Work visa program is rife with problems - KansasCity.com

By MARK MORRIS
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Mon, Dec. 14, 2009 10:15 PM

The largest suspected human trafficking ring ever uncovered by U.S. law enforcement brought its victims into the country on commercial airliners, using completely legal documents, records show.

For almost a decade, three companies and 12 accused human traffickers charged in a landmark Kansas City human trafficking case allegedly took advantage of a guest worker visa program that is easy to defraud.

An investigation by The Kansas City Star found it’s a loophole-ridden system that permits traffickers to file transparently bogus paperwork that goes virtually unchecked by at least three federal agencies.

With approved visas in hand, traffickers around the country have brought thousands of workers to the United States, where they are often exposed to hazardous living and working conditions and paid just pennies an hour.

And the U.S. Labor Department — the agency charged with protecting workers — does little to root out the problems, even returning almost $200 million earmarked for visa fraud detection to the federal Treasury.

As part of its investigation, The Star obtained hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed investigative records from the alleged Kansas City conspiracy and examined thousands of pages of wiretap transcripts and other documents from labor trafficking cases around the country.

The stories of abuse include workers in Missouri being injured on the job and going without adequate medical treatment because their employers didn’t buy workers’ compensation insurance; employers requiring workers in Alabama to rent crowded apartments so shabby that they resembled “pig sties” while the trafficking schemes’ leaders lived in a $700,000 home with an air-conditioned doghouse; and women illegally working in a Tennessee motel paid so little that they were “dying of hunger.”

Federal prosecutors exposed weaknesses in the guest worker visa program as recently as May, when they announced human trafficking charges in Kansas City against the leaders of the Giant Labor Solutions conspiracy.

Prosecutors alleged that GLS and others brought more than 1,000 foreign workers to Missouri, stole their wages and exposed some to terrible living and working conditions. It’s the first human trafficking case in the nation filed under federal racketeering laws.

Some defendants in the GLS case allegedly heaped debt onto workers and threatened to have them deported if they didn’t illegally perform work that was not permitted under their visas.

Those victims came to the United States carrying visas issued by the government’s H-2B program, which funnels temporary guest workers into non-agricultural, seasonal jobs, such as those in the hospitality and landscaping industries.

At a recent court hearing on the GLS case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Cordes said that flaws in the program make it attractive to criminals.

“The structure of the H-2B visa program makes it a prime vehicle for gross and widespread abuse,” Cordes said. “As evident by the indictment itself, the H-2B visa program offers a means to take advantage of international workers and empowers criminals to have the upper hand once the workers have arrived in the United States.”

To be sure, thousands of legitimate businesses use the H-2B program to find temporary, full-time help for peak periods when Americans are not available or do not want the jobs. For honest employers, the paperwork process can be arduous and painstaking.

But for a criminal labor broker with no scruples about falsifying applications, obtaining visas is simple. What’s more, federal labor officials admit they have no authority to enforce the terms of the contracts between foreign workers and the employers who bring them over.

During a recent debriefing with federal prosecutors in Virginia, Gabor Teglasi — a Hungarian illegally in the United States — bragged about how he and others exploited American guest worker visas to traffic thousands of foreigners to St. Louis and other cities.

“The United States deserved what happened in this case,” Teglasi said.

But instead of tightening the program, federal bureaucrats recently “streamlined” it so that guest worker visas could be approved more quickly and with even less oversight, The Star’s investigation found.

The ease with which the system can be defrauded allows criminals to use U.S. law to turn foreign workers into something very close to slaves, said Mary Bauer, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“For too long, our country has benefited from the labor provided by guest workers but has failed to provide a fair system that respects their human rights and upholds the most basic values of our democracy,” Bauer said.

Red flags ignored

H-2B is a small visa program used by businesses that can’t find American workers to take temporary, full-time seasonal jobs. Workers with such visas clean hotels, shuck shellfish and teach youngsters to ski at Colorado ski resorts.

Given the size of the U.S. work force, the program is relatively tiny. Only 66,000 new visas are approved every year.

Until some recent rules went into effect, applications were submitted first to state labor agencies, which verified that employers had made good-faith efforts to hire Americans by advertising the jobs and interviewing applicants.

Criminals quickly found ways around that.

One East Coast visa fraud conspiracy simply scheduled interviews with U.S. applicants for inconvenient times, such as 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The few Americans who actually appeared reported later that the interviewers were “intimidating” and made the jobs sound “as bad as possible.”

Even false financial information sometimes doesn’t raise red flags.

In application after application, The Star’s investigation found that the U.S. departments of Labor, Homeland Security and State routinely certified and approved the applications and issued the visas.

Last year, Ilkham Fazilov, a Kansas City defendant in the GLS case, signed paperwork on behalf of Five Star Cleaning, asking for 87 H-2B visas.

In the application, Five Star contended that it had a gross annual income of almost $1.6 million and employed more than 90 employees since January 2007. The spreadsheets also gave a detailed accounting of its payroll and hours worked for the entire year of 2007.

A check by authorities with state incorporation records — available online without cost — would have shown that none of that was true. Fazilov didn’t incorporate Five Star Cleaning until Dec. 18, 2007.

While Five Star also claimed to have the money to pay workers once they arrived in the United States, a review of records by The Star showed that the company conducted no bank activity in 2007.

Government watchdogs also might have noticed that GLS and Crystal Management, two other companies charged in Kansas City, each submitted identical financial information on their visa requests.

Indeed, both companies reported the exact same gross annual income — $1,434,347 — and the same annual profit down to the penny — $125,414.11.

Examples outside of Missouri aren’t hard to find, either. In 2007, the government issued 25 H-2B visas for a Virginia contractor that provided workers to load trucks from a nearby manufacturing plant onto rail cars. But the plant had stopped producing trucks almost a year before.

Immigration lawyer Kent Felty, who represented trafficking victims in civil suits against an Oklahoma company, said he isn’t surprised that such red flags go unnoticed.

“None of the people involved in the H-2B process talk to each other,” Felty explained.

Searching for fraud can be time-consuming and expensive. But sometimes even having Congress appropriate millions to combat it isn’t enough.

Congress ordered the Department of Homeland Security in 2005 to collect a new $150 fee for H-2B visa applications and give a portion to the Department of Labor for fraud prevention and detection.

But that money never was spent, The Star’s investigation found.

The Labor Department allowed almost $200 million collected for visa fraud enforcement to lie dormant over the last two years, apparently because it questioned whether it could legally spend the money.

A Department of Labor spokesman said that much of that $200 million was earmarked to investigate fraud in another guest worker visa program. That money was returned to the Treasury, he said, because without complaints, the department has no authority to look for fraud.

The $200 million lapse was “unconscionable,” said the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, Rep. George Miller of California. He added that rooting out fraud and abuse in guest worker programs must be a higher priority.

“Congress is working with the new administration to ensure that they will be able to use these funds to prevent fraud committed by unscrupulous labor recruiters, and businesses that exploit guest workers and deny jobs to U.S. workers,” Miller said.

In a statement to The Star, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis pledged to improve her department’s fraud-prevention record.

“Ensuring compliance with our laws is a priority for this administration,” Solis said. “Any deficiencies in past strategies to achieve that end will be addressed, and we will continue to strengthen our efforts to ensure we are not only detecting foreign labor fraud and assisting in prosecuting offenders, but preventing criminals from taking advantage of the programs in the first place.”

Busting GLS

Investigative records recently obtained by The Star reveal that procedural safeguards in the H-2B visa program had little to do with uncovering the alleged GLS conspiracy.

Rather, the case broke open after federal agents followed up on tips from business associates of the accused conspirators.

On Oct. 11, 2007, two disgruntled business associates of alleged conspiracy kingpin Abror Askarkhodjaev opened the door to investigators. And while those associates looked on, agents tore through the Westport Road offices of GLS.

Poring through filing cabinets, investigators found labor contracts with more than a dozen hotels and golf courses between Overland Park and South Carolina, including the Westin Crown Center and two Kansas City area Hilton properties, the Doubletree and the Embassy Suites on the Plaza. Other than denying any wrongdoing, spokesmen for the hotels declined to comment on the case, citing the pending investigation.

Agents also scrutinized payroll records, visa applications and personnel files on foreign workers employed by GLS.

One of the associates pointed agents to computers that held digital copies of more payroll and employment data. A computer expert swooped in and copied the hard drives, which took investigators and prosecutors months to digest.

The agents’ next reported foray into the GLS offices came on April 15, 2009, the day after they interviewed an unhappy worker.

Alexis Julio Tejeda Encarnacion had been recruited in the Dominican Republic to work for Crystal Management, a company affiliated with GLS, according to authorities.

