Texas bar Owner charged with sex trafficking of minors
February 12th, 2010 - 4:43 am ICT by BNO NewsMCALLEN, TEXAS (BNO NEWS) – A Texas bar owner was indicted for sex trafficking minor females, U.S. Attorney Tim Johnson said Thursday.
Beleal Garcia-Gonzalez, 34, a Mexican national and resident of Mission, Texas was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on January 13, 2010. He is supposedly the owner of a bar in Mission called “El Paraiso”.
Elizabeth Mendez-Vasquez, 22, and Maria Luisa Vaquez-Garcia, 19, both from Mexico illegally in the U.S., were also charged with conspiracy and three counts of harboring illegal aliens.
Garcia- Gonzalez is accused in three counts of knowingly recruiting, enticing, harboring, transporting, providing, obtaining and maintaining a minor child under 18 years of age in reckless disregard of the fact that force, fraud and coercion would cause that minor to engage in a commercial sex act between November 2009 and Jan. 13, 2010.
Mendez-Vasquez and Vasquez-Garcia each face a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000 if convicted of the conspiracy or harboring charges. Garcia-Gonzalez faces up to life imprisonment and a $250,000 fine if convicted of any one of the three sex trafficking charges.
“Because human traffickers pray on the most vulnerable,” said Jerry Robinette, special agent-in-charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in San Antonio, “ICE will continue to aggressively identify and assist victims of human trafficking and apprehend and present for prosecution those allegedly responsible.”
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Tags: bar owner, bno, coercion, commercial sex, conspiracy, el paraiso, garcia gonzalez, human traffickers, illegal aliens, immigration and customs enforcement, life imprisonment, maria luisa, mcallen texas, prosecution, reckless disregard, robinette, sex act, sex trafficking, tim johnson, victims of human trafficking