Baby Smuggling Ring May Still Be Operating, Say INS Investigators

Immigration authorities who broke up an alleged international baby-smuggling ring in San Diego this week say they are doubtful their investigation has halted the questionable transport of adopted children across the border into California.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service said Friday that the State Judicial Police in Baja California had joined the search for two men described as ringleaders of a group selling newborn infants from a Tijuana home for unwed mothers to couples in the United States.

However, the Tijuana district attorney’s office said late Friday afternoon it had not received documents relating to the case from the INS. Mexican police could not be reached for comment on the case.

The INS Wednesday arrested two San Ysidro women at Lindbergh Field as they handed a Washington couple a five-day-old baby allegedly smuggled into the U.S. from Tijuana. By Friday, the INS said it had confirmed from seized records that the ring had delivered 26 babies to couples in eight states, including four in California, since April.

But Clifton Rogers, deputy district director for the INS in San Diego, said Friday that investigators did not know whether the arrests had halted the smugglers’ activities, which have been going on for at least two years.

“This group may very well splinter off, or it may be a splinter,� Rogers said. Authorities in both the U.S. and Mexico are attempting to determine the extent of the smuggling network, he said.

Investigators were working backwards from the most recent to the earliest records seized from alleged participants in the ring to identify American families who took custody of the Mexican babies for fees of $5,000 and more. Rogers said some of the records lacked pertinent data, slowing the inquiry.

The two women arrested Wednesday, Juanita Leyva-Vargas, 52, and her daughter Melinda, 25, were being held on charges of smuggling an illegal alien. They are scheduled for a detention hearing Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

Rogers said he had reports that nationwide publicity given the arrests had prompted some parents to contact INS offices, suspecting they may have adopted children brought to the U.S. by the alleged smugglers. If parents in fact were unwitting participants in the scheme, the INS will refer them to state adoption officials so steps can be taken to make the adoptions legal, he said.

However, Rogers declined to predict how the INS might react if it determined that parents were knowing participants in illegal baby-smuggling.

“I don’t want to put out the message here that you can do this illegally and just go to the INS and they’ll tell you how to straighten it out,� he said.

Immigration and adoption officials said the scam, which aped the methods of legitimate adoption agencies, underscored the risks involved in adopting through private channels.

“There is only one proper way to adopt a child, and that is through your state adoption agency or through your state-licensed adoption agency,� Rogers said.

However, state statistics show that about 50 percent of adoptions in California are private placements, completed with the assistance of a lawyer or other counselor. Operators of these private adoption services said Friday that however illegal the Tijuana smuggling ring’s activities might be, there was no reason to condemn their services’ legal, authorized activities.

“Because these women didn’t obey the law, when the law isn’t difficult to obey, other infants in Tijuana whose mothers can’t feed them are going to be deprived of the opportunity for a decent life,� said David Keene Leavitt, a Beverly Hills attorney who said he places 25 to 30 adopted children monthly.

Leavitt said immigration authorities readily grant resident status to Mexican children legally adopted by American parents, though the numbers of such adoptions are small. Moreover, he said he has arranged hundreds of legal adoptions of the children of Mexican nationals who enter the U.S. to give birth.

“There’s a constant flow of women who come into America to give birth,� he said.

Bonnie Gradstein, whose adoption service in San Francisco places 15 to 20 children monthly, said there was little evidence of a large black market smuggling Mexican children into the U.S. across the California border.

“It’s so do-able to find an infant,� she said. “So there’s no reason to do anything illegal.�

Hawley Ridenour, chief of the adoptions section of the San Diego County Department of Social Services, said the wait in California to adopt healthy white infants, even through slower public channels, was shorter than in many other states--two years at the most.

Couples who sought to adopt children through the San Diego-area ring were poorly informed about the options for finding adoptable infants, Gradstein said: “They haven’t really tried to find anything out if they do something like that.�

According to Rogers, most of the couples that dealt with the ring learned about it from informal networks of adults seeking to adopt infants. “It looks like it was direct solicitation, with the evidence we have now, to clubs and organizations of would-be adoptive parents,� he said. “Through that, word of mouth to potential parents spread.