Encarnacion’s family had gone $3,000 in debt to send him to work in the United States. Arriving in February with 25 other Dominicans, he was told that he would instead be working for GLS, a violation of his visa.

Two days later, a GLS manager gathered the workers in a motel parking lot in Johnson County and sorted them by English-speaking ability. The five best English speakers, including Encarnacion, were to stay and work in Kansas City.

GLS loaded the rest onto vans and shipped them to a DVD manufacturing plant in Alabama. In a recent interview, Ronny Marty, a Dominican who worked for GLS at the Alabama plant, confirmed Encarnacion’s story.

“When we arrived in Kansas City they changed everything,” Marty recalled. “They said, ‘We don’t have any hotel jobs, but we have jobs with DVDs. If you don’t like it, you can go back to your country.’ ”

GLS housed the five workers remaining in Kansas City in a two-bedroom apartment. Together, the workers paid GLS $1,500 a month for an apartment that the company rented for just $600.

Encarnacion lost a full 65 hours of wages over his first seven weeks of work because of deductions for his visa, uniforms and transportation.

Marty said he faced a similar situation in Alabama. “This guy was charging us for everything,” Marty said.

On Tax Day 2009, federal agents wired Encarnacion with electronic audio and video equipment and sent him to GLS offices to complain that he wasn’t making enough to help his family pay off the $3,000 debt.

According to a summary of the meeting, Viorel Simon, now a defendant in the human trafficking case, warned Encarnacion that if he quit his hotel job, GLS would cancel his visa and he would become an illegal immigrant.

Simon also refused Encarnacion’s plea for cheaper rent, transportation and visa fees.

“Simon told him that it was his problem,” according to the summary.

‘Dying of hunger’

If things go wrong for H-2B workers after they arrive in the United States, they quickly learn they have even fewer protections than migrant farm workers.

Already deeply in debt to a recruiter, the workers have no option of changing jobs and can’t use federally funded legal services available to guest workers in other visa programs.

Complaining often is futile.

As one of the top managers of a Virginia-based labor contracting firm, Dzmitry Krasautsau heard those complaints. Until last December, his job was to make certain that hundreds of foreign employees that his conspiracy had hired under the H-2B program kept going to work each day.

Krasautsau also had to take the calls when workers asked why deductions for rent and transportation made their paychecks so small.

But unlike most labor traffickers, Krasautsau and his co-conspirators had drifted into the crosshairs of a federal task force, which recorded his telephone calls.

Transcripts of those calls obtained by The Star show that, on Nov. 4, 2008, a Jamaican labor recruiter called Krasautsau to complain about how he was treating five women who worked for him as housekeepers. After two weeks of long hours at a motel in Gatlinburg, Tenn., the women had received paychecks totaling less than $50 each.

“This is very desperate,” said the Jamaican recruiter. “Those girls in Tennessee, they are dying of hunger. Nobody has any money.”

Krasautsau later was convicted of conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens, money laundering and visa fraud and is now serving a 78-month prison sentence.

The Star found that not all labor trafficking schemes involve hundreds of workers spread over big cities in dozens of states.

For seven months between 2005 and 2006, four Filipino workers lived in fear of two motel owners in Oacoma, S.D. — population 406.

After Robert and Angelita Farrell arranged for the workers to come to the United States, they immediately took their passports, cut their already minimum-wage pay in half, required them to work long hours with no overtime, and loaded them with debt in the form of visa fees, transportation costs and exorbitant rent.

At first, workers accepted the hardships, believing that their employers had their best interests at heart.

“They knew better,” Gina Agulto, one of the workers, told jurors at the Farrells’ criminal trial.

The Farrells insisted that the workers take second jobs at fast food restaurants to generate fatter paychecks, which the workers then signed over to the motel owners to pay off their escalating debts. The couple also insisted that the workers not talk to other people in town, speak with their American co-workers or go anywhere without their permission.

According to allegations in a civil suit filed in March in South Dakota, the scheme unraveled after Robert Farrell appeared in the workers’ apartment one evening and dumped the bloody carcasses of two deer on the floor, intending the workers to use the meat for food.

Finally, the workers alerted authorities.

Indeed, criminals sometimes can scam thousands of dollars from the unwary by dangling the mere promise of an H-2B visa in front of a prospective worker.

Marvin Danilo Perez-Gomez, of Chimaltenango, Guatemala, quit his job making fireworks and paid $2,000 to an unsavory recruiter, who promised an H-2B visa and a legal job planting pine trees in Mississippi.

But he was disappointed when he arrived at the U.S. Embassy to process the paperwork and get his visa.

“There were more than 50 peasants, and the American officers were laughing at us,” Perez-Gomez told The Star. “They denied my visa just like they did with all who were there.”

Perez-Gomez eventually entered the United States illegally and began work at a Postville, Iowa, meatpacking plant. Immigration agents raided the plant in 2008, and he eventually was deported.

Don Mooers, a lawyer representing Save Small Business, which lobbies on behalf of legitimate businesses using the H-2B program, said his group supports reasonable regulations to better protect workers.

“These workers need to be treated fairly,” Mooers said, “and the employers need to respect the program.”

‘Virtually no oversight’

Uncovering fraud in the Department of Labor’s visa certification program now is the “fastest-growing area” of criminal investigations, according to the department’s Office of Inspector General.

The investigators said the department’s senior management should put “maintaining the integrity” of its guest worker programs at or near the top of its priority list.

But Alese Wooditch, who spent four years as an intelligence analyst with the Labor Department’s Office of Labor Racketeering and Fraud Investigations, said the department should try to limit fraud before it happens.

“We don’t have any systematic prevention measures in place,” Wooditch said. “The fact that we don’t have a fraud prevention unit is of concern.”

Faced with complaints from small business owners about backlogs in granting guest-worker visas, the Labor Department has opted to streamline the program to allow the department to issue the visas quickly.

Now it’s taking the word of employers that proper documentation could be produced if the application were audited.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph E. DePadilla in Virginia recently told a judge that the new procedures will make catching criminals even more difficult.

“The H-2B program is very simple to defraud on a systemic level and the rule changes will make it even easier for the criminals,” DePadilla said.

Under the new procedures, the Labor Department has given its Wage and Hour Division the authority to investigate problems in the H-2B program. But experts question whether Wage and Hour has the capacity or competence to protect low-wage workers, such as H-2B visa holders.

In March, the Government Accountability Office released a report of its undercover investigation of Wage and Hour, concluding that the division’s procedures actually made workers more vulnerable to the kind of wage theft common in labor trafficking cases.

As part of its investigation, the GAO filed fictitious complaints with the division, including one that touched on one of the Labor Department’s top enforcement priorities — protecting children from hazardous working conditions.

Undercover investigators told the division that children were operating heavy machinery, such as grinders and circular saws, at a California meatpacking plant during school hours.

Wage and Hour investigators never even recorded that they had received the tip, much less investigated it.

In their 2010 budget request to Congress, Wage and Hour administrators asked for an additional 288 staff members to, in part, improve enforcement for the H-2B program.

Any move toward stricter enforcement of the program would be an improvement, experts said.

Catherine K. Ruckelshaus, legal co-director of the National Employment Law Project, said it could hardly get worse.

“H-2B is being abused left and right and there’s virtually no oversight over the program,” Ruckelshaus said. “It’s a perfect storm of no enforcement and that just perpetuates the practices.”

The third of a five-part series
•WEDNESDAY: Some suspected victims, in violation of U.S. policy, are being deported on government-run airlines based in Kansas City.

•THURSDAY: A new approach is needed, and changes are coming.

http://www.kansascity.com/922/story/1630974-p4.html

Hostage House, Part 2: A slave to time and money - KansasCity.com

By LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Sun, Dec. 13, 2009 10:15 PM

It’s 3 a.m. and another load of chickens is about to roll in.

“Chickens.” That’s what the human traffickers call them. These fresh loads of unwitting immigrants smuggled over the border and into southern California from points south.

The woman from Central America had been one of them once. She came here several summers ago in anticipation of landing a good job out east.

Then the traffickers derailed her plans, demanding more money. She’s counted a couple of birthdays in this run-down, two-story home in Los Angeles that serves as a way station for illegal immigrants, many of whom are pressed into servitude.

Most days, she follows the same routine. She gets up at 6 a.m., pulls herself off the grungy floor where she sleeps shoulder-to-shoulder with other hostages, cooks for everyone and cleans the house.

They watch her every move. She’s never left alone. Never allowed to talk to people on the outside.

Sometimes, she’s taken to clean other traffickers’ houses. At night, she and others are locked in a room. The men with guns and threats want to protect their property.

The days run together. But now, the end is in sight. Her traffickers have told her she’s almost paid off her debt.

