(CNN) — Several years ago, a family came to the United States and took up a terrifying new endeavor: smuggling young, poor women from Central and South America into the country and forcing them into prostitution.
The scheme was rather straightforward, according to court documents. One or two members of the family would contact women abroad and offer them resources to illegally immigrate and a legitimate job when they arrived. All the women needed to do was pay back their travel fees.
But once they were on the way, the women were told that price had increased, often by tens of thousands of dollars. The women felt they had no choice but to agree to engage in commercial sex and hand over the proceeds, prosecutors said.
On Wednesday, the ringleader of the operation — and the matriarch of the family — pleaded guilty to three conspiracy charges: sex trafficking, conspiring to bring illegal aliens into the US for financial gain, and money laundering.
The woman, Yilibeth del Carmen Rivero-De Caldera, faces up to life in prison.
The victims are young people who “think they’re coming to America for some type of opportunity for a better life,” Tysen Duva, who runs the Justice Department’s criminal division, told CNN. “They want to get here. They want to leave from where they come from. They’re going to pay money to do it. But what they don’t realize is the sex debt they’re going to be incurring when they get here.”
CNN has reached out to Rivero-De Caldera’s attorney for comment, as well as the attorneys for her eight codefendants, who have all pleaded guilty.
“As a young teenager, my client walked through and survived the jungles of the Darien Gap seeking refuge and a better future,” said Meggan Sullivan, the attorney for one of Rivero-De Caldera’s daughters-in-law. “Instead, she became the victim of a family of traffickers who groomed and controlled her” until she joined their scheme, Sullivan said.
“Before we judge survivors, we have to understand the extraordinary vulnerabilities traffickers deliberately exploit,” Sullivan continued. “We cannot understand these cases unless we understand the trauma, coercion, and survival that define them.”
The scheme
According to court documents, Rivero-De Caldera, a Venezuelan national, entered the United States in 2022 and jump-started the trafficking operation out of motels in Nashville, Tennessee.
Prosecutors allege that within a year, Rivero-De Caldera’s two sons, daughter, and their partners also entered the country and joined the scheme, as did two associates.
The group allegedly sent travel money to victims, hired smugglers to help them enter the US, and sometimes even escorted victims into the country and to Tennessee.
When they arrived, the victims were surveilled on a “near-constant basis” to ensure they didn’t escape, court documents say. Their immigration documents were often withheld. Some victims told investigators they believed Rivero-De Caldera and one of her sons were connected to Tren de Aragua, a cartel and US-designated terrorist organization, and worried the gang would hurt their families if they refused to comply, according to the documents.
One victim highlighted in court documents said she traveled through multiple countries by bus and on foot before she entered the United States. But during her journey, the woman, who is not named by prosecutors, was allegedly told she was going to be fined $35,000 because she was bringing along her 5-year-old daughter.
Because the woman couldn’t afford to pay that additional fee, she began working in commercial sex, prosecutors say, adding that she was repeatedly warned that there would be consequences should she try to escape before she had fully paid her debt.
When law enforcement arrived to arrest one of Rivero’s sons, they found the woman’s daughter in his hotel room, prosecutors say. Her mother was in a separate room with a client.
Prosecutors say Rivero-De Caldera and the codefendants used proceeds from forced prostitution to bring new victims to the US
Justice Department focuses trafficking resources
The Justice Department has made human trafficking one of its top priorities.
It is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises, according to the Justice Department, along with gun and drug trafficking. Human trafficking is estimated to be a $32 billion-a-year global industry, the department says.
To that end, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last month that he was appointing prosecutor Alessandra Serano to act as a liaison to other federal agencies on the department’s human trafficking and child exploitation work.
Serano told CNN that she hopes to “take the best of what DOJ has to offer” on its human trafficking investigations and partner with “other agencies like Homeland Security, the State Department, (and) state and local organizations, to work together to combat this problem.”
Serano is tasked with submitting a report to the deputy attorney general updating the department’s strategies to combat human trafficking and child exploitation within 120 days of her appointment.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.