Wrong chains unbroken - BostonHerald.com

By Geoffrey J. Haber / As You Were Saying...
Friday, January 1, 2010 - Added 1d 2h ago

We may look upon slavery as something our ancient ancestors experienced, but irrelevant to our lives. But, truth be known, today the slave trade is larger than ever before.

New Year’s Day marks the anniversary of a seminal date in American history. On that day in 1863, many slaves were set free under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Over the next two years, millions of slaves would experience freedom for the first time in their lives.

Yet while slavery was abolished in the 19th century in the United States, it lives on across the globe. Its continued existence abroad is every bit the threat to our society that slavery in America was, as it runs counter to the principles of a democratic society. In essence, it limits our very own freedom.

And just as we as a nation will not stop in our quest to end terrorism wherever it may live, nor should we stop short of committing ourselves to doing what we can to stop slavery in foreign countries.

Slaves live as servants in the Sudan. In India, children are forced to work without rest spinning fabric on looms. In Asia and Eastern Europe, teenage girls are enslaved, sent overseas in inhumane conditions and forced into prostitution.

According to Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest human rights organization, millions of people throughout the world are in bondage. Some are simply born into it. Others are forced into it for economic survival or to get medical care for an ailing loved one. And yet others are victims of trafficking, where they are sent away from their homelands to be exploited either for labor or for sex.

Members of the Jewish community understand what slavery is. The Haggadah read at Passover proclaims: “Now we are slaves/Next year we will be free.” We tend, however, to look upon slavery as something our ancient ancestors experienced, but irrelevant to our lives. It is a quaint memory that we recall when telling the Passover story. But, in truth, today the slave trade is larger than ever before.

Benjamin Skinner, author of “A Crime so Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery,” exposes one of the great evils of our time: That there are more slaves in the world today than at any time in history. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, also writing about modern slavery, reports that “At this moment, millions of men, women, and children - roughly twice the population of Rhode Island - are being held against their will as modern-day slaves.”

To many, modern slavery is perceived as workers in low-wage jobs or inhumane working conditions, which of course is deplorable in and of itself. But modern-day slaves differ from the lowest wage workers in developing countries because they are actually held in physical bondage - shackled and held at gunpoint.

Let’s remember today’s historical relevance in the United States. Moreover, let us resolve to take action to free the millions of people who are enslaved across the globe.

Action can be as simple as writing your congressman and senators and asking that they work to help people abroad be freed from the bonds of slavery. Or it may mean taking steps to get educated about the issue of slavery, such as going to anti-slavery Web sites, and then educating others and advocating for change.

Eliminating slavery in all its forms will not come easily. It will require hard work and activism on the part of many Americans to demand change. We will need to use our economic power and bully pulpit to fight for freedom so that those enslaved can rightfully say, just as Jews do when reading the Haggadah every Passover, “Now we are free.”

Geoffrey J. Haber is the rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill.


Wrong chains unbroken - BostonHerald.com

Ask Questions Later: Victims are too often deported - KansasCity.com

By MIKE McGRAW
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Tue, Dec. 15, 2009 10:15 PM

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala | In a dingy reception center across from the new terminal at La Aurora International Airport, Guatemalan immigration agents don surgical masks and brace for another day of controlled chaos.

A U.S. government passenger jet — one of up to seven a week — taxis to a stop. More than 100 disheveled deportees shuffle down the stairs and head for the center. Agents check for criminal records and swine flu and return shoelaces confiscated stateside, usually as a suicide precaution.

One thing the agents won’t do, however, is check to see if the deportees were victims of human trafficking while on U.S. soil.

“We don’t look at that,” said a Guatemalan immigration agent. “That’s done by the U.S. government before they send them here.”

In fact, that’s not the case.

Instead, The Kansas City Star found, the U.S. government compounds their suffering by deporting them back to the same impoverished conditions they fled in the first place. Up to one-fourth of the victims who might have testified against their traffickers were deported.

What’s more, deportees on one of two Kansas City-based government airlines have been abused or sedated in violation of federal regulations, The Star found.

“These are very disturbing allegations and this is not permitted under our system,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who heads the House subcommittee that oversees detention and deportation procedures. That is “completely at odds with our policy,” she noted, adding that The Star’s findings should be investigated.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who charter the flights said they take great care to identify trafficking victims, but would not comment specifically on whether they screen all deportees for human trafficking status, or whether they are aware of deporting trafficking victims.

They said they have guidelines to prevent abuse of deportees, but they acknowledged that earlier this year at least one deportee was sedated on a Marshals Service flight in direct violation of those regulations.

