Human Trafficking

When Sandra agreed to make the perilous trek from her native Guatemala to the United States in 2006, she said, she was lured by the prospect of a job as a housekeeper that would enable her to send money to her impoverished family back home. Her father had a hernia that prevented him from working, and money was so tight that she and her 12 siblings sometimes didn't have shoes or enough to eat, the young woman testified Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.

When television producer Sibyl Gardner adopted a baby girl in China in 2003, the official story was that the infant had been abandoned on the steps of the salt works in the city of Guangchang, where a worker found the day-old child and took her to a social welfare institution. But after reading with "utter horror" the latest revelations of child trafficking in China in the Los Angeles Times, Gardner found herself contemplating a trip to back to Jiangxi province to investigate how Zoë, now 7, came up for adoption.

Human trafficking is a modern form of slavery that must not be tolerated, a senior U.N. official said at a United Nations conference in Vienna. About 2.5 million people are involved in forced labor as a result of trafficking, the U.N. said. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said: "Let's call it what it is: modern slavery."

They can spot the smile on a suspected smuggler's face from 10,000 feet in the air, record full-color video of his run for shore and simultaneously track 5,000 ships spread over hundreds of miles of ocean. Flying above the Atlantic about halfway between Florida and the Bahamas, the latest addition to the government's anti-smuggling arsenal can track the trajectory of a boat leaving Cuba and compare it -- in seconds -- to every filed course plan for vessels on the water.

The father-and-son owners of an Oxnard auto body shop were arrested Thursday on suspicion of running a human smuggling ring that outfitted vehicles with hidden compartments and used them to transport illegal immigrants into the United States. Eduardo Aceves-Murillo, 45, and Edgar "Chucky" Eduardo Aceves, 26, both of Oxnard, and four co-defendants were indicted on charges of conspiring to transport migrants for financial gain, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

Federal authorities said Thursday they had dismantled a smuggling ring that brought hundreds of undocumented immigrants each month into Southern California, using private homes as "drop houses" and a 99-cent store as a staging ground. Authorities estimate the ringleaders may have grossed $6 million to $18 million annually transporting about 5,000 undocumented immigrants after they illegally crossed the border into Arizona.

Dozens of bodies washed ashore Friday in Yemen after smugglers threw nearly 150 Somali migrants overboard in shark-infested waters, the latest such tragedy in one of the most lawless stretches of ocean in the world. The Gulf of Aden between Yemen and the Horn of Africa is notorious for Somali piracy. The hijacking of a freighter carrying a cargo of heavy weapons two weeks ago heightened concern over the chaos in a key shipping route. It also prompted NATO to send warships to help U.S.

A task force in Los Angeles County has launched a billboard and public education campaign to draw attention to the battle against modern-day slavery that often involves women and children smuggled into the country and forced to work without compensation to pay their trafficking costs.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent has been arrested on suspicion of being part of a Tijuana-based trafficking organization that smuggled illegal immigrants into Orange County, U.S. law enforcement sources said. Because the indictment was not scheduled to be unsealed until this morning, few details were available. Robert Harvey, a Border Patrol spokesman, confirmed that an agent was arrested last week. According to sources, the agent is Jose Olivas, a 10-year veteran.

A truck driver was sentenced to life in prison without parole Thursday for his role in the deaths of 19 people who suffocated in an airless trailer during a disastrous human smuggling attempt in 2003. Tyrone Williams put his head down, then stood stock-still as U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal read the jury's sentence. His lead lawyer, Craig Washington, wiped away what he later said were "tears of joy" that his client's life was spared.