Four charged with smuggling illegal immigrants found dead

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Four men were charged Thursday with smuggling 11 immigrants whose badly decomposed bodies were found in a railcar at a grain elevator in Iowa last fall.

Federal prosecutors announced the 27-count indictment at a news conference in front of a grain car Thursday -- the first charges to result from the smuggling deaths.

The charges came nearly nine months after workers cleaning railcars in Denison, about 50 miles southeast of Sioux City, found the bodies. They had been trapped in the railcar for at least four months, and the bodies were so decayed that they could not identified until May.

Prosecutors said Juan Fernando Licea-Cedillo, 26, Rogelio Hernandez Ramos, 38, Guillermo Madrigal Ballisteros, 45, and Arnulfo Flores, 33, were charged with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants for financial gain where death resulted. Two of the suspects were in custody, while warrants were issued for the others.

If convicted, each could face the death penalty or life in prison.

U.S. Attorneys Charles Larson of Iowa and Michael Shelby of Texas said Licea-Cedillo was the leader of the smuggling ring.

Shelby said the men brought immigrants across the Rio Grande in groups of two or three and then hid them in Harlingen, Texas, where they were loaded into latched rail cars to be smuggled past the border checkpoint at Sarita, Texas.

"If you can get past that checkpoint you are largely unchecked in the United States afterward," Shelby said.

Immigrants or their families paid an average of $1,000 apiece to be smuggled into the country, Shelby said.

"It was a well planned, well-organized criminal enterprise that these people engaged in and that it was quite profitable," he said.

Despite the deaths, Licea-Cedillo and his associates allegedly continued to smuggle immigrants into the country until February.

Shelby did not say whether his office would seek the death penalty, but said the charges should send a message.

"They don't care about your life, they care about making the next dollar ..." Shelby said. "The loss of life of these people is the cost of doing business and if people knew that they would not put their children, they would not put their brothers and sisters, they would not put their husbands and wives aboard trains like this."

Licea-Cedillo was being held in a federal detention center in Houston on an unrelated federal charge. Warrants had been issued for Hernandez and Madrigal, prosecutors said.

Flores was arrested Thursday in McAllen, Texas, and appeared briefly before U.S. Magistrate Linda Dorino Ramos, who set bond at $150,000. His attorney, Abel Toscano, said only that "we don't have any idea how the case is going to unfold at this point."

It was not known if Licea-Cedillo had an attorney.

In a separate case, four men from the Rio Grande Valley have been indicted on charges they extorted, enslaved and raped illegal immigrants they had promised to smuggle to Houston. The charges were included in a federal indictment unsealed Thursday.

One suspect was at large while the others were in custody.