Inside ICE: Volume 3, Issue 1

ICE Investigation Breaks Two Texas Smuggling Groups

EL PASO, Texas—The masterminds of two major alien smuggling organizations and 13 of their associates have been indicted in El Paso, Texas on charges of smuggling and transporting more than 600 aliens from the El Paso area to Dallas and beyond.

The ICE led investigation revealed that the organizations generated more than $1.6 million in smuggling fees between March 2003 and October 2005. Depending on the nationality, aliens were charged between $1,500 and $6,000 each to be smuggled into the United States and transported to points that included Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, Illinois, Florida and New York.

ICE special agents, assisted by U.S. Border Patrol agents, late last week arrested 12 of 16 people named in two sealed indictments returned Dec. 21, 2005, by an El Paso federal grand jury. The defendants are charged with conspiracy to smuggle aliens, and the charges are the result of an ICE investigation that spanned more than two years.

Three of the defendants remain at large, and another, Roger Alvin Auxter, is already in La Tuna Federal Correctional Institute on a previous alien smuggling conviction. The 54-year-old truck driver was arrested in Fort Worth in 2004 after ICE special agents discovered 79 illegal aliens in his trailer.

Mike Price, 53; his wife Fabiola del Carmen Moguel de Price, 39; and Sam Jarvis, 52, headed two separate organizations. Jarvis and the Prices, all of Socorro, Texas, originally worked together. However in 2003, the Prices left the Jarvis organization to establish their own alien smuggling criminal enterprise.

The ICE investigation revealed Jarvis and both Prices headed two networks that smuggled Brazilians, Colombians, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Ecuadorians and Mexicans. Both organizations housed the aliens in “drop houses” throughout El Paso County after smuggling them into the United States from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

“These unscrupulous smugglers operate ruthlessly and with no regard for the human beings whose lives they endanger,” said Kyle Hutchins, special agent-in-charge of the El Paso ICE Office of Investigations.

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