Ariz. Takes Aim at Migrant ‘Drop Houses’
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State officials are picking new targets in their efforts to stop illegal immigration in Arizona: the “drop houses” where human smugglers hold customers until they pay up.
Gov. Janet Napolitano, addressing the opening day of the Legislature on Monday, said the state should go after property managers who knowingly rent homes to smugglers.
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Napolitano posted an executive order Monday that lets state real estate regulators and state police share information on drop houses so they can prepare reports and make recommendations on the problem.
Smugglers store customers in drop houses while they collect their fees and make their travel arrangements. The locations host some of the worst abuses in immigrant smuggling, such as assaults, rapes and hostage-takings. Some smugglers force their way into drop houses to kidnap rival traffickers for ransom.
The Phoenix metropolitan area is believed to have about 1,000 drop houses.
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(Posted on January 18, 2008)
Comments
Gov. Napolitano of AZ has no real interest in preventing illegal immigration… she just gave pro-amnesty candidate Barack Obama her endorsement for president.
This superficial idea of focusing on owners of drop houses will not even begin to put a dent in the problem.
There are 500,000 illegal aliens in Arizona… the employer sanctions law is one step in the right direction, but the liberals like Napolitano are trying to weaken it (and the pols and lawmen who support it) from behind the scenes.
Posted by Taxpaying Citizen at 5:25 PM on January 18
Such houses are a priori illegal, since placing people in them under these circumstances constitututes unlawful imprisonment.
Posted by at 6:13 PM on January 18
I have a better idea. Wny doesn’t the state give rewards to citizens who report drop houses? The neighbors can usually figure out what is going on. They should be able to “drop a dime” on these houses and clean up their own neighborhoods.
Posted by Reader-1 at 6:26 PM on January 18
It seems as if the “War on Illegal Immigration” is growing - hopefully this won’t be a case of “shutting the door after the horse has bolted”, or words to that effect.
Posted by Obscuratus at 8:25 PM on January 18
I live next door to a drop house! Well, a raided drop house, so it’s a complete eyesore, and there’s still a shipping container in the back yard where the illegals were stowed away. Nothing can be done about it because ownership of the house is tied up with the lawyers.
Posted by Jacqui in AZ at 8:45 PM on January 18
Slavery is illegal in this country.
Posted by at 10:33 PM on January 18
I am just one gringo, but I bet I can rent new “drop houses” faster than the State of Arizona can close them. I can do several a day but the State of Arizona cannot begin to search for them until I begin to stuff them with illegal aliens. If I have enough of the “drop houses”, I can put some elderly sorts in them and use each of the houses less than full-time. Now you almost have to be standing at the front door to catch me smuggling human cargo.
Of course, this is easier still if I do not use a house at all for a drop house. I can use a RV, houseboat, mini-warehouse, truck trailer, tent, beanfield, travel trailer, bus, open pit, or state park.
But my smuggling business would dry up, if there were NO JOBS for the clients to work when they got to Gringotown.
Posted by Memphomaniac at 12:37 AM on January 19
Napolitano has an ulterior motive for making these statements, she is attempting to place the focus on one aspect of illegal immigration to avert it from others. These drop houses are only the beginning of their journey thruout America, from there they will be dispersed to “safe or distribution houses” all over the US.
Posted by abc at 5:47 AM on January 19
In Southern California, thanks to a pair of talk show hosts here, these “drop houses” are also called “clown houses”. The reason they are being called “clown houses” is because there have been up to 90 people packed into these houses like clowns packing themselves into a car during a circus show.
Posted by Jeff at 11:17 AM on January 20
Reader-1 - I did just that. My neighborhood had a house with 18 people living in it, all illegals. It took some doing. First had to find a reason other than immigration law for the locals to get involved. We tried ICE. ICE wouldn’t drive all of the way from Chicago to pick them up, my town of 4300 doesn’t have a formal arrangement with ICE. My county of St Louis County — even though it has a million people plus — also did not (and probably still does not) have a formal agreement with ICE in place to deport illegals taken into custody.
The best my city police could do was send in the building inspectors, find enough violations and use the police to hold everyone for a warrant for unsafe conditions and violation of the code & run checks against everyone there & entering later for outstanding warrants (quite a few had those). They tacked on a few minor charges where they could and arrested most of the people in the house, some they couldn’t come up with a legal way to hold them even though they were illegal. The police condemned the house on the spot & seized a vehicle with drugs in it.
But what happened to the illegals and people collecting the rent? They were taken to our local jail, processed out to St. Louis County jail where they were allowed to make bail if they could & pretty much disappeared back into the community. Even if they couldn’t make bail, they still would only be held until trial and then released with fines. End up right back out in the community.
The only thing I achieved getting LEO involved was the removal of the house from my area. Other than a few of them with outstanding warrants, the illegals didn’t go anywhere. It was difficult to get LEO interested, my local police don’t even have an interpreter on staff so they had to wait for an officer who spoke Spanish to become available from another police dept and convince them to let them use him for a couple hours. You can’t do a raid on a building safely without some way to communicate.
If the feds wont enforce the law, and make it very difficult for you to do so, you are left with the existing codes to try to find a way to charge them or forced to release them. They had to use building code violations to find a way just to get in, and if they hadn’t let the inspectors in voluntarily there would have been nothing that could have been done legally to gain access in the time alloted with the Spanish speaking officer.
Its not as easy of a problem as it sounds like when local police can not enforce immigration law, and there are only petty criminal and civil laws against building code violations. If they had a law aimed at drop houses it might have been made to apply to this situation.
Posted by Salt at 2:47 PM on January 23