Just four more months.

As she thinks about the new arrivals, the woman prepares coffee. She’ll tend to their needs, as she has done for nearly three years. But that connection she’s always shared with other victims is beginning to fade. Soon, she knows, she won’t be one of them.

For now, though, she must get up. There are new people to serve.

•••

The faces never seem to change.

The woman has seen hundreds of them. Some are hopeful, some weathered and weary, and others never get past dazed.

Scrawled along the walls of the house are the markers of their time here. Like prison inmates, they write names and dates as reminders of time served.

At the moment, she’s one of eight women held in this place. They are the cooking and cleaning crew, and it’s a full-time job.

The carpets are worn and dirty from the constant traffic. Food and dishes are scattered everywhere in this four-bedroom, two-bath drop house.

No one goes hungry here. The traffickers always provide plenty of staples. Beans and rice. Beef and chicken. Big bags of cheap Mexican bread for the immigrants. One item they cannot eat. Pan dulce, sugary Mexican sweet bread, is strictly for the men in charge.

For the woman, serving food is perhaps the one thing she enjoys. She understands what a hot meal means to the poor people dropped off here. It usually comes with a smile — a rare display of warmth in this grim place.

This morning, the delivery is earlier than normal.

They arrive dusty, after days without washing. On the exhausting trek, some pay the men 10 pesos for a bucket of water, just so they can wash away some of the trip.

These new arrivals keep showing up. They have no way of knowing what’s awaiting them here.

•••

She remembers what the men say when new people, especially young women, come into the house.

Let’s see what new merchandise we have.

The raping of young women is only part of the torture. Some immigrants are burned with cigarettes or subjected to electric shock. For many, walking through this door will be their last act of freedom until “debts” are paid in full.

They will at least get a day or two to rest. Then the demands for more money will come. The coyotes also will make phone calls to family members with orders to hand over cash.

Some will plan an escape. Most will fight through a jumble of emotions. Part of her job, as always, will be to calm the most agitated — the wailing or unruly — fearing that outbursts are contagious and will infect the entire group.

Four more months, she thinks.

The new arrivals file in, their squinting eyes adjusting from predawn darkness to the well-lit living room. Their feet are blistered and legs aching from the journey.

The woman scans their faces. They are like so many of the other faces.

Except one.

She has seen this face before. Back in Central America. Back in the house she shared with her sister and family.

For a moment, the anguish and fear and panic are so strong that the woman forgets her eyes can tell a story. Can they see the pain? The spark of recognition?

She pours the coffee, avoiding eye contact with one particular young woman. She hopes the men won’t notice her rapid breathing, the sudden rush of blood to her face.

For her, there is no one else in the room, no one else in the world. She can’t not look, it’s impossible. She hasn’t seen the young woman in three years, and this is the last place on earth she wants to see her now.

The world fell on me, she says to herself.

Their eyes lock. Her heart beating fast, the middle-aged woman prays the girl won’t say the word she must be thinking.

Tia. Aunt.

http://www.kansascity.com/959/story/1629021-p2.html

Sex slavery: The desperate plight of many women

By LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Sun, Dec. 13, 2009 10:15 PM

Sitting in the Boone County jail, the Chinese woman didn’t look like a criminal to Kelley Lucero. She looked like a middle-aged mom.

Soon, Lucero learned that the woman had indeed come to America to scout out a college for her teenage son. She had come, legally, as part of a cultural exchange program, but her life had taken an unexpected and terrifying turn here in Middle America.

Forced to work in a one-room massage parlor, she ended up being arrested for prostitution at a truck stop between Kansas City and St. Louis.

Only an experienced eye like Lucero’s could see something that Boone County, Mo., deputies appeared to miss. What so many in law enforcement all over the nation still are not trained to see.

“This wasn’t a prostitute,” said Lucero, a sexual abuse program coordinator for a domestic violence shelter in Columbia. “She was a human trafficking victim.”

And yet, the Chinese woman sat in jail for five months.

When the United States took a global stand on human trafficking in 2000, lawmakers wanted to rescue foreign-born women turned into American sex slaves. In too many cases, though, that hasn’t happened.

In its six-month investigation into America’s effectiveness in the war on human trafficking, The Kansas City Star found that the system orginally designed with sex trafficking in mind is often unsuccessful in reaching those victims.

Some are mistakenly identified as prostitutes and end up either lost in the criminal justice bureaucracy or back on the streets. Even when victims are identified by law enforcement, some are reluctant to go through the gantlet that accompanies the prosecution of their trafficker, too untrusting or scared to reveal the horrible things that happened to them. Critics complain that the U.S. law is inherently flawed because it connects victims’ aid with their willingness to help make cases.

“No one is seeing the situation for what it is,” said Karen Stauss, an attorney with Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization based in Washington, D.C. “It’s like we’re saying, ‘We blame you for what you are suffering.’ ”

The government also has been slow to recognize an emerging class of new victims: young American girls. While millions are spent each year to combat international sex trafficking, lawmakers have yet to approve funding for domestic victims — perhaps the fastest-growing class of those trafficked in the United States.

Anti-trafficking experts say that the current federal and state laws are blunt legal instruments in trying to address the complexity of an ever-evolving global criminal enterprise and do not account for the trauma of women forced into sexual abuse. Of all human trafficking crimes, The Star found, the ones involving sex slavery have proved to be the most difficult when it comes to catching and prosecuting the traffickers.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act “is not creating the legal environment we worked so hard to create so we can prevent human trafficking,” said Norma Ramos, of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. “It’s a federal law that’s really not that useful for what it was supposed to do — end human trafficking.”

All in the approach

When the mother from China was arrested, deputies in Boone County hadn’t been trained to recognize human trafficking. They didn’t know what questions to ask.

Or that the crime requires a victim-centered approach, much different from what officers are traditionally schooled in.

Boone County Assistant Prosecutor Merilee Crockett said she couldn’t discuss specifics of the case, but generally cases that may involve human trafficking are a “conundrum” because if victims are released they could end up back with their traffickers. And sometimes there is no safe place to keep them other than jail.

“Where is the rescue? What do we do for them? How do we protect them?” Crockett said.

Law enforcement authorities also have different priorities, explained Ivy Suriyopas, staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. “They focus on catching perpetrators, making sure the public is safe from additional crimes. That doesn’t necessarily correlate with the needs of the victims.”

Some police officers get it and know how to work human trafficking cases, advocates acknowledged. Yet many don’t. At least not at this point.

But experts say that’s not surprising.

“They are being asked to take off their glasses and put on a slightly different prescription,” said Bill Bernstein of Mosaic Family Services, which works with human trafficking survivors in Dallas. “They’re having to view some people who we think might be victims in a slightly different light. That’s beginning, but it will take time.”

Further complicating anti-trafficking efforts is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are supposed to not only screen victims for possible human trafficking, but also root out illegal immigration — what some see as a conflict of interest.

At the very least, that creates an “inherent challenge,” according to Kristyn Peck Williams, screening and field coordinator of the anti-trafficking services program for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“ICE would do the raid, but they would also be the ones in the position to identify trafficking victims,” Williams said.

The initial contact with potential victims is crucial, advocates maintain. If agents use the same hard demeanor they use investigating other crimes, it can further traumatize a victim and destroy the case.

In one instance, a federal agent in the southern region of the United States interviewed a foreign-born woman picked up in a brothel raid. “So you were a prostitute?” the agent asked during the investigation.

An immigration attorney in the room told The Star that the woman instantly clammed up. Later, she was deported.

“I’ve seen a lot of women who were helped, but I see a lot of women who slipped through the cracks,” said the attorney, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of retribution by law enforcement.

In routine prostitution cases, officers are usually only interested in the money generated by the ring and the people involved. But human trafficking cases require more sensitivity and different questions.

“We now ask, ‘Where do you live? Who do you live with? Where did you come from? How are you paid?’ ” said Capt. Ken Bergman of the Independence Police Department, who works with the local anti-trafficking task force and has six “very trained” detectives who know how to identify victims.

The local task force has trained more than 2,000 officers throughout Missouri and Kansas about trafficking.

Still, that’s only a fraction of the officers in both states.

“You have to know what you are looking for or you will miss it,” Bergman said.

Without the right approach, a sex trafficking victim can be recycled into a lifetime of slavery.

Help us, we’ll help you

From the outset, the system set up to help trafficking victims had a major flaw, advocates found. Especially when it came to helping sex trafficking victims.

The protection act concentrated on three Ps: preventing trafficking, protecting victims and prosecuting the traffickers. Some critics, however, believe that the United States has put too much emphasis on prosecution.

Victims are required to show reasonable cooperation with law enforcement before they receive all the benefits intended for them, such as food stamps, shelter and the opportunity to stay in America.

