Men Arrested in Watonga Allegedly Had 17 Immigrants ‘Stacked’ in Van

WATONGA – Two men were arrested in February after Watonga police pulled over a minivan in the city and found 17 men crammed inside.

Juvencio Martinez-Bautista, 40, has been charged with one count of conspiracy and 17 counts of transporting or moving an illegal alien, a felony. Officials say Jorje Acevedo, 36, was driving the vehicle when it was pulled over.

According to a police report, Acevedo was driving a white minivan with Arizona tags when he was stopped Feb. 21, just before 2:15 a.m., for making two illegal turns. He pulled into the Western Inn parking lot on Clarence Nash.

After Acevedo provided a Mexican driver’s license, the officer could see his van was “occupied multiple times.” When they opened the sliding door on the driver’s side, the officer found more than a dozen men “stacked” unsecured in the van in a “manner that could only be described as inhumane.”

“They had been given a jug that once contained tea in which to urinate in,” the report says, “they all smelled as if they had not bathed in quite some time and they all seemed very frightened.”

Counting the driver and coconspirator Martinez-Bautista, officials eventually determined there were 17 men in the minivan, all undocumented migrants. The report says migrants at the scene would “look first” at Martinez-Bautista every time they were approached or directed by officers “as if he were in charge.”

The occupants were being taken to work “somewhere in Tennessee,” officials learned. One occupant told officials via translator that Acevedo took the workers’ phones and placed them in the glove box of the vehicle, where they were retrieved.

WPD notified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics about the workers. The van occupants were transported to the Blaine

County Jail, where they were fingerprinted and identified and then released at “the request of ICE.” Their cellphones were returned to them, the report says.

License plate recognition software determined that the minivan had been spotted just four days prior in Delaware.

Martinez-Bautista was held on $100,000 bond.