Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, Labor Trafficking, Ohio 2015

Aroldo Castillo-Serrano, a 33-year-old Ohio man, was sentenced to 188 months in prison for his role in a labor trafficking ring that forced Guatemalan minors and adults to work on egg farms in Ohio under the threat of physical harm.

The sentencing was announced by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, Acting U.S. Attorney Carole S. Rendon, and Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony of the FBI’s Cleveland Division.

Castillo-Serrano pleaded guilty on August 24, 2015, to conspiracy to commit forced labor, forced labor, witness tampering, and alien harboring charges. His co-defendant, Ana Angelica Pedro-Juan, 22, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

According to documents filed in the case and admissions made in court, the defendants and their associates recruited workers from Guatemala, some as young as 14 or 15 years old, by falsely promising them good jobs and a chance to attend school in the United States. The defendants then smuggled and transported the workers to a trailer park in Marion, Ohio, where they ordered them to live in dilapidated trailers and work at physically demanding jobs at Trillium Farms for up to 12 hours a day for minimal amounts of money.

The work included cleaning chicken coops, loading and unloading crates of chickens, debeaking chickens, and vaccinating chickens. Eight minors and two adults were identified in the indictment as victims of the forced labor scheme.

Castillo-Serrano recruited the victims, smuggled them into the United States, oversaw money transfers, and issued threats to ensure compliance. Pedro-Juan falsely represented herself to government officials as a family friend of the minor victims in order to have them released to her custody. She also oversaw the trailers where the victims were housed and arranged for their wages to be transferred to co-conspirators in Guatemala and elsewhere.

The defendants were ordered to pay a total of $67,230 in restitution, jointly and severally, to the victims.

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