In effect, victims are told, they may not get help from the government unless they help the government prosecute the trafficker.

“It is very wrong to have this condition,” said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, appointed last year as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on human trafficking. “Countries must avoid that.”

Victims are not given enough time for reflection or counseling, Ezeilo said, before they have to agree to cooperate. Given time to heal, some victims may be more likely to help prosecute their trafficker.

Kelly Heinrich, who has studied human trafficking and the laws addressing it, said the federal law is more witness-centered.

“It’s the way it was designed to begin with and implementation made it worse,” Heinrich said.

Many victims aren’t stable enough to immediately tolerate having to relive what they went through, said Judy Okawa, a licensed psychologist specializing in the evaluation and treatment of survivors of severe trauma.

One sex trafficking survivor Okawa has worked with said she relives her abuse every time the sun goes down. She told Okawa it’s then — when the quality of light is at a certain level — she’s reminded of the time she was forced to have sex.

Other survivors have different triggers. But the last thing they want to do is speak of the abuse. Or look into the eyes of the perpetrator.

It brings it all back, Okawa said. The fear. And the threats.

“If that trafficker is not in jail or dead, there’s always a chance he or she will hurt them,” Okawa said. “(The trafficker) says, ‘You can run, but you can’t hide from me. I will find you and I will kill your family.’ ”

One trafficking victim reached out to a domestic violence advocacy program in Kansas. Her trafficker was forcing her to work long hours for little pay, stopping her from leaving the country, and frequently sexually assaulting her.

Pregnant with his baby, she wanted help.

But she was afraid to pursue a trafficking visa designed for victims because it would mean having to report her trafficker, which could put her, and her baby, in more danger.

“Although she may have had a remedy available … she didn’t feel like she could do that. She was too afraid,” said Pamela Jacobs, immigration project attorney for the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.

“Being asked to testify against a person you’ve been afraid of for a long time, and someone who could still hurt you, and your child, is very difficult. Just having a visa does not guarantee a victim’s safety.”

The woman did not see a way to escape, and advocates do not know what happened to her.

Consensual arrangement?

In the late spring of 2007, Johnson County authorities undertook the first major human trafficking investigation in the Kansas City area. Law enforcement at the time said they “rescued” 15 women from strip-mall Asian massage parlors — one called China Rose — and there could be many more victims.

Originally from China and Korea, the women worked 14 hours a day, seven days a week, performing sex acts. Sometimes they slept on the same bed where they serviced customers.

For investigators, on paper they looked like human trafficking victims.

But as time went on, and the case wound through criminal court, more information surfaced. Some women came to Kansas City knowing they would work as prostitutes. One woman, according to statements made by one of the defendants, made about $15,000 in a month.

Others said they had no idea they would be prostituted when they got here.

Ultimately, prosecutors didn’t charge the four main defendants with human trafficking. Instead, they were charged with and pleaded guilty to coercing females to travel for prostitution.

Court testimony and other information prompted the federal judge hearing the case to dismiss the notion that there were “vulnerable victims.”

“The victims were more participants than victims,” said Chief U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan in sentencing the lead defendant, Ling Xu. “They appeared to be professionals.”

Defense attorney Melanie Morgan, who represented Ling, said she believes prosecutors tried too hard to make the case into something it wasn’t.

“This wasn’t human trafficking,” Morgan said. “This was a very consensual arrangement.”

The case provided a small window into the complexity of sex trafficking investigations. Prosecutors across the country are filtering through scenarios where the water is muddy regarding what is coercion and what is consensual.

In the China Rose case, federal prosecutors said evidence supported the charges filed, and the government still contends that some of the women met the definition of a human trafficking victim.

Those women were offered trafficking visas, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Cordes, who specializes in trafficking cases.

“But they wanted to return home to their families,” Cordes explained.

Our own backyard

Ever since passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act nearly a decade ago, foreign-born victims have been the law’s focus. They get extensive counseling, visa assistance and help with food and housing costs as they rebuild their lives.

For victims born in the United States, however, state governments were expected to take care of children prostituted by pimps or family members.

But that rarely happens, The Star found.

“You talk about frustration,” said Thomas Egan of Catholic Charities in Phoenix. “We found hundreds of prostituted kids and no funding available to help them.”

Kristy Childs sees it every day.

As founder and director of the nonprofit Veronica’s Voice, Childs works to help Kansas City area women and girls escape the commercial sex industry.

That’s what Childs did this summer when she and her staff searched the streets for a 12-year-old girl. Day after day, they heard from sources on the street, the junior-high-school girl was forced to prostitute herself.

“Every day she’s out there, she’s in more danger,” Childs said one day as they went out to search again. “…We’re trying to save the world and we can’t. We can’t even save the victims in our own backyard.”

With American-born victims, it becomes a maddening game of catch and release.

Most welfare programs require recipients to be at least 18 to receive benefits. Since many young domestic trafficking victims are considered unaccompanied minors, they don’t qualify.

Critics said this is another area where the law is deeply flawed.

“They (lawmakers) messed up,” said Theresa Flores, who was sex trafficked as a teenager growing up in Michigan and now works as a victim advocate. “They didn’t include Americans, and they should have.”

Four years ago, Childs and other advocates lobbied U.S. legislators to make it clear that domestic victims should be protected under the act. They specifically wanted American-born girls under the age of 18 who are sex trafficked to be considered victims entitled to services and benefits.

Lawmakers included that provision in the 2005 reauthorization of the protection act.

But they didn’t fund services for domestic victims, leaving thousands of young girls vulnerable to further abuse.

“We’re going to point the finger at other countries for how they deal with their domestic trafficking, but then we’re not doing enough for our own citizens?” asked Colette Bercu of Tennessee’s Free for Life International, a nonprofit organization that supports trafficking survivors. “We’ve got a problem.”

At a national symposium in July, social workers and health care experts pointed out that resources available to help domestic victims don’t come close to what’s available for foreign-born victims.

Near the top of the list is housing. Police and community organizations are having a tough time finding somewhere to take domestic victims lucky enough to have escaped their pimps.

“As a result, many domestic minor victims are housed in juvenile detention centers, which often do not recognize or treat these youth as victims of a crime, but rather as perpetrators,” a symposium report said.

Cordes said she prosecutes domestic sex trafficking cases with the same fervor as cases with international victims but it can be challenging.

“We have a duty to protect our own citizens and children,” she said. “Because the domestic victims are ineligible for funding under the (protection act) each case demands extra effort and creativity to obtain services.”

More than 1,800 Las Vegas youths under the age of 18 were in juvenile lockup on prostitution-related charges between 1996 and 2007, according to a study released this year by Shared Hope International, which rescues victims of sex trafficking. In Dallas, 165 youths were in police custody on prostitution-related charges in 2007 alone. Shared Hope officials believe all of these kids were victims and should not have been thrown in jail.

“We have to stop criminalizing, arresting the kids,” said Shared Hope founder Linda Smith.

For the 12-year-old in Kansas City, police were more understanding. Especially after Childs called them when her search came up empty.

Within a day, law enforcement had found her. But only after two officers spent a night doing nothing but looking for her. She was taken to a local hospital and examined.

Authorities tried to connect her with Veronica’s Voice and Childs, to get her the counseling she needed. But somehow she slipped away.

Now, Childs worries she’s back on the streets.

A long way home

With foreign-born human trafficking victims, the line between victim and criminal isn’t always clear, either.

Consider the Chinese woman Lucero met in jail.

The woman paid $13,000 — her family’s life savings — to enroll in what she thought was a cultural exchange program that would bring her to the United States. Her teenage son planned to go to college in America, and someone in their family had to come in advance to get a job and earn money.

She made the trip on a six-month visa, Lucero said. But when she got off the plane in Los Angeles, she was taken to a Chinese restaurant where she went to work washing dishes.

Next, she thought she’d get a job as a nanny for a wealthy family. But then she met a man who said he was from her province in China. He told her about the massage business, how she could get a license and make good money.

She believed him. With what the woman thought was a legitimate license in hand, she traveled with several other women to the Midwest.

Twelve of them worked 12 hours a day inside cramped parlors set up inside truck stops across Middle America.

“They gave her half of what she was making,” Lucero said, noting that she still knows very little about the traffickers.

The woman ended up with a couple of hundred dollars a week. Most she’d send to family back in China.

Then police got a tip about a one-room massage parlor operated out of a Boone County truck stop along Interstate 70. The night she was arrested, police didn’t have a translator and she couldn’t tell her story.

The Chinese woman never told Lucero all she was forced to do. She even denied having sex.

“It would be too humiliating,” Lucero explained.

The woman spent Christmas 2007 behind bars.

