Mexican Ends Up With More Than Egg On His Face

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tues. April 12, 2016: A Mexican man has ended up with more than egg on his face for his role in a forced labor scheme that exploited Guatemalan children at Ohio egg farms.

Conrado Salgado Soto, 53, will spend the next 51 months in prison in  Ohio for his role in luring Guatemalan minors and adults into the United States on false pretenses, then using threats of physical harm to compel their labor at egg farms in Ohio.

According to the indictment, which was unsealed on July 2, 2015, members of a labor-trafficking conspiracy recruited workers from Guatemala, some as young as 14 or 15 years old, falsely promising them good jobs and a chance to attend school in the United States.

Salgado along with his co-conspirators – Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, Ana Angelica Pedro Juan, Pablo Duran Jr., Conrado Salgado-Borbon and Bartolo Dominguez, then smuggled and transported the workers to a trailer park in Marion, Ohio, where he and his co-conspirators ordered them to live in dilapidated trailers and to work at physically demanding jobs at Trillium Farms for up to 12 hours a day for minimal amounts of money.

The work included cleaning chicken coops, loading and unloading crates of chickens, de-beaking chickens and vaccinating chickens.  Eight minors and two adults were identified in the indictment as victims of the forced labor scheme.

Castillo-Serrano, 33, led the conspiracy and pleaded guilty in December 2015 to the labor-trafficking conspiracy, forced labor, witness tampering and alien harboring.  He will be sentenced on June 27, 2016.

Pedro Juan, 22, pleaded guilty in February 2016 to the trafficking conspiracy and her sentencing hearing is set for June 27.  Pedro Juan’s role in the scheme included falsely representing herself to government officials as a family friend of the minor victims in order to have them released to her custody, as well as overseeing the trailers where the victims were housed and arranging for their wages to be transferred to co-conspirators in Guatemala and elsewhere.

Salgado Soto pleaded guilty to the labor-trafficking conspiracy in August 2015.

Duran Jr., was to 14 months in prison for alien harboring after pleading guilty in December 2015. Salgado-Borbon and Dominguez, pleaded guilty to immigration offenses in connection with this case and were sentenced to six and 12 months, respectively.