House rentals appeal to entrant smugglers

By Jacques Billeaud

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SURPRISE — 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 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, Calif.

He said that whenever he spoke to the renters, "everything seemed OK."

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

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."