Inset: Brandon Holguin (Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office). Background: The North County Correctional Facility in Castaic, Calif. (Google Maps).
A California man will spend several years behind bars over his role in a drug-fueled child-labor plot in which he forced a 14-year-old middle school student to sell clothes online for hours at a time.
Earlier this week, Brandon Holguin, 26, pleaded no contest to one count each of human trafficking for labor, child abuse under circumstances likely to cause great bodily injury or death and furnishing a minor a controlled substance, according to a press release issued by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.
The defendant was sentenced to five years in state prison and ordered to pay $4,300 in restitution for "depriving the victim of his possessions," the district attorney's office reported.
"Human trafficking often includes a predator luring a vulnerable child into illegal labor exploitation, as in this case," Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman said in a statement.
The underlying incidents occurred in May 2025 at a motel and elsewhere in Los Angeles County, Law&Crime previously reported.
The defendant first targeted the 14-year-old at a thrift store several months before the trafficking, which began on May 2, 2025.
Then, with the victim in tow, Holguin drove to the motel where he put the victim to work "sorting and photographing used clothing items for online resale," according to prosecutors.
But the work was voluminous and cataloging the hundreds of clothing items continued well into the warm Southern California night, law enforcement said. Holguin's solution, prosecutors said, was Adderall.
Prosecutors previously noted that the defendant "instructed the victim to ingest a controlled substance containing amphetamine commonly known as Adderall — which made the victim sick — so the victim could work late."
At the beginning of the middle schooler's ordeal, the defendant kept the victim's cellphone in his possession, so the minor could not be contacted by his family. Then, Holguin told the minor they needed to get rid of the device so that he "could not be tracked by his mother." Finally, the defendant sold the phone and used a fake ID to pawn the victim's jewelry, pocketing hundreds of dollars.
Holguin had other plans for the victim as well, authorities said. Namely, the defendant intended to traffic the boy hundreds of miles away into Northern California, law enforcement said.
When that alleged plan fell through, Holguin left the minor "alone on the side of a Los Angeles freeway in the middle of the night" on May 5, 2025, "driving away with the proceeds of the sales of the victim's phone and jewelry," according to the district attorney's office.
The victim managed to make it off the freeway and sought refuge at a nearby business. There, the staff made a 911 call, and the boy was reunited with his family later that same day by the LAPD.
On May 9, 2025, Holguin was arrested.
The case took several months to move forward. Eventually, the defendant was arraigned on the initial charges and pleaded not guilty. Later, prosecutors filed additional charges in a criminal information.
"The defendant, Brandon Holguin, will spend years in prison for his despicable acts of labor trafficking a child, making the child take an amphetamine so he could work all night and cutting off all communications with his family," Hochman's statement continued.
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