Yet ICE said in a statement that it “takes allegations of trafficking very seriously and investigates any claims that a person makes to indicate they have been a victim of trafficking or trafficking-related crimes.”

The State Department and Congress recognize the need for more aggressive screening to keep from deporting human trafficking victims, said Luis CdeBaca, the director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

“We are going to be working … to make sure those vulnerable populations are not just shown the door,” he said.

Top officials, however, have known about the problem for years.

Trafficking expert Julianne Duncan, formerly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told federal officials in 2005 that trafficking victims — who are often forced into prostitution or hard labor — are “frequently deported rather than provided services. This is shockingly the case even for children.”

That’s allegedly what happened to Mardoqueo Valle-Callejas and many of the 388 workers swept up in a workplace raid last year at a Postville, Iowa, meat processing plant.

The Guatemalan father of five came to America illegally to earn money for his family. But he told The Star that he was forced to provide hours of free labor to his bosses, work when injured and that he had questionable fees deducted from his remaining earnings.

Iowa officials are also pursuing some 9,000 child labor law violations involving 32 young Guatemalan workers caught up in the same raid, some as young as 15. Some were illegally put to work at jobs that exposed them to dangerous chemicals at the Postville plant, according to a complaint by the Iowa attorney general.

“These are classic examples of human trafficking victims,” said attorney Sonia Parras Konrad, who is representing many of those swept up in the raid. ICE never screened them for victim status, she said.

Had they been identified as human trafficking victims, they could have qualified for aid and ultimately may have been allowed to remain in the United States.

Instead, most were jailed for five months and then deported.

The Star’s investigation also found more than 100 instances, most between 2007 and 2009, in which the government violated or tried to sidestep its own rules for the treatment of deportees on government flights carrying trafficking victims and other vulnerable detainees such as children, the mentally ill, the sick and the dying.

The findings are based on court documents and thousands of pages of reports released under the Freedom of Information Act.

In some cases deportees were boarded on four- to five-hour flights without needed medication. Some were boarded despite being too ill to fly, at times potentially exposing guards and other passengers to communicable diseases.

Medical problems aboard the flights clearly resulted at least in part from mismanaged health care inside U.S. immigration detention centers, according to a report released last week by Dora Schriro, a special adviser to ICE.

Schriro found that ICE often sent immigrants to detention centers before assessing their health needs, resulting in some not getting proper medical attention. She also said that ICE’s “assessment, treatment, and management of pandemic and contagious diseases were inconsistent.”

In addition, Schriro, a former Missouri prison official who now runs New York City’s jails, said, “Medical summaries were not always provided when detainees were transferred.”

Other deportees were harassed or denied permission to use lavatories on the planes, causing some to soil their clothing. Some deportees — chained at the wrists, ankles and waist — also were sedated with dangerous drugs, even after federal officials promised to discontinue the practice.

And that represents only the cases guards and nurses actually documented.

Many others may have gone unreported, some guards said, because of an unspoken rule that “what happens on the plane stays on the plane.”

Deportation frenzy

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said it was unrealistic to believe the United States could deport all of the 12 million illegal immigrants estimated to be living in America.

“We are not going to send them home,” Obama said.

But the government seems to be trying. For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the United States deported 387,790 illegal immigrants — the seventh consecutive record for deportations.

At some point most of them were passengers on one of two government “airlines” headquartered in Kansas City, one operated by ICE and the other by the U.S. Marshals Service.

A few deportees are criminals, but most are what ICE calls “non-criminal” immigrants who entered the United States illegally. Most are from Mexico and nearly all came to find higher-paying jobs.

Some also are human trafficking victims, according to a report last year funded by the Justice Department.

“People definitely get deported who shouldn’t be deported,” said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at New York University School of Law and an expert on deportation law.

In fact, the United States has mistakenly been deporting its own citizens, including 31 specific cases recently documented by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

One was Mark Lyttle, a cognitively disabled man who was born in North Carolina, but deported to Mexico even though he speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican heritage.

Lyttle was chained and boarded onto a U.S. Marshals Service plane late last year, flown to a staging area in Texas, and ordered to walk across the border.

Lyttle’s strange odyssey began after he served jail time for inappropriately touching an employee at a group home where he lived. A jail form showed his birthplace as Mexico, and he gave ICE conflicting statements.

Stevens, who has studied the federal file on Lyttle, said records ICE checked showed Lyttle was born in the United States and was a U.S. citizen, but that ICE agents “falsely swore to the contrary.”