“My parents are old and sick,” she later wrote Lucero. “My mother knows I’m in jail and she’s had a heart attack and is in the hospital. My husband (still in China) … can’t work because of my situation.”

Eventually, charges were dismissed. The woman went to California and got her temporary visa extended. Then she headed east to work, she said, in a market.

But before she left the Midwest, she wrote Lucero about missing her homeland.

“The only thing I wish for is to leave America and go to my loved ones,” she said. “I feel like America is a place where they talk a lot about human rights, and I know I have the right to go back to China. Can you please help me?”

For almost a year, Lucero didn’t hear from her and wasn’t sure where she ended up.

Then last week, Lucero received an e-mail. The woman is on the East Coast waiting for her green card.

“She just wanted to say merry Christmas to me and tell me that she loves me,” Lucero said. “And that we have a special connection.”

The second of a five-part series
•TUESDAY: America’s intricate, fraud-plagued work visa program is a welcome mat for modern-day slavers.

•WEDNESDAY: Some suspected victims, in violation of U.S. policy, are being deported on government-run airlines based in Kansas City.

•THURSDAY: A new approach is needed, and changes are coming.

Go to KansasCity.com to read Parts 1 and 2 of the series, to view a photo gallery showing scenes from the borders and to watch a video preview of the full series that includes interviews with the reporters.

http://www.kansascity.com/959/story/1629003.html

Hostage House, Part 1: Beginning a descent into despair

By LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Sat, Dec. 12, 2009 10:15 PM

It’s gonna cost you more.

The man’s words fill the cramped bedroom inside this dingy, two-story house in Los Angeles. A middle-aged woman stands in front of him, scared, her dream slowly dying.

There are guns on the bed — rifles and a pistol. Her eyes take in everything: the weapons, the man, his words searing and uncompromising, still hanging in the air.

More money.

She’s been in America less than a week, stashed away in a house full of immigrants who, like her, just made the illegal trek into America. Any day now she expects to leave this place with the stained carpet and grimy, cream-colored walls to hop a bus and head east to Boston. There’s a job waiting for her there, good work taking care of an elderly woman.

But the tired road from Central America has so far just led her here, to this room. She will soon learn her fate. At this moment, though, only the questions in her head are coming fast.

How did she end up in this trap, tangled up with a conniving band of human traffickers? How will she get out?

After all that she has suffered, she thinks, how can I go back now?

•••

In Central America, crushing poverty has swallowed the woman and her family.

She lives with more than 20 people in a home built of thick plastic and dirt. It is partitioned into many quarters, and two to three family members share beds at night.

She has come back here after venturing out on her own, and the conditions are worse than she remembered. She had left when she was 18 — just as her sister was getting married — and experienced a better life in Mexico.

It has made her hungry for more.

In Mexico, she made decent money. She got married and lived among the middle class, and things were pretty good there for a while. But her husband began spending their hard-earned cash on other women, and she wasn’t going to live like that. The divorce eventually drove her back home.

But now, there are even more mouths to feed. Her married sister has a daughter and two sons, and there is little money for anything beyond basic sustenance.

Despite the comfort of family, the woman feels smothered inside this house of dirt.

She wants more, needs more. She’s not a young girl anymore, and her options are dwindling. All her life she’s been a nurturer, the kind who cooked and cleaned and took care of kids. But she will have to have money to live out her older years.

She is drawn to the men who come to her town wearing fancy clothes and driving fancy American trucks. In the United States, they brag, there are $14-an-hour jobs.

She allows her mind to wander, to do the math. More money in 60 minutes than she’ll make in about a week in Central America.

I want a better life, she decides.

She asks her ex-husband to help her come to America, and he agrees. It will take money and courage and the well-dressed men to make the 2,000-mile journey across Central America, through the badlands of Mexico and to the doorstep of America.

The fee: $5,500.

So much money, and yet, what did the coyotes say?

Life is good there. Whatever you want, it’s yours.

•••

All the woman wants now is freedom. She has made it to America — twice. The first time, she was caught after crossing the border, and it took all the resolve she could muster to try again.

This time, there are other obstacles. Like the man in front of her. The guns scattered on the bed. His words still resonating.

More money.

The fee had already been impossible. Her ex-husband made the down payment of $2,500 and she had planned to come up with the rest somehow.

ut the man now tells her they smuggled her in on a “special trip.” He needs another $5,000. Pay up, he tells her, or go back home.

Go back? After all she’s suffered?

The trips north had been brutal. Days in an old pickup truck bouncing along bumpy roads had been the easiest part. Then there was the walking. She is still nursing her aching feet, swollen and discolored from the hours of marching in her ragged shoes.

She is trying hard to forget the desert. The steep hills and thorny handholds. Men starving, waiting for the food they would get once they stopped for the night. Moms trying to calm their crying kids.

Sometimes the only water was from stagnant pools in troughs or bowls left out for livestock or dogs. If she pulled her shirt collar out far enough, she could create a makeshift sieve to pour the water through. At least she could strain out some of the filth.

Through the hunger and thirst, she had pulled herself up those hills, wrapping small, worn hands around branches and rocks.

Hold on tight, she’d tell herself.

She’d made it through the dust and the grit. Through the mounds of loose rock and stinging scrub brush and ominous saguaro cactus standing guard like sentries.

Yes, she had made it. But already, standing in this bedroom, she worries it was all for nothing.

After her first painful trek through the northern Mexican desert, she’d finally crossed the border in California and arrived at a cluster of houses.

For hours, the Sonoran sun had sucked the moisture from her body. Parched and dizzy from dehydration, her lips cracked and peeling, there was only one thing on her mind.

Ahead of her was a clinic. Outside the clinic was a hose.

She knew the risk, but she couldn’t resist.

She ran for the hose.

The rest was a blur. An immigration official handing out water and crackers. The monotonous trip back to Mexico. The gradual, sickening realization that she had been tossed back when she was so close.

Not again, she thinks.

•••

The man is on the phone, and her ex-husband is on the other end. In coming days, there will be more calls with the same demand.

You’re gonna have to come up with $5,000 more.

He says he doesn’t have it, can’t get it. There is not much more to say.

By now, the woman is crying. It seems like she and the man have been in this bedroom a very long time. Outside, there is a house full of dreamers who await the same meeting.

She’s thinking so hard, trying to come up with the right answer. And finally, it occurs to her that she can fall back on what she knows, what she’s known all her life.

She can cook. She can clean.

Can I work off the debt? she asks.

There are many more illegal immigrants who must be told today of the special trip and the new surcharge. The man gives in.

Why not, he tells her.

Work here in the house until your debt is paid. Fifty dollars a week.

She lets it sink in. Fifty dollars. What choice does she have? The realization hits her.

They own me. Until the debt is paid.

Here in America, she’s a slave.

http://www.kansascity.com/944/story/1626970.html

A New Slavery: Human Trafficking in America--US System to find, help victims of human trafficking is broken

By MIKE McGRAW and LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star
12/14/2009 08:51 AM

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” — 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified Dec. 6, 1865

Sebastian Pereria told a friend last year about his life in America.

How he wanted to see his wife and children in India, but his boss kept his identification papers and wouldn’t let him go.

Other waiters who worked with him at a Topeka restaurant told of how they were forced to work 13-hour days, six days a week. They talked of how the boss underpaid them and pocketed their tips.

In the end, Pereria, 46, got his wish. He finally arrived home last year.

In a coffin.

The U.S. government could not help Pereria, even though they said he fit the criteria for being a human trafficking victim. Other waiters he worked with got help and were rescued from the Globe Indian Restaurant. But for Pereria, even in death, a judge remained unconvinced.

America declared war on human trafficking nearly a decade ago. With a new law and much fanfare, the government pledged to end such human rights abuses at home and prodded the rest of the world to follow its example.

But an investigation by The Kansas City Star found that, in spite of all the rhetoric from the Bush and Obama administrations, the United States is failing to find and help tens of thousands of human trafficking victims in America.

The Star also found that the government is doing little to stop the flow of trafficking along the porous U.S.-Mexico border and that when victims are identified, many are denied assistance.

The United States also has violated its own policies by deporting countless victims who should be offered sanctuary, but sometimes end up back in the hands of traffickers.

After spending millions of taxpayer dollars, America appears to be losing the war in its own backyard.

Even some top federal anti-trafficking authorities in the Bush and Obama administrations acknowledged serious problems.

“The current system is not yet picking up all the victims of human trafficking crimes,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told The Star two weeks ago. “It has been a growing problem and in a world of growing problems, it’s time for the nations of the world to take it on.”

