Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

10/13/00 News Report -- The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The daughter and brother-in-law of prominent Stockton farm labor contractor Luis Bautista have pleaded guilty in Sacramento federal court to conspiring with Bautista "to regularly, repeatedly, and intentionally hire illegal aliens."

Francisca de Inocencio and Francisco Figueroa also admitted Thursday that they assured a worker that his lack of a valid immigration document "did not matter."

Meanwhile, Bautista is seeking to suppress a statement he made to immigration agents when arrested July 15, saying he did not understand his right not to talk and to have a lawyer present.

Bautista, 66, is charged with hiring and harboring undocumented immigrants and, as a convicted felon, with illegally possessing a firearm when he was arrested.

While de Inocencio is the registered owner of F. Bautista Farm Labor, her father "ran the day-to-day operations" of the business, Assistant U.S. Attorney Camil Skipper told the judge Thursday.

The charges to which de Inocencio, 30, and Figueroa, 63, pleaded guilty are misdemeanors punishable by a maximum six months in prison plus fines that hinge on the number of undocumented immigrants involved.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Peter A. Nowinski set sentencing for Jan. 11.

Bautista has operated as a labor contractor for years, supplying workers to farmers and to food-service businesses in at least seven counties.

De Inocencio "acted as the office manager ... and was aware of employees for which (the business) had not obtained verification of eligibility for employment," Skipper told the judge.

"Figueroa was the 'pay man,' " she said. "In other words, he was responsible for paying the employees. (He) was aware that some of the employees ... were illegal aliens not eligible for employment in the United States."

Skipper then described a May 1999 exchange that one or the other of the two who pleaded guilty had with a worker.

In response to an undocumented employee's admission that he did not have a valid immigration document, one of the two "answered that it did not matter," the prosecutor told the judge.

According to a court affidavit of Special Agent Mark Green of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the two defendants were unknowingly dealing with a paid informant who had obtained work with their operation through one of their drivers.

The informant wore a hidden recording device when he went to get paid on May 15, 1999, at Bautista's office in Stockton, according to Green's affidavit.