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Exclusive: Judges rule parents in human smuggling ring can’t have son back

A New Jersey appeals court has agreed that a 3-year-old  boy should remain in foster care and not be returned to a Union City couple convicted of participating in a horrific human trafficking ring out of Honduras.

Photo Credit: Cliffview Pilot


The appellate court said the child never bonded with his parents, who were both behind bars when he was born and later were sentenced to 78 and 51 months in federal prison.


The harsher sentence went to the mother, Noris Elvira Rosales-Martinez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who was convicted of running the ring, which forced girls into indentured servitude, dancing for tips and meager wages in Hudson County bars.

Rosales-Martinez’s projected release date is Oct. 10, 2010. By that time, the youngster will be 5 years old, the judges noted.

The father, Jose Dimas Magana of El Salvador, got 51 months and was released last fall.

Both pleaded guilty to forced labor, conspiracy, and  harboring of illegal aliens, with deportation to follow their federal prison sentences.

“I’ve been around criminal law a long time — since 1974,” U.S. District Judge Joel Pisano said at the January 2008 sentencing in Trenton. “I don’t know that I’ve seen a more brazen, outrageous and depraved course of conduct.”

“The facts of this case are horrific,” the judge added. “We have threats, physical abuse, psychological abuse, coercion, and we have death.”

Rosales-Martinez admitted to Pisano that she and her sister helped oversee dozens of illegal Hondurans — some as young as 14 years old — who were forced to work six days a week and squeeze together in tiny apartments until they could repay smuggling fees upwards of $20,000. In one instance, a pregnant girl was forced to ingest abortion pills. The baby died after being born in a toilet.

Magana, meanwhile, admitted that the women were beaten and threatened.

Small wonder, then, that a Superior Court judge denied the couple custody of their child.

New Jersey’s appellate panel agreed, in a decision released Monday.

The parents appealed the original ruling from December 2007 — a month before they were sentenced — that terminated their parental rights to the boy, born on Oct. 20, 2005. They claimed their wasn’t enough legal evidence for the placement, and that their rights had been violated.

The mother actually  had planned to place the boy with the daughter-in-law of a friend she knew from church, they argued. She and her boyfriend also provided a list of “numerous relatives whom they thought might be able to care for the child,” the appellate panel noted.

However, “many of these relatives were unable or unwilling to do so,” the judges said in their decision, which, because of the boy’s age, refers to everyone involved only with initials.

“One relative, living in Honduras, already was caring for eleven children,” the appeals panel wrote. “One family in Connecticut eventually expressed a willingness to care for the child, but by the time it obtained the necessary licensing from the Connecticut authorities to do so, the child was already a year old.

“At that point, DYFS was looking for a placement with caregivers willing to adopt, and this family was unwilling to commit to adoption.”

DYFS put the boy in a foster home, where he remains. The parents called this a “patently unreasonable” move with no basis in reality.

The youth and family services officials presented a psychiatrist who examined the boy and determined that his lack of contact with his parents wasn’t a factor in a placement determination.

Ironically, the appeals judges noted, the doctor “found both parents to be free of major psychiatric or mental disorders, although immature…. [They] both were capable of parenting their child; they had positive qualities to help them provide for the child; and they would not present a risk to the child,” their decision says.

Still, the doctor added, the boy appeared “well taken care of” and had bonded with his foster mother. Any separation “will be significantly traumatic and cause enduring harm to this child’s emotional development,” the doctor warned. In addition, his “ability to trust and to form relationships” would be “significantly jeopardized.”

It is “essential to develop a very strong bonding between the child and the primary caretaker, and that bonding is developed very young in life, in the first two years of life,” the doctor testified.

The appeals panel, in turn, said the state judge’s decision to terminate parental rights “was supported by clear and convincing evidence in the record.”

The justices did, however, take DYFS to task for claiming the parents had no plan for the boy when they actually did. They even went so far as to say that “noting in the record indicates that” the woman the boy’s mother had in mind “was an inappropriate caretaker.”

However, they said, the fact that both parents were looking at long prison stretches at the time — followed by certain deportation — more than justified the decision to terminate their parental rights.

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