America’s failure to live up to its own high standards isn’t for lack of will or good intentions or even money. The Star’s investigation pointed to problems that are more systemic: an uncoordinated, inconsistent approach to finding victims; politically charged arguments over how to define trafficking; and a continuing disbelief among some in local law enforcement that it even exists.

The issue is further complicated by the heated debate over illegal immigration. The willing participation initially of some victims is blurring the lines and testing the law.

“People feel if you come in illegally, anything that happens to you is your fault,” said Lisette Arsuaga, with the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking. “Slavery is not an immigration issue. It’s a civil rights issue. There’s no justification for making someone a slave.”

It may be hard to imagine that slavery exists in America, but trafficking victims are all around us. The Midwest, in particular, seems to be an emerging hub.

Although trafficking usually is considered a coastal phenomenon, more alleged traffickers — 36 in the past three years — have been prosecuted by federal authorities in western Missouri than anywhere in the nation.

One Kansas City case, involving Giant Labor Solutions, is believed to be the largest labor trafficking ring uncovered in U.S. history.

Around the country, some victims exemplify the more exotic definitions of trafficking — those sold into the sex trade or into forced labor. But many, like Pereria, find themselves in mundane jobs. Incurring heavy debts while trying to find a better life, they become financially chained to their traffickers and work for low pay or in dangerous conditions.

They toil in factories and massage parlors, on fruit and vegetable farms, and inside homes, hotels and restaurants from California to Maine. Stripped of their humanity, they’re often threatened with their lives, or their families’ lives, if they don’t submit to the traffickers’ demands.

The victims are not unlike Dareyam, a 42-year-old Indonesian woman held captive for 18 years, half of those in the United States.

Kept as a housekeeper on the West Coast, she was forced to clean house naked and to sleep on the floor. She could not use the indoor bathroom, forced to go in a plastic bag outside.

“My lady, she was mean, evil, crazy, you know,” Dareyam told The Star.

Another Indonesian woman, Ima, 29, worked long hours caring for two children, cleaning a home on the West Coast and never making a dime. Verbally abusive, the woman who enslaved her once hit Ima so hard she needed stitches.

After three years, she wrote a note to a housekeeper next door. Please help me, I can’t take it anymore. It took Ima hours to find the courage to write those eight words.

The physical and psychological toll on trafficking victims can trap them in a life of slavery for years.

“I trusted nobody,” said Flor, a 37-year-old survivor living in California, who came to the United States to earn money to start a sewing business.

She’d already lost one child to starvation in Mexico. She swore none of her children would go hungry again. “But when I got here, everything went wrong,” Flor said.

Her boss started abusing her, forcing Flor, who was in the United States illegally, to work 17 to 19 hours a day for no pay. After other workers went home, she labored through the night, toiling under a dim sewing machine bulb no bigger than a matchbook.

“I thought slaves were only in the past, just in history,” Flor said. “It happens every day.”

She still can’t forget the words of her trafficker, a woman who told her she could kill her and no one would care. “If I kill a dog, I will get in trouble,” Flor’s trafficker told her. “If I kill you, I won’t get in any trouble. No one knows you are here. You don’t exist.”

Finding victims

Six months after President Barack Obama was sworn in, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared human trafficking a top foreign policy priority. “Trafficking is a crime that involves every nation on earth and that includes our own,” Clinton said in June as she presented the U.S. government’s ninth annual global report on human trafficking.

But so far, little progress has been made in changing ineffective policies, The Star found.

Obama’s incoming anti-trafficking czar, former federal prosecutor Luis CdeBaca, said many obstacles remain, including a lack of money, coordination and training. “We are doing a lot … but continue to have a lot of learning to do,” CdeBaca said.

America’s human trafficking law requires the government to rate other nations every year and report on their efforts to rescue victims and punish traffickers.

In the best category: most of Europe and a few other countries. In the worst: North Korea, Malaysia and 15 other nations whose human trafficking records the United States finds unacceptable.

One country the State Department has never rated: the United States itself.

“That has been a criticism of the report from the outset … countries around the world just hate this report,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican who co-sponsored the original anti-trafficking legislation in 2000.

He added that it may be time for congressional oversight hearings on America’s anti-trafficking efforts.

State Department officials have promised to rate the United States against other countries in their next report in June 2010. While the assumption is that America will be in the top category, some experts aren’t so sure.

“It’s not a slam dunk,” said Mark Lagon, the Bush administration’s human trafficking czar. “Too many people in government are not recognizing victims as victims,” added Lagon, who now heads the Polaris Project, a nonprofit anti-trafficking group.

Lagon and other experts say America first needs to do a better job of determining how many victims there are in the United States, and then try harder to find them.

Even officials with the Justice Department-funded Human Trafficking Reporting System acknowledge the shortcomings. “We are just not as good as we should be at being able to identify victims of trafficking,” said Amy Farrell, who helps run the reporting system.

In fact, the government estimates that since 2002, up to 140,000 trafficking victims have been brought into the United States. But only 1 percent of them, about 1,600 people, ended up with visas meant for trafficking victims, The Star found.

The reasons for such low numbers are unclear. Many victims are afraid to come forward. Others just want to go home. Some do not cooperate with law enforcement and are deported.

But even if the U.S. had rescued all of them, congressional limits on so-called “T-visas” would have allowed only 40,000 people to get them.

“It’s like the devil is running roughshod over these people who have already suffered so much,” said Kent Felty, a Colorado attorney who has represented scores of suspected trafficking victims. “We shouldn’t be doing this to these victims.”

The Star found an unworkable bureaucracy also is partly to blame. The federal government’s vast anti-human trafficking network suffers from turf wars and a lack of coordination.

In all, seven Cabinet-level departments are involved: Homeland Security and the State Department, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, Defense and the departments of Education and Labor.

The enforcement effort is so widely dispersed that in 2003 officials set up the Senior Policy Operating Group to coordinate the coordination.

Federal watchdogs found it isn’t working. A Government Accountability Office audit in 2006 noted that disagreements among the various agencies have hurt America’s anti-trafficking activities at home and abroad.

All this is costing millions. Even the Congressional Research Service couldn’t figure out exactly how much has been spent, concluding it was impossible.

A new report, however, found $23 million spent on domestic programs alone in fiscal 2008.

What’s more, federally funded human trafficking task forces are clustered in coastal areas, leaving huge swaths of the country ill-equipped to find victims.

Audits found some agencies misused federal grant money or claimed victims who didn’t qualify. Others spent the money, but found few if any victims.

Determining the effectiveness of the task forces is impossible, too. That’s because the Justice Department is prohibited from releasing task force-level data without their consent, said Duren Banks, chief of the department’s Prosecution and Adjudication Statistics Unit.

However, an audit by the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded they’re not working very well.

“Human trafficking grant programs have built significant capacities to serve victims,” noted last year’s audit. “But (they) have not been effective at identifying and serving significant numbers of alien trafficking victims.”

During raids at poultry plants or factories, immigration agents often don’t screen for human trafficking. The immigration enforcement agency also doesn’t screen every immigrant it finds, trafficking experts said.

“Our biggest problem is the screening,” says Florrie Burke, a longtime advocate against human trafficking.

Border failures

Even along the U.S. border with Mexico, little is being done to screen for victims being trafficked into the United States.

“The only question they (border agents) ask is, ‘Do you have your documents?’ ” said Mary Galvin, a social worker in Tijuana, speaking through a translator as she sat in the front room of the women’s shelter where she works.

“That’s all they care about. They don’t do screening, sit down with people and ask, ‘What are you doing here? Who brought you in?’ ... They don’t investigate. They don’t care.”

But even when the Border Patrol catches illegal immigrants, agents often fail to recognize human trafficking victims. Consider a 21-year-old woman snatched off the street outside her school in Mexico. Rocio Gonzalez Watson, a victim’s advocate, tells the woman’s story.

How the words of her kidnappers echoed in the young woman’s mind as she moved through a long line of immigrants near the border. Don’t say anything, or we’ll kill you and your family.

She was smack in the middle of the busiest and what some consider the most dangerous point of entry into the United States, just north of Tijuana.

Traffickers herded her and 11 other females through the port like cattle. The people who kidnapped her, the ones who gave her phony identification papers and who planned to sell her once she was inside America, were just feet away. Watching. Don’t say anything.

A U.S. border agent thought the young woman was trying to smuggle herself into the country, and she ended up back in the hands of her kidnappers.

“She was face to face with the agent, but he didn’t ask her anything. Even when he was with her, away from the kidnappers, he didn’t ask her more questions,” Watson said.

Denied at the border, the young kidnapping victim was taken to a “load house” where the other girls waited. They put the 12 of them across the bottom of a filthy motorboat and headed to a landing spot in southern California.

Once there, the young woman from Mexico could hear the traffickers assaulting some of the other girls and barking orders. Keep your head down. Put your heads down on the floor.

