Undocumented Chinese nationals recruited on international websites to cross into the United States are becoming victims of labour and sex trafficking, often on illicit marijuana farms run by Mexican and Chinese syndicates in Oklahoma, the state's top law enforcement official said on Wednesday.
"These ads, in Mandarin, are thinly veiled offerings to engage in criminal activity," Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma's attorney general, said in testimony before the US House Homeland Security Committee in Washington.
One such advertisement "offers jobs for a 'massage spa' to people who are 'able to endure hardships' and who have 'good hygiene'," he said.
Drummond was participating in the Republican-led panel's first impeachment hearing for President Joe Biden's top border official, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, over the flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border. He agreed with his fellow Republicans that the federal government had not done enough to control the influx.
He said that "every single case" of illegal marijuana growing being investigated in Oklahoma had some level of undocumented labour trafficking, "particularly in operations run by Chinese nationals".
Drummond narrated what he called the "living horror" of two Chinese women investigators had found while executing search warrants related to illegal drug activity by Chinese nationals.
"Mattresses on the floor of their bedroom were littered with condoms, lotions and other unsavory supplies," he said, adding that the women spoke no English and had been in the US for months but "could not say where they were".
"They had not been out of the house since their arrival. They simply awoke every day, worked and went back to sleep," Drummond said.
The hearing comes as Republicans are blocking funding for Ukraine in its war against Russian invaders and threatening to force a government shutdown as part of their efforts to "secure" the southern border. Immigration remains one of the top issues for conservative voters ahead of the presidential election on November 5.
In 2023, the US Border Patrol arrested about 2 million migrants at the US-Mexico border. During Donald Trump's presidency from 2017-2021, the year 2019 saw the most migrant arrests at 852,000.
According to US Customs and Border Protection data, US authorities encountered more than 24,000 Chinese nationals at the US-Mexico border over the 12 months ending in October 2023. Only about 2,000 Chinese came to the southern border in the previous year, the data shows.
People who leave China often are trying to escape persecution or poverty at home, reports say, as the nation struggles to restore a measure of pre-Covid growth.
Drummond cited the execution-style murder of four Chinese nationals at an illegal marijuana farm in Oklahoma in November 2022.
The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics said at the time that close to 80 per cent of the 200 such farms shut down by between 2020 and 2022 were either run or owned by Chinese nationals.
Drummond testified on Wednesday that a "vast majority" of more than 50 "complex, multi-jurisdictional criminal cases" being investigated by Oklahoma's Organized Crime Task Force, which was established last year, involved Mexican and Chinese drug syndicates.