Lyttle finally made it home in April this year, after he persuaded a consular officer in the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala to contact his family. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal auditors documented numerous weaknesses in ICE’s “alien removal decision making” process, especially during large workplace raids such as the one in Iowa. The problems included a failure to identify “humanitarian issues,” such as child welfare and medical problems.

It’s little wonder then, critics contend, that human trafficking victims sometimes get deported.

Agents should be required to screen for such victims after all workplace raids, said Leslye Orloff, director of the Immigrant Women Program, Legal Momentum.

“If we take the Postville case, we know there were at least some women who were picked up in the raid and later deported that may well have been crime victims,” Orloff said.

While ICE officials acknowledged they were told of substandard working conditions and inadequate pay at Postville, they said no one claimed to be a human trafficking victim.

But victims are often reluctant to step forward, experts said, especially during raids such as the one in Postville.

“We ask other countries to make sure they are not deporting human trafficking victims,” said Mark Lagon, former director of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. “But there’s every reason to think that we have deported them, too.”

Shroud of secrecy

An ICE public affairs officer accompanied a Star reporter and photographer on one deportation flight in August from San Antonio to Guatemala City.

Deportees on the flight were “non-criminal” illegal immigrants, and none were in chains. Conditions mirrored those on other flights, said Pat Reilly, an ICE spokeswoman. But documents, lawsuits and interviews with deportees, nurses and guards paint a different picture when the media isn’t around — especially on ICE’s partner airline run by the U.S. Marshals Service.

Deportations and transfers occur under a shroud of secrecy, often after detainees have been locked up for weeks or months.

Because of space limitations in some detention centers, many are repeatedly transferred by ICE or Marshals Service planes in what one recent report described as a game of musical chairs.

“The transfers are devastating, absolutely devastating,” immigration attorney Rebecca Kitson told Human Rights Watch for a recent report on the transfers.

Kitson said detainees “are loaded onto a plane in the middle of the night. They have no idea where they are, no idea what state they are in. I cannot overemphasize the psychological trauma to these people.”

The transfers also severely disrupt the attorney-client relationship, said Human Rights Watch, “because attorneys are rarely, if ever, informed of their clients’ transfers.”

ICE said the process is designed to reduce security risks.

But records show that some of those transferred and deported on the planes have been subjected to inhumane treatment and physical abuse on the trip, even those who were shackled.

As recently as last year Dianna McChargue, a Marshals Service supervisor, said in a sworn statement that she told her bosses that some guards on the flights were sexist and racist toward fellow guards and others, but that they ignored her warnings.

A few years earlier, McChargue admonished guards for discouraging deportees from “defecating during lavatory call” because of “unpleasant odors.” She ordered them to stop preventing deportees from using lavatories in any way they needed.

The Marshals acknowledged “isolated cases” where deportees were denied permission to use lavatories during flights but added, “We can assure you these incidents have been addressed.“

Internal documents show ICE and the Marshals Service continue to disagree on how deportees should be treated on the flights.

In fact, the Marshals refused a request from ICE this summer to stop carrying stun guns, sedating passengers and restraining females and juveniles on the flights it operates for ICE.

The Marshals cited security concerns, adding that deportees are clearly in Marshal custody during those flights. ICE insists, however, that deportees remain in ICE custody, even while on Marshals Service planes.

Pre-flight cocktails

From 2003 to 2007, numerous deportees were injected with “pre-flight cocktails” before their flight home, according to congressional testimony.

The main ingredient: Haldol, a potent antipsychotic that can cause death. In some cases, sedated deportees needed wheelchairs to get off the plane.

The practice became so controversial that ICE ordered it stopped and said it would no longer involuntarily sedate immigrants without a court order. “There are no exceptions to this policy,” an ICE memo said at the time.

But The Star found that the practice never really stopped, at least for detainees on Marshals Service flights operated as ICE charters.

Records show the Marshals Service in May forcibly injected a Jamaican detainee with Haldol — even after he had been moved to the back of the plane and was no longer disruptive.

Ashim Mitra, a pharmacy professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, called it a clear violation of ICE policies and an overreaction that risked harming the patient.

ICE told The Star it learned of the incident after the fact and sent the Marshals a memo asking them to stop. The Marshals said that they are aware of the memo, but that the action was called for under their own policies, and they don’t intend to make changes.

Incident reports obtained by the newspaper also show that ICE boarded or tried to board detainees who were too physically or mentally ill, or too far along in their pregnancy to travel under ICE’s own guidelines.

