Six Guatemalan men had driven 70 miles from Glen Burnie - tools loaded, tarps spread, shingles laid - and by the morning of March 23, the job on Bayly Road was nearing the finish line. Somewhere close to $10,000 was waiting for them at the end of it. It never came.
Instead, federal immigration agents arrived. The workers were surrounded, commanded down from the roof, and taken into custody. Their van sat in the driveway, doors open, thousands of dollars in tools left behind like a still life of a raid. One of the men’s wives was five months pregnant. They have two other children.
The woman at the center of it all - Karen Trevino, identified in court records as Karen Jeanette Trevino - now finds herself under the weight of a potential felony investigation, a viral condemnation, and a Maryland extortion statute with teeth.
Maryland Criminal Law Code Section 3-701 is not ambiguous. It prohibits obtaining services - or avoiding payment for them - through the threatened use of a person’s immigration status as leverage against them. Legal experts, including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, have said the alleged conduct in Cambridge fits that statute with uncomfortable precision.
The math matters here. At approximately $10,000, the alleged extortion lands in a sentencing tier carrying up to 15 years in prison and a $15,000 fine.
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