BANGOR – Five Spanish-speaking men who apparently were harvesting potatoes in Aroostook County appeared Monday in federal court on charges of possessing false identification documents.

Each man had fake Social Security cards and fake resident alien cards, according to court documents.

Julio Cesar Erazo, 45, Roberto Erazo-Santos, 44, and Carlos Ernesto Vasquez-Espana, 48, all of El Salvador, and Jose Alfonso Vasquez-Rodiguez, 25, and Fernando Garcia, 38, both of Honduras, appeared Monday before U.S. Magistrate Judge Margaret Kravchuk.

If convicted, they each face up to one year in prison, a $250,000 fine and eventual deportation.

They were arrested Sunday afternoon outside a residence on the Houlton Road in Mars Hill after a border patrol agent on routine patrol saw them lying on the ground outside the house, according to court documents.

The men had been working for McCrum-McCrum-Lunney, a large potato and rotation crop operation based in Mars Hill.

No one connected with the farm has been charged in connection with their arrest, according to court documents.

Garcia and Erazo-Santos had been arrested previously and deported, according to court documents. The other men had no previous immigration violations or criminal histories.

The men admitted to border patrol agents on Sunday that they had entered the U.S. illegally earlier this year, according to court documents.

Four said they had crossed the Rio Grande into Texas; the fifth said he crossed the desert into Arizona. The four apparently purchased their false documents in Boston or Baltimore for between $120 and $150. A fifth man told border agents a person connected with an employment service gave him the documents.

In court Monday, a Bangor attorney was appointed to represent each man. The effort to move the legal proceeding along quickly stalled when Erazo-Santos indicated through the interpreter that he did not understand what was happening.

Paul Garcia of Appleton spent more than four hours interpreting for the defendants when they met with probation officers and their attorneys. He told Kravchuk that the task of translating for all five men at once in the courtroom was difficult because some words, such as bail and hearing, are not the same in El Salvador and Honduras.

Instead of waiving their rights to preliminary examinations and detention hearings, attorneys and the judge agreed to hold those hearings in five days so they could have more time with their clients and the interpreter.