The reports also showed that ICE often failed to provide nurses on Marshals Service flights with required medical records for deportees, and that seriously ill deportees were sometimes boarded without their medications.

“It was unbelievable the condition some of these people were in when they arrived,” said Nina Siulc, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, who interviewed several thousand Dominican deportees within minutes of their arrival there.

Scott Allen, a doctor with Physicians for Human Rights, said, “The documents I reviewed show multiple cases involving pressure on flight nurses to board improperly screened patients, or patients without proper medical documentation. This is simply bad practice.”

Neither the Marshals Service nor ICE responded directly to the allegations in the reports, but both said they have guidelines to prevent such incidents.

Court documents show some deportees also have been harassed and threatened aboard the planes.

Marshals Service guard Fernando DaCosta held a switchblade knife in the face of a young Mexican deportee on one flight and threatened to cut his throat if he didn’t give DaCosta his correct name, according to allegations in a federal anti-discrimination lawsuit.

The Marshals suspended DaCosta for two weeks in 2006 for “obscene and derogatory language” directed toward fellow workers and others, and “conduct unbecoming an aviation enforcement officer.”

ICE and the Marshals Service refused to comment about DaCosta, calling it a personnel matter. DaCosta, who is no longer with the Marshals Service, said the incident “never happened.”

The Star also found that guards, deportees and others potentially have been exposed to communicable diseases such as tuberculosis because ICE failed to follow its own screening criteria. On several occasions, records show ICE agents attempted to board detainees despite what a nurse called “grossly positive” TB skin tests.

ICE insists all deportees are carefully screened and that deportees who test positive for TB are not sent home if they are contagious.

But in May 2003, in what federal auditors later called “an extreme case of failed medical screening,” a Marshals Service crew was ordered to board a female detainee who met the plane in Chicago.

She and two ICE agents wore surgical masks and protective clothing, and she showed symptoms of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Top Marshals Service officials in Kansas City ordered the woman boarded over objections from the nurse and the rest of the crew. The incident sparked a mutiny, and the crew refused to continue the mission.

She was later transported on a commercial airliner filled with passengers.

Valle-Callejas’ journey

Advocates for detainees rounded up in the 2008 workplace raid in Postville said a lack of proper screening by ICE also led to the deportation of potential human trafficking victims.

They included Valle-Callejas, who was deported on one of the flights to Guatemala City.

With his family gathered around in his impoverished village of Calderas, Valle-Callejas told the story of his ill-fated trek to America.

After putting up his house for a loan to smugglers, he was shuttled across the U.S. border illegally and traveled north looking for work. He said he ended up in a job where his illegal status was held over his head.

“I worked 86 hours a week and never got paid for more than 60,” he recalled. “If we complained, they would take the job away, and this was the only job available.”

After his arrest, U.S. authorities gave Valle-Callejas and the others a choice. Plead guilty to illegal entry and identity theft and spend five months in prison before being deported, or plead not guilty and face up to two years in prison.

Valle-Callejas and most of the others took the deal.

While Valle-Callejas was in jail he lost his house in Guatemala, and now he and his family are homeless.

“I came back feeling desolate for the way they treated us,” he said.

Were they human trafficking victims as their advocates insist? No one knows, because they allegedly were never properly screened.

But once they were back home, some told Guatemalan officials they were exploited or abused and felt they were victims of forced labor, said Antonio Escobedo, director general of consular and migratory affairs in Guatemala City.

“There was absolutely no consideration of whether they were victims of trafficking, exploitation or child labor,” said Erik Camayd-Freixas, who served as a translator for the U.S. government after the Postville raid. “They all got the same raw deal.”

Still, many come back for more.

A Salvadoran who would only give his first name as Raoul said he already had been deported once. But this summer he was leaving a migrant shelter near the Guatemalan border in an effort to sneak back into the United States.

“In El Salvador I make $3 a day from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” Raoul told The Star as he prepared to ride a makeshift raft across the Suchiate River that divides Guatemala from Mexico.

Despite the risks of being deported again, Raoul said it’s worth it.

“People in the U.S. should know that we suffer on the way. We know the risks, and we know we broke the laws in the U.S. But that is better than what we have here.”

http://www.kansascity.com/975/story/1633621.html

The Punch:: Human trafficking: Police arrest medical doctor in Enugu

By Adelani Adepegba and Ademola Oni, Published: Thursday, 31 Dec 2009

The police in Enugu have arrested a medical doctor, identified as Chike Uzoma for alleged child trafficking and defilement.

