Brazilian smuggler exploits Biden border rules to supply restaurants with cheap labor

A newly revealed migrant smuggling case out of Massachusetts is shedding light on several massive holes in the U.S. immigration system, including the “family loophole,” asylum fraud and using illegal immigrant labor to undercut U.S. workers’ wages.

The Brazilian man accused of orchestrating the smuggling bragged about how easy it was to game the system. He said he paid close attention to changes at the border to know where to send his clients and what to tell them to say to gain a quick catch-and-release.

In one conversation with an informant that federal agents recorded, he pointed to the importance of sending migrants to the border with children in tow because it means they would almost certainly be set free in the U.S. rather than blocked at the boundary line.

“We know that the government can’t hold these people there because of the children,” said the man, Chelbe Moraes, according to a translation that agents provided to the federal court in Massachusetts.

Chelbe Moraes is at the center of the accusations, which also include Jesse Moraes, his brother, and Hugo Moraes, Chelbe’s nephew and Jesse’s son. They stand accused of running a years-long smuggling operation that ran from Sao Paulo to the streets of Boston.

Authorities say they and others cajoled Brazilians to make the illegal journey across the border, charged them roughly $20,000 to facilitate their trip, provided them with contacts and documents and bribed Mexican authorities to smooth the journey.

Once the migrants were in the U.S., authorities said, they were forced to work off their smuggling debts by pulling shifts of 14 hours a day or more, seven days a week, at two restaurants in Woburn, one run by Jesse and Hugo. The two men paid criminally low wages, off the books, to their captive workers, while haggling over what they said were unpaid smuggling fees.

Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, said the real tragedy is that case isn’t particularly unusual. She said it happens with “astonishing impunity.”

“How many people in Woburn patronized that restaurant, walked past the house, encountered the abused migrants without understanding the brutality of what was occurring, how they were threatened and in bondage, and thinking what’s the problem with illegal migration?” she said.

Attorneys for Jesse Moraes and Hugo Moraes didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Both are being detained while a magistrate judge considers their cases.

Chelbe has also been charged, but a Homeland Security Investigations agent told the court that there is little hope of getting him extradited from Brazil to face the charges. Brazil does have an extradition treaty with the U.S., but the national constitution prohibits it from turning over citizens for charges abroad.

The Brazilian Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to an inquiry for this report.

Chelbe told one of the migrants he helped smuggle that he is a lawyer and the mayor of a city in the state of Minas Gerais.

Through phone numbers, investigators tied Chelbe to more than 40 cases of Brazilians who were detected after being smuggled into the U.S.

He kept close track of changes in U.S. border security policy, and according to authorities who taped his conversations, told one of his smuggling clients that he was quick to adapt to opportunities presented by a change in enforcement policy.

“I have to be following the decisions of all these judges on the border, sometimes we have to change places, people at the last minute; and if I don’t follow that, I end up losing clients, clients are arrested and end up going to deportation, because of some guidance I didn’t provide,” he said.

Ms. Vaughan said that dispels the notion that there’s something inevitable about massive waves of illegal border crossers.

“This proves that policies make a huge difference in the flow of migrants and that illegal migration is not a force of nature but a criminal business that responds to our policies,” she said.

Chelbe Moraes coached the migrants to claim asylum once in the U.S. He told one witness cooperating with ICE that they needed to have filed his claim “yesterday.” Chelbe offered to hook them up with fake documents to help build the case.

The government’s chief informant said they agreed to pay Chelbe $20,000 but could borrow only $10,000 from family so they ended up owing the other $10,000. Chelbe agreed to let them pay the rest in installments but tacked on another $2,000 to the price for interest.

Another government informant claimed to have been cajoled by Jesse and brought three children and paid $22,000 to Chelbe. That informant worked at Jesse’s Taste of Brazil restaurant from 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. every day but Sunday, when quitting time was 3 p.m. They got $100 a week.

After moving to Hugo’s restaurant, the informant said, their hours improved slightly and they doubled their pay to roughly $800 a month. One of their children also worked at the restaurants and clashed with Jesse, saying he threatened to have them kicked back to Brazil where someone would “exterminate” them and their family.

Biden administration officials say they are trying to increase enforcement against smugglers.

The Homeland Security Department said last week that it made 5,000 smuggling arrests in the previous six months, which it said was a 500% increase over past anti-smuggling surges.

“Because of these increased law enforcement efforts, human smuggling organizations have been forced to change their tactics. Some have shifted their routes. They moved their stash houses — the locations where they hold people being smuggled or stash illicit weapons — further away from the border,” Homeland Security said. “They have also increased what they charge and often do not guarantee passage across the border.”

The Washington Times has reported that the migrant smuggling economy along the U.S.-Mexico border is now worth $20 billion a year, and cartels themselves collected $2.6 billion in pure profit over the past 12 months from border-crossing fees alone.

As part of the smuggling scheme authorities also charged Tony Chacon-Gil, who they said produced fake Social Security cards and other bogus documents for the Moraes brothers.

Chacon-Gil, from El Salvador, has his own strange immigration history: He waded across the Rio Grande with a larger group of illegal immigrants in 2005, skipped out on his deportation hearing and was ordered removed.

He didn’t pop up on authorities’ radar until a 2012 arrest in Massachusetts for driving without a license.

ICE took him and put him before an immigration judge, where he fought his deportation but lost. ICE released him anyway and he remained until 2018, during the Trump administration, when he was brought in and finally ousted. In 2020, investigators realized he had returned and was living under an alias.

That appears to be around the time investigators were pursuing the Moraes family, judging by the dates of conversations recorded between informants and Jesse and Hugo.