She could hear other women being bought and sold.

I want her, someone would say. I want her.

Ten were sold. But not the young woman. They took her to a rough neighborhood, dropped her off, and told her she would die there.

A good Samaritan finally saved her.

If agents had asked more questions at the border, identified her as a human trafficking victim, she wouldn’t have had to go through so much trauma in the United States, advocates said. Her story is an “eye opener,” Watson said, showing how victims go undetected and unassisted.

She hopes it also shows the need to educate victims that it’s all right to trust law enforcement and there are laws against this kind of abuse — even for those who are not U.S. citizens.

“If they (victims) understand the authorities are there to protect them, that they have rights, 99 percent of the time they will be willing to cooperate,” Watson said. “But when victims are treated like criminals, when authorities act exactly how the traffickers say the authorities will act, we all lose.”

No one knows how many girls and women like her, scared and silent, cross the border each year. Or how many come over thinking they will be getting legitimate jobs, then are victimized once they are here.

But there’s only so much agents can do when the abuse hasn’t happened yet, said Christopher Dombek, who directs the Office of Alien Smuggling Interdiction for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

“At the time they are coming in, they probably don’t consider themselves victims,” Dombek said. “I don’t think people coming to the United States think they’re going to be victimized.”

Dombek said preventing and detecting trafficking is a priority for his agency.

Yet advocates contend border agents could do more to spot patterns, such as packs of young women coming into the United States with promises of legitimate jobs who later are sexually exploited. Often they’re turned loose on the streets, or forced to work in massage parlors as prostitutes, like one young Asian woman.

A college student in her homeland, she was lured by traffickers to America with hopes of a bartending job making $200 to $300 a night. At first she worked on the West Coast, forced to drink whiskey with wealthy patrons and provide sexual favors. Next stop, a massage parlor in the South.

The first two days she did nothing but cry.

“After that, you’re no longer a human being,” said the 32-year-old who agreed to speak with The Star if her name wasn’t published. “You feel like an animal.”

Finding justice

While federal anti-trafficking laws provide stiff penalties — and the number of prosecutions is increasing — the chances of being charged or convicted as a trafficker remain low, The Star found.

The United States convicted fewer traffickers per capita in 2006 than most of the countries deemed by the State Department to do the best job of fighting trafficking, according to a study by Alese Wooditch, a human trafficking expert and researcher at George Mason University.

To be sure, prosecutors are reluctant to file charges they don’t think they can make stick.

But contributing to the problem, experts said, is a lack of consistency among prosecutors as to the meaning of coercion, which is required under federal law. Some prosecutors also tend to “cherry pick” the best cases and pass over victims who might not do well on the stand.

“The definition of human trafficking in the federal code is for severe trafficking where there is physical abuse, or branding, of the victim,” explained Lt. Derek Marsh of the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force in California. “So when we bring a case without those elements, they are less likely to prosecute.”

In one case last year, a Utah Legal Services attorney acquired special trafficking visas for more than 60 Thai laborers who went unpaid for work they performed on pig farms in Utah and Colorado.

Many had mortgaged property in Thailand to pay fees to get into the United States. Some lost their homes when they were unable to make the payments, said attorney Alex McBean. Federal prosecutors investigated but never filed charges against the alleged trafficker.

“The questions they asked tended to be focused on physical abuse or a threat of physical abuse,” McBean said, noting abuse can take other forms as well.

Across America, many local police and sheriff’s departments tend to ignore human trafficking.

Homicide and burglary, assault and larceny remain high on their “to do” lists, but not trafficking.

“I don’t think much is being done to root it out,” said Ron Soodalter, who wrote “The Slave Next Door,” a new book on human trafficking, with Kevin Bales. “There’s the idea that if I stumble across it, hopefully I will know it when I see it.”

More than 70 percent of local and state law enforcement agencies surveyed by Northeastern University recently said that human trafficking was a rare or nonexistent problem in their communities. Only one in five agencies had received some type of human trafficking training.

In addition, some officers are reluctant to intervene in sex and labor trafficking cases because they believe the victims likely were complicit in their own victimization.

The young college woman from Asia — forced to have sex with 10 to 12 men a day — finally escaped. But only after paying someone $1,200 in “tip money” to help her contact authorities.

She sought shelter with an anti-trafficking agency but it took four months to get a work permit. Though she finally got a T-visa, allowing her to remain in the United States for four years, she must wait to apply for permanent residency.

“The U.S. process is too long,” she said. “All I want is to be normal. I want to forget.”

She still has nightmares. She still sees the face of the man who enslaved her. Still threatening her, cutting her. Still inflicting pain. She doesn’t like to talk about what she went through.

She refuses to tell her husband and her mother what happened.

“It was horrible,” is all she can say.

She won’t know for two years whether she’ll be granted permanent residency in the United States. Like so many survivors, she remains imprisoned by uncertainty.

“I can’t be happy 100 percent until I know,” she said. “Until I know what is going to happen to me.”

Invisible man

Pereria never had a chance to find out what would have happened to him. He never got a chance to be certified as a trafficking victim.

Nevertheless, even though his death was never connected to the restaurant, some of the customers Pereria waited on are wondering why they didn’t see the invisible chains he claimed he wore to work every day.

“He was clearly in a desperate situation, and it breaks my heart he didn’t open up to us a little bit,” said Christina Hauck, a Kansas State University professor who was a Monday night regular of Pereria’s at the restaurant.

After the discovery of Pereria’s body in his apartment, his boss, Amapreet Singh, claimed he was just a “homeless alcoholic.” But he later admitted that Pereria had indeed been his employee.

Singh’s attorney, Pedro Irigonegaray, conceded that Pereria’s death was sad but insisted that Singh wasn’t responsible. He vehemently denied that Pereria or other employees were victims of human trafficking.

“Are the allegations ugly?” Irigonegaray said. “They are horrific. … The fact is while there are serious concerns that must be addressed with human trafficking, that was not the case in our community with these restaurant workers.”

Irigonegaray also denied that Singh mistreated his workers in any way.

The government argued that its evidence suggested otherwise. Federal prosecutors presented information from a confidential informant who’d talked with Pereria and other waiters. They had told the informant that Singh withheld their wages. That he also withheld their identification documents. And that he required them to work long hours.

The informant told authorities that Singh forced up to seven workers to live together in the apartment. Pereria had told the informant that he was abused and kept from returning to India.

Under federal law, all are elements of human trafficking. In fact, federal authorities can certify people as human trafficking victims even if no charges are ever brought against their employers. And that’s what they did in the Globe Restaurant case when they certified Pereria’s co-workers as trafficking victims.

Prosecutors never charged Singh with trafficking. He was charged and convicted of a lesser felony: harboring an illegal immigrant. Prosecutors did argue that Singh deserved an enhanced sentence because he used coercion against Pereria.

But after prosecutors didn’t produce witnesses to testify about those allegations, the judge ruled in November that the government’s evidence of threats and coercion was not sufficiently compelling and declined to lengthen Singh’s sentence. He got 18 months in federal prison, not the 20 years he could have faced if he’d been convicted of trafficking.

There would be no words to the contrary from Pereria. No family reunion, either.

He died on his apartment’s bathroom floor. Cause of death: acute pneumonia. The coroner’s report noted he was dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt, with a “filthy sock” on his left foot.

On the day he died, sick and helpless, Sebastian Pereria was still wearing his waiter’s uniform.

The first of a five-part series

•MONDAY: International sex trafficking is more complex and problematic than the U.S. law designed to combat it; meanwhile, domestic victims are getting scant attention.

•TUESDAY: America’s intricate, fraud-plagued work visa program is a welcome mat for modern-day slavers.

•WEDNESDAY: Some suspected victims, in violation of U.S. policy, are being deported on government-run airlines based in Kansas City.

•THURSDAY: A new approach is needed, and changes are coming.
< Previous page

The Star’s Mark Morris contributed to this report.
Posted on Sat, Dec. 12, 2009 10:15 PM

http://www.kansascity.com/944/story/1626936-p4.html

New funds prompt new hope in fight against human trafficking - KansasCity.com

By MIKE McGRAW and LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star

America’s war on human trafficking got its biggest-ever one-year boost in federal funding following President Barack Obama’s signing of an appropriations bill, one of several significant anti-trafficking developments this week.

The legislation contains a $12.5 million increase in funds to fight human trafficking in the United States. That money and other provisions of the law address problems identified in a five-part series this week in The Kansas City Star.

Included in the omnibus appropriation bill signed into law Wednesday is money to provide services to U.S.-born human trafficking victims — mainly underage girls forced into the sex trade. Previously, only foreign-born victims got federal anti-trafficking aid.

