Flight of illegal immigrants from LV probed

Monday, April 4, 2005 | 9:11 a.m.

Immigration authorities said they will be "trying to pursue leads for a potential criminal case" springing out of the detention of 11 illegal immigrants who boarded a Southwest Airlines flight in Las Vegas and flew to Raleigh, N.C.

The investigation will include attempts to determine if the immigrants spent any time in Las Vegas and if there is "any local connection" to the area, said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The flight left McCarran International Airport March 29 with a layover in Chicago, where a federal official notified peers in Raleigh about a suspicious group of passengers, Kice said.

The passengers -- 11 illegal immigrants and one legal resident, the step below citizenship -- apparently entered the United States in Arizona. They are Mexican nationals and are now detained in Atlanta.

Kice said "it is no secret that McCarran has been used in the past by human smugglers ... as a fallback because of the abundance of flights," particularly as other airports in the region like those of Los Angeles and Phoenix receive more scrutiny from federal officials.

The scrutiny, Kice said, is aimed at "disrupting human smuggling operations" by "taking out pivotal members of groups" that smuggle immigrants into the United States.

If the ringleaders of the groups are caught, she said, they can often be hit with more serious charges than entering the country illegally, including money laundering and conspiracy.