No fewer than five girls whose ages range between 12 and 17 years in varying stages of pregnancy were rescued when policemen raided his clinic located at 6, Nawfia Street, Independence Layout, Enugu.

The Enugu State Police Public Relations Officer, Ebere Amarizu (DSP), who confirmed the arrest to our correspondent on Wednesday, explained that Uzoma had confessed to defiling the girls and selling off infants.

He stated that the suspect would soon be arraigned once the court resumed, adding that investigation into the case was still ongoing.

Amarizu said that Uzoma may be handed over to the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons and Other Related Offences if the alleged crime of child trafficking was proved.

The PPRO explained that the rescued girls pointed out the doctor as the person responsible for their pregnancies, adding that the police would ensure that the suspect faced the law for his crimes.

Also, the Ogun State Command of the Nigerian Immigration Service has arrested another Beninoise, Agbonesi Azui, for alleged human trafficking.

Azui was found with six teenagers, who have been trafficked from the Republic of Benin.

The suspect, who was paraded alongside his six victims by the NIS in Abeokuta on Wednesday, brought to two the number of traffickers from the neighbouring country in one week.

The command recently mounted a manhunt for a farmer and an operator of commercial motorcycle in Abeokuta, Tosu Babatunde, who fled the country after his two wives and a trader were arrested over their roles in the trafficking of three teenage Beninoise.

Parading the suspects and the rescued victims, the Comptroller of Immigration Service, Ogun State Command, Mr. Abdulmumini Adbulmalik, said 10 suspected traffickers had been arrested in the state this year while 29 of their victims had been set free.

The Punch:: Human trafficking: Police arrest medical doctor in Enugu

Changing views: Government promises action - KansasCity.com

By MARK MORRIS, MIKE McGRAW and LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star< Previous page
Posted on Wed, Dec. 16, 2009 10:15 PM

The Obama administration is weeks away from announcing a new surge — this one aimed at escalating the war on human trafficking in America.

“In January we are going to be announcing a major set of initiatives,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told The Kansas City Star.

Napolitano disclosed the administration’s plans at the conclusion of The Star’s six-month investigation exposing numerous failures in America’s anti-trafficking battle.

Although details of the plan were not released, advocates and other experts said they’re cautiously optimistic that this is the best chance in years to address many of the problems revealed in the newspaper’s five-part series. They’re also hopeful that the administration, which has reached out to them and asked what changes are needed, will correct structural flaws in the broken system.

“It is time to go back to the drawing board and promote a more seamless, coordinated plan,” said Florrie Burke, a nationally known advocate for trafficking victims.

Other experts said it’s also time for congressional oversight hearings on the flagging decade-long struggle, and time to centralize an anti-trafficking effort that is thinly spread across a vast bureaucracy plagued by inter-agency wrangling and a lack of coordination.

Others contend what’s also needed is a top-to-bottom overhaul of ineffective immigration policies that infuriate those on both sides of the politically charged debate.

“The series that ran this week in The Star is a horrible reminder of the price of codes without compassion or common sense,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat. “In our quest to make our borders unbreakable and our laws unforgiving we have driven some of the most poor and desperate seeking the promise of America into unthinkable situations.”

Kansas state Rep. Mike Slattery, a Mission Democrat, said reading the series convinced him that changes across the system are desperately needed.

“It has been on people’s radar on the federal level,” Slattery said. “Yet there seems to be no coordinated effort to make things better…I think it’s about making this a priority.”

The series also sparked a grassroots response that many argue is key to regaining America’s moral authority to preach the human trafficking doctrine around the world.

One Kansas City area man contacted The Star wanting to know how to help a human trafficking victim he knows. One area woman said she planned to approach her Lenexa pastor to see if area churches could create a safe house for sex trafficked women.

A local small-business owner wanted to know how to find out if the personnel service she uses employs legal immigrants and treats employees properly. Others planned to call Congress and request better oversight of trafficking and more money funneled into the effort.

“It is hidden, ignored, denied, shuffled around and overlooked at the expense of thousands of lives,” said Jane Mailand of Lincoln, Neb. “I was so sad to find out that the Midwest is right in the middle of this huge human tragedy.”

Experts told The Star that the federal government needs to concentrate on core issues, such as reaching a consensus on how to define human trafficking. They include:

•Launching initiatives to find more victims. Better trained police officers and public information campaigns need to be aimed at new arrivals and U.S. citizens.

•Appropriating money for services Congress promised years ago for American-born victims. Most are girls — some as young as 12 — sex trafficked in the United States.