Jolene Smith, CEO and co-founder of Free the Slaves, called the additional funding a “watershed moment.”

“The fact that we were able to get this increase in such a tough economic climate shows that the U.S. is moving in the right direction,” Smith said.

She noted that The Star’s series helped focus needed attention on human trafficking, but she added that more money alone won’t solve the problem.

“This is an incremental increase,” she said. “It is not transformational.”

Meanwhile, a California congresswoman said Thursday that she would use The Star’s investigation of human trafficking at upcoming oversight hearings to help reform U.S. detention and deportation policies.

“We are concerned about deportation practices, so we may do some combination oversight hearings,” said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose House subcommittee oversees detention and deportation rules. “Your findings should get wider circulation.”

The Star’s series examined America’s failures to find and rescue tens of thousands of human trafficking victims estimated to be in the United States. The newspaper also found that U.S. officials too often deported and abused those victims, some on Kansas City-based government airlines.

Lofgren said that she and a colleague, in consultation with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, also introduced a bill Wednesday to reform the H-2B work visa program, which The Star found is often used fraudulently by traffickers.

And Cabinet officials within the Obama administration have said that in January they will announce a major set of initiatives in the anti-trafficking battle.

But it was the additional funding that anti-trafficking groups were applauding the loudest Thursday.

“We are delighted about a 25 percent increase in appropriations overall, and we are delighted it covers both foreign nationals and domestic victims,” said Mark Lagon, former State Department anti-trafficking czar and now CEO of the Polaris Project, a nonprofit group that combats human trafficking.

The measure also addresses problems with uneven enforcement of the federal anti-trafficking law and for the first time requires every U.S. attorney’s office in the nation to designate a human trafficking point person.

In western Missouri, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Cordes already has assumed that role and used it to help her office prosecute more alleged traffickers than any other U.S. attorney in the country.

The addition of such an anti-trafficking contact in U.S. attorneys’ offices should “improve communication and coordination within each jurisdiction, including with victim services organizations, in order to better serve the victims of human trafficking and slavery,” according to the new legislation.

The funding measure was pushed by members of the congressional human trafficking caucus, including Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat.

Overall, the $12.5 million in increased appropriations will provide a 25 percent increase in funding for counseling, housing and legal assistance for trafficking survivors. That includes more money for human trafficking task forces around the country, including one in Kansas City.

Of the total, $5.3 million will go to the Department of Justice’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, a 50 percent increase from last year.

The unit has posted a 600 percent increase in its caseload over the past four years. Many trafficking experts had told The Star that — despite increased prosecutions — the federal government is not convicting as many traffickers as other countries with good anti-trafficking records.

An additional $6 million will go to the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, a 34 percent increase from last year.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s International Labor Affairs Bureau will receive a 7 percent increase, for a total of $93 million. Some of those dollars will be used for anti-trafficking efforts.

But Jolene Smith pointed out that all U.S. citizens could help fight human trafficking around the world by simply changing their buying habits.

“We need to make it clear to businesses that slavery is too high a price to pay for cheap goods,” she said. “Businesses need to … uncover whether there is slavery in their supply chain and, if so, work together with communities and governments to root it out.”

Go to KansasCity.com for the five-part Human Trafficking in America series, plus videos and photos.

To reach Mike McGraw, call 816-234-4423 or send e-mail to mcgraw@kcstar.com. To reach Laura Bauer, call 816-234-4944 or send e-mail to lbauer@kcstar.com.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics/story/1637831.html

Texas police: Teen was victim of human trafficking | AP Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

Image via Wikipedia

The Associated Press
Dec. 25, 2009, 9:50PM

SAN JUAN, Texas — A 16-year-old Mexican girl was raped, deprived of food and forced into household labor by a South Texas family who sneaked her across the Mexican border into the United States, police said.

Ofelia Vargas, 45, was arrested Wednesday and charged with failure to report a felony, San Juan Police Chief Juan Gonzalez said. Her daughter, Belen Vargas, 17, has been charged with misdemeanor assault. Police are searching for her son, Benito Vargas, 17, who was last seen at the girl's home in Jalisco, Mexico.

Ofelia Vargas was being held in Hildago County Jail in lieu of $50,000 bond. Belen Vargas was in custody at the La Villa Detention Center in lieu of $45,000 bond. She was being held on an unrelated marijuana possession charge.

Neither Vargas nor her daughter could be reached for comment.

Gonzalez said police believe Benito Vargas sexually assaulted the girl and that his mother did not respond to her cries for help. Gonzalez also said the girl's family told authorities Benito Vargas went to their home searching for her after she disappeared and tried to intimidate them.

The police chief told The Monitor in McAllen it's not uncommon for girls and women to be lured north across the border under false pretenses. He said the 16-year-old "came over with the intent of a better life, but what she walked into was a nightmare."

The teen was beaten on several occasions, rarely fed and forced to sleep on a couch outside, he said. She escaped this week through a window in the house.

A neighbor took her to a shelter where she was under police supervision, Gonzalez said.

Police said Benito Vargas may face additional charges, including unlawful restraint and human trafficking.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6787293.html

___

Armenia Reports Surge In Human Trafficking Sentences

30.12.2009
Emil Danielyan

The number of individuals prosecuted and imprisoned on human trafficking charges in Armenia has almost tripled in 2009, according to the national police.

The latest police data also show the number of persons officially identified as trafficking victims nearly doubling to 60 in the course of the year. Twenty-two of them were referred to rehabilitation centers run by two non-governmental organizations. The vast majority of victims are Armenian women who were transported abroad and the United Arab Emirates in particular for sexual exploitation.

A brief report posted on the police website this week said 11 individuals were convicted of organizing the illegal practice and sentenced to between 3 and 13 years. A police official told RFE/RL that none of the sentences was suspended. Only four persons received trafficking-related jail terms, ranging from 2 to 7.5 years, in 2008.

The police presented the sharp increase as proof of its “serious work” aimed at eliminating cross-border transport and illegal exploitation of human beings from Armenia. It also noted that 119 police officers participated in training courses aimed at deepening their understanding of the problem in 2009.

The U.S. State Department acknowledged those efforts in June when it removed Armenia from a “watch list” of countries which it believes are not doing enough to combat human trafficking and aid its victims. “The Government of Armenia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so,” the department said in its 2009 Trafficking in Persons report.

The Armenian government has scrambled to get the country out of the U.S. blacklist with a range of legislative and administrative measures. The government approved its second anti-trafficking program in late 2007 and upgraded the status of an inter-agency government council coordinating its implementation a year later.

The authorities in Yerevan have also substantially toughened punishment for human trafficking and cracked down on local prostitution rings. The number of relevant criminal cases opened by the police has risen in recent years.

The police statement indicated that the government will soon propose more trafficking-related amendments in the Armenian Criminal Code. It gave no details, though.

http://www.azatutyun.am/content/article/1917813.html

Kyrgyz children slaves liberated in Russia

Published 29 December, 2009, 06:18

Edited 29 December, 2009, 11:31

In an illegal sewing factory in the town of Noginsk in the Moscow region, investigators found 15 exhausted Kyrgyz children aged from 11 to 17 who were forced to work long hours with little food and even less money.

The children were selected by ruthless employees who target poor families, telling them their children would be well looked after – but the reality is often very different. Children from Kyrgyzstan claim they worked twelve hours a day and were frequently physically abused.

“The parents were promised that the children will work with two days off a week, paid salaries and be provided with an opportunity to communicate with parents,” said Anastasia Lokteva, Press Officer for the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “In reality, the children were kept in barrack-like buildings, worked 12-hour night shifts, and ate twice a day mainly mayonnaise and bread.”

“I began working when I was 15,” said one of the underage slaves. “I came here with my brother. We work 12 hours a day.”

It is thought that around 2,000 children work as slaves in factories similar to this one throughout Russia, and without proper regulation and enforcement the problem will keep on growing. Over the past several years, there has been an increasing movement to combat human trafficking, but despite these efforts there are still basic issues that need to be tackled.

“We propose to toughen responsibility of employees, first of all, it should be criminal responsibility with serious administrative fines for the use of illegal workers,” said the Director of Moscow’s Bureau of Human Rights, Aleksandr Brod. “Second, the law enforcement agencies should work well and very precise procedures should be conducted on the state borders, as we are aware of corruption when law enforcement officials openly provide protection for such factories. They just receive money illegally for such services and close their eyes.”

In the past few years, the number of cases investigated has remained low and the number of people who are sentenced is even lower.

For the time being, these boys have escaped a life of modern day slavery, but there remain thousands of other children still caught in the trap.

http://rt.com/Top_News/2009-12-29/kyrgyz-children-slave-release.html