2024-01-17 08:29:53
Events / International.- A Venezuelan who was illegally in the United States was part of a human trafficking operation that forced immigrant women to work as prostitutes in Chicago and the suburbs, prosecutors said Tuesday. Chicago police officers released two women from the trafficking operation following one of their captors took them to a West Side hospital for medical treatment over the weekend, according to officials.
The victims, Venezuelan women ages 20 and 22, and a third woman told investigators they arrived in the United States in October with the help of a man named Victor. He forced them to work as prostitutes to pay their “debt” and kept all the money his clients paid.
The women escaped from Victor at the end of the year and fled to a hotel in Elgin, authorities said. They revealed to investigators that they met a man in Elgin named Yession, who promised to protect them from Victor if they worked for him.
On Friday, Yession and three men went to the women’s room at the Elgin hotel with firearms. The men took both women’s phones, told them they owed them money and forced them into separate cars, according to prosecutors.
Both victims ended up in the same place: a home in the 5000 block of West Gladys in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood.
Prosecutors alleged that Wilson Albeiro Vásquez Román, 24, a Venezuelan who is in the country illegally, held the women at gunpoint in the home. While they were there, different men, including Vásquez Román, assured the women that they would be sent out of state to be sex workers and threatened to harm the victims’ families, prosecutors said.
Fuente: CWB Chicago
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