snakeheads and start my life in the U.S. After a month or so I managed to borrow forty thousand dollars, but it still wasn’t enough. Eventually my older sister was able to get hold of some other loan sharks who lent me the extra money. After two months in L.A., I had the sixty thousand dollars to pay off the snakeheads. When the L.A. snakeheads had received confirmation from the China snakeheads that the fee had been paid, I was free to go.
