Washington ? The Immigration and Naturalization Service has arrested five citizens of El Salvador it alleges were involved in a multimillion-dollar ring that smuggled hundreds of Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadoran children into the United States, officials announced Monday.

“After years of earning enormous profits on the backs of innocent children by exploiting their desperation and exploiting their very fear, this ring of vultures is now shut down,” Johnny Williams, INS executive assistant commissioner for field operations, said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

INS agents were tipped off to the ring April 5, when Guatemalan authorities intercepted seven buses bound from El Salvador for the United States. They found 53 children, who tearfully told authorities that they were hungry and had been forced to sleep on the floor of hotel lobbies, officials said.

“This was a multinational investigation that has broken what we believe is the largest child smuggling ring we have ever encountered,” Williams said. “This was not a humanitarian operation built on any shred of compassion. It was a mean-spirited criminal enterprise, driven by greed and criminal profit.”

The investigation, dubbed “Operation White Fields,” is continuing, he said.

Beginning in 1994, the ring charged an average of $5,000 per child to smuggle its human cargo into the United States, INS officials said. It had transported hundreds of children ranging from 18 months to 17 years from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala through Mexico and into Los Angeles, from where they were sent throughout the United States, according to INS officials.

Many of the children expected to be reunited with their parents, who were living often illegally in the United States, but others were brought in for work or, to a lesser degree, for “exploitation,” INS spokesman Russell Bergeron said. The ring was contacted in a variety of ways, including through advertisements placed by the smugglers in American newspapers, officials said.

Officials of both the INS and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., said Monday that they would decide on a case-by-case basis whether to return the rescued children to their home countries and whether to prosecute or deport their parents.

The investigation involved INS officers in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, as well as those in Washington, Los Angeles and Houston. Also participating were law enforcement agencies in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Berta Campos, the alleged ringleader, was arrested in Los Angeles on July 15 for arranging to smuggle a young person identified only as “G.L.A.M.” for $5,000 plus a $60 fee for traveling expenses.

A second suspect, Guillermo Antonio Paniaqua, was arrested in Houston on June 13. The indictment alleges that two months earlier, Paniaqua met a 15-year-old boy identified only as “J.A.R.” at a hotel in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital, to make arrangements to smuggle him into the United States and pocketed half of the $5,000 fee.