413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Brothels and Migrant Camps Brothels
San Diego’s close proximity to Mexico and large number of migrant camps, particularly in the northern
part of the county, make it a prime market for underground commercial sex activities. These activities are
known to take place within migrant worker encampments and brothels and typically involve Hispanic
male clients and Hispanic female sex workers. As one San Diego law enforcement official explained,
“Where up there you’ve got migrant camps, you’ve got a lot more fields and everything else where they’re
doing prostitution out of the fields and setting up brothels to keep the workers happy.” The UCSE in these
venues are all cash-based, and johns pay from $20 to $80 for a variety of sex acts.
Similar to the Asian massage parlors, law enforcement has difficulty determining whether the women that
work in the migrant camp brothels are trafficked or trade sex in these venues voluntarily. According to
one federal law enforcement officer, “The Mexican nationals actually temporarily enter the United States
legally with border crossing cards, visa, etc. They will come across and they will service men here and then
they will go back. It is a business and it is work. So it terms of your true human trafficking case when they
are under lock and key and so forth, that is where we do not see as much as we should be seeing.” Several
stakeholders stated that the women who work in the camps and brothels tend to be younger–and in many
cases are minors–and see more clients in a day than the Asian women working in the Asian massage
parlors. Thus, there are more elements of sex trafficking visible in the migrant camps and brothels;
however, law enforcement is often unable to find anyone within the Hispanic community willing to talk
about what takes place in migrant camp brothels.
Women are brought to migrant camp brothels during the summer months and then moved to indoor
brothels, located in different parts of the city, once the weather turns cold and rainy. Because migrant
camps are often in remote areas, traffickers hire drivers to drive women to a field near the camps, where
set up tents and sometimes sell food and beer:
They would bring in anywhere from five to eight girls, something like that and then there
would be 20 to 70 men that would come hiking in. There was usually a given time. The
geographic area was perfect for them, the way the road was set-up, how they set up so it
was really difficult to investigate that one especially because we had to hike in five miles
behind the other side of the mountain just to get a location to look down on the property
because if you went in they know who is supposed to be there, who is not supposed to be
there … the pimps do not; they stay very distant from what they are doing, and they have
drivers that drive their girls everywhere. (San Diego Law Enforcement Official)
The women and girls would see anywhere from 30 to 50 johns during a two and a half- to three-hour
period. A local law enforcement officer described what he saw when investigating a case in one camp:
It’s like having sex in a PE-room, and up the road from there it was girls’ underwear,
condoms, beer bottles, so you can just picture how this looks, with everybody lined up—
no shame. But I think the money is there. Obviously it’s there or it wouldn’t be around as
long as it has been. The money that they ask for per service is less but they deal more of it.
(San Diego Law Enforcement Official)
Because the brothels are located in apartments within commercial zones, such as strip malls, they do not
bring in as much business in a week as the migrant camp brothels. Brothels tend be marketed through
word of mouth, as one law enforcement official explained, “I was watching a place over in [city name] one
year and we knew the brothel location and what they were doing is right around the corner was a Hispanic
strip mall and what they were doing is they had a guy they put down there and he would bring a guy back
with him, they would do their deed, he’d bring him back, they’d bring another one.” The officer went on to
say,
You’d go in there, and I don’t know what they’d charge, but they have a three bedroom
apartment, four bedroom apartment, and guys are lining up, and they’re selling beer, and
a condom and they go in there and get out. You walk into a living room and it’s like a
night club with a bar in the kitchen where the refrigerator is, then your back three
bedrooms are separated off into fours or however big the mattress is and that’s how big
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