Illegal immigrants smuggled into new homes

updated 2:45 p.m. ET Dec. 19, 2007

SURPRISE, Arizona - Unable to sell his house in suburban Phoenix's anemic real estate market, Jason Winterholler rented to a couple who paid the deposit in cash and didn't haggle over price.

It was a deal he came to regret.

The renters were fronts for immigrant smugglers who used the house as a hiding place for illegal immigrants and trashed the home. In October, a police SWAT team drove an armored personnel carrier onto the lawn and raided the house, rounding up nearly two dozen people.

"That was the biggest disappointment. I definitely felt violated," said Winterholler, a high school athletic director now living in Pasadena, California. He said that whenever he spoke to the renters, "everything seemed OK."

Immigrant smugglers are seeing a business opportunity in the U.S. mortgage crisis: They are renting vacant new homes in the Phoenix suburbs and using them as stash houses for the people they have slipped across the Mexican border, authorities say.

Stash houses are stopover points where smugglers collect their fees and make travel arrangements for immigrants headed to points throughout the country.

The homeowners, often out-of-state residents who bought the houses as investments, get suckered into renting to immigrant smugglers because they are desperate to generate income from properties that aren't selling, authorities say. The background checks they do on the prospective renters are not as rigorous as they might otherwise be.

Immigrant smugglers "are opportunistic," said Troy Henley, deputy special agent in charge of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona. "They will go where it's easiest and where it gives them the most benefit."

The Phoenix metropolitan area is believed to have about 1,000 immigrant stash houses. Exactly how many of them are new houses that languished on the market and were rented out in desperation is unclear. But authorities say they are seeing more and more such cases.

Immigration authorities elsewhere said they have no evidence the same thing is happening in other cities near the country's southern border.

Arizona is the busiest entry point for illegal immigrants coming through Mexico, and Phoenix's proximity to the border has make it the nation's busiest smuggling hub.

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