•Eliminating fraud in work visa programs that make trafficking easier.

•Screening for victims before they arrive in the United States or are swept up in workplace raids and deported.

•Avoiding built-in conflicts for officers who are now responsible for both arresting illegal immigrants and identifying victims.

Advocates concede that, even with such changes, it will be a long fight.

“If you want to change the direction of a goldfish, that’s pretty easy,” said Bill Bernstein, deputy director of Mosaic Family Services in Dallas, which works with victims. “If you want to change the direction of a whale, it takes a lot of water. And it takes time.”

Training and awareness

Top anti-trafficking officials agree that more law enforcement training to identify and respond to human trafficking is critical.

A police officer, state trooper or federal agent who focuses on a crime such as prostitution — without asking how the person in the back seat of the patrol car got there — could be missing a much larger offense.

While training was a focus of the Bush administration, experts said that it should be broader and become a standard part of the law enforcement curriculum for every officer in a position to encounter human trafficking.

Napolitano suggested that her initiative could take such an approach.

“The problem is it is a very difficult crime to find,” she said. “We are revisiting how law enforcement officers are trained to detect human trafficking at the federal, state and local levels.”

Many survivors of human trafficking said they didn’t know there are laws in the United States against what they experienced.

They didn’t have a clue that they have rights in America.

“So many people with relatives being held hostage and sold don’t feel comfortable coming forward,” said Rocio Gonzalez Watson, a victim’s advocate. “They think they are going to get in trouble. If people feel they’re not going to be punished for telling the truth, they will open up.”

That’s why education is vital, according to advocates. They’re calling for educational programs in countries that are a source of U.S.-bound trafficking victims, such as Mexico, China and Guatemala.

“If you come from a country where people make 10 cents an hour or $1 an hour, you may think a few dollars an hour is good. Under the laws of the U.S., you must be paid at least the minimum wage regardless of where you come from or what your immigration status is,” said Ivy Suriyopas, staff attorney for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“They also need to know that here in the U.S., they’re not required to work 80 hours or 100 hours a week. If they do work such hours, they are entitled to receive the appropriate overtime pay.”

Also needed is a campaign to educate immigrants and their families that U.S. law enforcement will help them and that authorities aren’t corrupt like in some countries where they protect the trafficking ring.

Eliminating a built-in conflict for law enforcement authorities who must sort out illegal immigrants from trafficking victims is another challenge.

Although federal immigration officials maintain that their agents are trained to identify human trafficking victims, advocates such as Sonia Parras Konrad noted there is an “inherent conflict of interest” when the same officers searching for illegal immigrants are also trying to identify trafficking victims.

Visa fraud, improved screening

The Star’s investigation found that the U.S. Department of Labor had returned $200 million it was supposed to use to detect fraud in the nation’s work visa program.

Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed a measure giving the Labor Department authority to spend that money. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law Wednesday.

The bill also adds more money for combating human trafficking, including some services for American-born victims. But more needs to be done to prevent traffickers from misusing the visa program, experts say.

Laura Abel, deputy director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said guest workers should have more freedom to legally change jobs. “If the employer says work for pennies a day and sleep in this pigpen, they have to. They have no negotiating power,” Abel noted.

Catherine Ruckelshaus, legal co-director of the National Employment Law Project, suggested allowing H-2B visa holders access to the same kind of federally funded legal services to which migrant farm workers are entitled.

Other experts suggest cracking down on businesses, such as national hotel chains, that profit by contracting with unscrupulous labor brokers who exploit vulnerable guest workers.

Topeka criminal defense lawyer Pedro Irigonegaray said investigators should look at large companies that create the economic incentive for human trafficking.

“When was the last time you saw the head of a large hotel corporation or a large manufacturing company or one of these plants where undocumented workers are made to work … go to prison?” he asked.

As for improved screening and public education, Napolitano said, those should be part of the Obama administration’s new initiatives.

“We want to go at the whole deal, about people making money off of other people’s miseries, with particular focus on child sex exploitation,” she said.

“We had the Hidden in Plain Sight campaign, designed to alert the public and local law enforcement about victims of human trafficking. And we are going to increase our efforts there … We are going to be doing some things at the border itself, where victims may be brought across.”

Focus on sex trafficking

Young American-born girls can’t be forgotten in the war against human trafficking, say experts and advocates who work with domestic sex trafficking victims.

First, fund services for victims, something advocates say lawmakers should have done four years ago. Then, create safe houses and shelters where authorities can take girls who were forced into prostitution.

Many girls are currently put in jail.

