A federal judge slapped lengthy prison sentences Monday on two siblings who smuggled young illegal immigrant girls into the U.S. and then forced them into vile conditions, making them serve as cooks and cleaners at home and to get jobs, then stealing their paychecks.
One of the illegal immigrant girls, a young teen, was stabbed when the family didn’t like her cooking, and the girl was forced to have sex with the family’s boys, leading to pregnancy and miscarriage, according to federal authorities.
Domingo Francisco-Juan, the man who first smuggled the girl to the U.S. and condemned her to years of abuse, was sentenced to life in prison, in what the Justice Department called a historic outcome.
His sister, Lorenza Domingo-Castaneda, received a 20-year sentence. Another sister, Catarina Domingo-Juan, was sentenced in December to 20 years in prison. All of the siblings were migrants themselves, from Guatemala, as were their victims.
“What these young women were forced to endure at the hands of these defendants was nothing short of a nightmare,” said Gregory Harris, U.S. attorney for the central district of Illinois.
The case comes amid an intensifying debate over illegal immigration under President Biden and allegations that his administration has lost track of tens of thousands of migrant children. The New York Times last year reported that many of them have been pressed into forced labor.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke called the sentences “severe and historic.”
“Sadly, we know that forced labor crimes and abuses are all too common. They’re hiding in plain site all around us,” she said.
Two children were smuggled in by the siblings, one in 2016 when she was just 10 years old, and the other in 2019. In both cases, the defendant siblings promised the girls’ mothers back in Guatemala that they would be able to go to school and get a better life in the U.S.
Instead, they arrived to face a living hell.
The first girl, identified in court documents only as Victim 1, was pressed into being the family’s cook, cleaner and nanny — all before she was a teenager. She did go to school for a couple of years, but at age 12 they forced her to take a job cleaning a hotel, stole her paychecks and blocked her from speaking directly with her mother back in Guatemala.
At one point when the mother said she wanted her daughter back, the siblings demanded $15,000 in payment, claiming that’s what the girl owed for being smuggled in and for taking care of her.
Domingo-Juan even stabbed the girl when she didn’t cook food the way the family wanted, according to a family friend who cooperated with authorities. The friend said she saw the girl beaten between 20 and 25 times.
And in the most vile of allegations, authorities said in court documents that the girl was forced to have sex with multiple members of the family, including two of Domingo-Juan’s boys. She became pregnant and had a miscarriage; it was getting help at a hospital that seemed to have alerted authorities to the case in the first place.
Another migrant girl identified as Victim 2 was brought in 2019 and was also pressed into labor, both as a nanny for the family and in jobs, and threatened with beatings if she told anyone about her suffering. She, too, was blocked from speaking with her mother in Guatemala, authorities said.
A third victim was also lured to the U.S. by her boyfriend, who promised a better life but delivered forced labor and abuse once here, prosecutors said.
Domingo-Castaneda, one of the sisters, admitted to the judge through her lawyer that they had done “unspeakable acts of violence and depravity.”
“She could have refused and said no. Sadly, she did not,” Joshua B. Adams, the lawyer, told the judge in a memo ahead of sentencing.
Victim 1 was treated as an unaccompanied alien child, or UAC, when she arrived in 2016. That meant she was quickly sent to the Health and Human Services Department, which delivered her to the very siblings who’d smuggled her in.
HHS said it did due diligence and checked the family out, including verifying that the girl was related — apparently using the false birth certificate Francisco-Juan had used when trying to smuggle her in.
Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the girls were the victims of U.S. policy, which creates a pipeline of illegal immigrant children streaming into the U.S. and then rushes them out of government custody and into sometimes dangerous situations.
And even though the abuse in this case stretches back to 2016, Ms. Vaughan said the government has yet to fix it.
“There’s no chance that this is solved,” she said. “It’s going to require changes to the law and changes to policy, and instead the Biden administration is going in the opposite direction to institutionalize the policies that failed these kids.”
She said the government should do more to validate the sponsors who claim the children — DNA would be a good start — and should check up on children after they’re placed. The Biden administration has refused the check-ins, saying it doesn’t believe it has the power under the laws Congress has written.