McALLEN — An Edinburg woman will plead guilty to forced labor for her role in the kidnapping and hostage-taking of three migrants who were not authorized to be in the country last year.
An attorney for Margarita Alvarez, 40, alerted the judge to her pending plea change during a pretrial hearing held in McAllen federal court Tuesday morning.
Alvarez and her husband, Eduardo Javier Gomez, 31, both stand accused of detaining three Mexican migrants at their Edinburg home for approximately two weeks last summer.
During the course of those two weeks, the couple allegedly forced the migrants — who are cousins — to perform forced labor, including caring for Alvarez’s children, cleaning, selling fireworks at a roadside stand, and selling narcotics outside of a bar in rural Edinburg.
Investigators discovered the three people were being held against their will after a relative living in New York contacted authorities there. New York law enforcement, in turn, alerted the Texas Rangers, who notified Homeland Security Investigations.
The relative — a woman referred to in court documents simply as “Maria” — told investigators that she had been able to learn about her family members’ kidnapping during brief phone calls that Alvarez and Gomez had allowed the trio to make.
In the phone calls, the Edinburg couple allegedly forced the three migrants to tell Maria that they were doing well, all while trying to extort Maria and her husband for some $12,000 the migrants allegedly owed for being smuggled into the United States and transported to Houston.
However, the migrants later told investigators that they had already paid $4,500 each to be smuggled into the country. It wasn’t until they were in the Rio Grande Valley that their smugglers had demanded more cash.
When the trio was unable to pay the additional fees, they were transferred from smuggler to smuggler until they found themselves with Alvarez and Gomez, who took away their cellphones and kept them under constant, armed supervision.
The three migrants were eventually able to relay to Maria the true nature of their captivity by using an Indigenous Mexican language during their brief phone conversations.
HSI agents began to surveil Alvarez and Gomez at their Edinburg home within days of Maria’s outcry to NYPD officers.
Federal agents took Alvarez into custody July 8, 2021 after local law enforcement apprehended her during a traffic stop in Mission. Alvarez’s three children, as well as one of the migrants — a woman named Luz Marisela Fernandez Juarez — were also in the vehicle.
Alvarez’s husband was arrested later that night when he showed up to the Mission Police Department in search of his family.
Agents later found the remaining two migrants — Roger Zamora Juarez and Juan Carlos Antonio Zamora — at an Edinburg house belonging to Gomez’s sister.
Charges were originally levied against the couple last July; however, on June 28, a federal grand jury handed up new charges in a seven-count superseding indictment.
Gomez, the husband, faces five counts of obtaining and benefiting from forced labor, as well as one count of hostage taking. He faces up to life in prison for the forced labor charges, and an additional 20 years for the hostage taking.
Alvarez, meanwhile, was charged with two counts of obtaining and benefiting from forced labor.
She has since agreed to change her plea to guilty on Count 6 of the indictment, which alleges she obtained labor from Fernandez by force or threats of force.
Alvarez faces up to 20 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine at sentencing.