“We must have a secure environment where they can stay safe,” said Linda Smith, founder of Shared Hope International, which rescues victims of sex trafficking. “… We have to protect that child.”

Studies show that as many as 100,000 American-born girls are sex trafficked each year, Smith said. That compares with an estimated 17,500 foreign-born victims trafficked into the United States each year. Yet most federal grant dollars go toward international victims.

“Why in heaven’s name isn’t 90 percent of the money going to our girls?” Smith said.

The United States needs to make a concerted effort to reduce the demand for sex trafficking, said Laura Lederer, a former senior adviser on human trafficking at the U.S. Department of State. The country needs programs targeted at arresting and prosecuting not only the pimps and traffickers, but also those buying sex.

Through her new organization, Global Centurion, Lederer reviewed innovative programs aimed at reducing demand. Good examples, she said, are the “Dear John” campaign in Atlanta, and the First Offender Prostitution Program in San Francisco, which diverts those who buy sex into a weekend program about the harm of human trafficking.

“Yes, it’s important to have shelters and fund services,” Lederer said. “But it’s also important to turn off the spigot, turn off the flow.”

“It’s that man out there buying the sex,” she said. “He’s creating a market for this.”

Prosecution and commitment

While prosecutions in trafficking cases are increasing, the United States still convicts relatively few traffickers.

“I think we have to understand the difficulties here,” Napolitano said. “It’s not as if victims are coming forward saying, ‘I am a victim of a crime.’ They don’t come to the attention of law enforcement.”

In its latest budget request to Congress, the Justice Department asked for money to almost double the number of human trafficking prosecutors.

Yet as the Obama administration prepares to roll out its new anti-trafficking initiatives, politics could cloud the issue.

Administration officials maintain that under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department overemphasized human trafficking prosecutions and shortchanged traditional civil rights cases, such as vote fraud and race discrimination.

Former Bush officials counter that Obama’s Justice Department will end up de-emphasizing human trafficking in its zeal to re-emphasize more traditional civil rights cases.

Whatever the new administration proposes, there is guarded optimism among advocates that progress is possible, even in Washington’s politically charged atmosphere.

Recent history has shown that the depravity of modern human slavery — universally decried as a scourge on civilized society — has made strange bedfellows of a wide range of political and social activists.

When Congress passed America’s landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000, the sponsors could not have been more different: Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, a stalwart social conservative, and the late Minnesota Democrat Paul Wellstone, one of the leading liberal voices in the party.

Brownback said that he and Wellstone found broad support for the law by avoiding politically sensitive minefields that could have derailed the entire effort. Progress on human trafficking can be made, they discovered, when it isn’t tied to the incendiary issue of illegal immigration.

For example, some lawmakers became suspicious that the plan to create a special visa for human trafficking victims was just a back-door way to expand immigration. Brownback defused that, in part, by linking the visa to cooperation with law enforcement in prosecuting traffickers.

Experts insist that whatever progress is made in the United States will be limited until lawmakers — and the American public — finally accept that human trafficking is but one dimension of illegal migration.

Go to KansasCity.com to read the full series and additional perspectives on how to solve the problem, including more essays and a video interview with the reporters.

http://www.kansascity.com/888/story/1635773.html

Hostage House, Part 5 | ‘I share my liberty with my son’ - KansasCity.com

By LAURA BAUER
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Wed, Dec. 16, 2009 10:15 PM

She fiddles with her cell phone. In midconversation, she holds it out, showing off who’s on the screen.

“Here’s my son,” she says, pronouncing those three words in perfect English.

A wide-eyed toddler smiles, an oversized hat on his head. Mom leans over to see the photo herself, not able to pass up one more look.

Two and a half years after she was smuggled into America and then held hostage at a drop house where she was raped, forced to work for no pay and constantly abused, this young woman from Central America is transforming herself. So is her aunt.

They’re human trafficking survivors, not victims. There’s a difference.

Every day now is about hope and healing and grabbing hold of that American dream they chased through the Mexican desert.

Finally, they can see it.

“We thank God for this,” the aunt says.

•••

The day of the raid, the two women didn’t know what would happen to them.

Would they be deported? Treated as criminals?

Would anyone believe what they went through?

So many of the 60 immigrants who were crammed into that single family home in Southern California refused to talk. They didn’t trust law enforcement. Some just wanted to go home.

Because of that, three-fourths of the immigrants were sent back to their countries. It isn’t clear if they were deported or went back on their own.

The aunt says 16 cooperated, including her and her niece. They were certified as victims and received benefits available for those who suffer severe abuse by human traffickers.

They were given food, housing, clothing and work permits. Once they get a special visa for trafficking victims, they can stay in America for three years before they can apply for permanent residency.

The two women got their work permits six months ago and are now legally employed.

The day after the raid, they arrived at a shelter where workers seem just as invested in their future as the women. They got weekly therapy, job training and the chance to commiserate with other survivors.

It’s what the U.S. system designed to protect human trafficking victims is supposed to do: Identify the victims. Help them. Heal them.

They now live the life they first heard about in Central America.

They save 30 percent of everything they make. The niece finally sends money home, where her father’s illness has gotten worse.

“My parents are very happy,” she says. “They say, ‘God bless you for doing what you are doing for us.’ ”

The two women and the little boy live together in a transitional apartment as they plot new courses.

The aunt now works at a college. After years of serving as a modern-day slave for human traffickers, she has her favorite programs: cooking shows.

The niece is taking classes to learn English. She spends most of her time with her 1½-year-old son, whose trafficker father never wanted him to live. Mom and son play on the floor together and watch “Sesame Street.” The father’s whereabouts are unknown.

•••

When they do talk about what happened, which isn’t often, they never focus on the pain. They say:

Look where we were and look where we are now.

Yet sometimes fear and the awful images sneak in.

The aunt has dreams about the men who trafficked them. She’ll wake up in the morning, shaken, and tell her niece about nightmares that seem too real.

“I dreamed they took the baby away from us,” she tells her.

More than a month ago, the aunt took him to get his immunization shots. She pushed him in a stroller on a nice fall afternoon.

When a stranger snatched her purse and ran off, she panicked.

Were they coming after the boy? she wondered. No, but the incident brought it all back.

No doubt the women are still afraid. Six or seven of their traffickers are still out there.

Sometimes they’ll just walk around the shelter, careful not to venture too far away.

Close to safety, but still free.

“I share my liberty with my son,” the niece says.

They tell their story, hoping that other victims of human trafficking know that there is a better life once they’re rescued. The United States intended for people like them — people who came here illegally but ended up horribly abused on American soil — to be able to rebuild their lives here.

In a country that believes in human rights.

“If more information is given out,” the niece says through a translator, her aunt nodding in agreement as she talks, “people will realize the help they can get, and fewer people would stay quiet.

“People would come forward.”

http://www.kansascity.com/888/story/1635821.html

Hostage House, Part 4: Armed men, just outside the door - KansasCity.com

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

It’s 6:30 a.m. at the two-story drop house in Southern California, and men with guns are quietly circling outside.

The middle-aged woman from Central America — who came here looking for a better life but was enslaved in a human trafficking ring — is in the kitchen making coffee for her pregnant niece.

There is one last moment of silence in this dreaded place … and then, boom!

Within seconds, men are bursting through the front door and running from room to room, barking orders at sleepy-eyed immigrants. You can hear women screaming, children crying.

It’s like a movie.

For some reason, the aunt thinks this as the door comes down — the same door through which hundreds of victims have passed the last few years.

In their uniforms, with shielded masks over their faces, the men make their way to the kitchen. The aunt instinctively raises her hands in surrender. To whom she’s surrendering she doesn’t know.

This is a raid.

•••

Upstairs, men, women and children sleep piled on the floor. So many bodies that arms and legs overlap. Some people sit up as they sleep, just so more bodies can fit latticed across a dirty carpet.

A total of 60 immigrants are in the house. All controlled by the traffickers.

The niece is getting up as she hears the commotion downstairs.

La migra, she thinks. Immigration.

But at this point, eight months pregnant, she doesn’t care.

Just get us out of here.

After 10 months in this house, she doesn’t care if she’s sent back to Central America. She just wants to be free again. Anywhere.

Amid the tumult, a Spanish-speaking man walks through the house trying to calm everyone.

Don’t worry, relax, he tells them in Spanish. What we are doing is to help you guys out.

For many of the immigrants, this next part — where federal agents question them and sift traffickers from possible victims — is almost as scary as what they’ve already gone through.

Traffickers warned them about this day. Their words still resonate:

If you ever speak, we’ll catch you.

We know your family, we know where they live, they will pay the consequences.

They will send you back. We know people at immigration.

So many of them stay silent. Can they trust these uniformed agents? These men with guns telling them what to do? In their home countries, police are often part of the corruption.

Scared and confused, they can’t know that the raid is part of a three-year human smuggling investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Authorities will soon have three of the traffickers under arrest.

•••

The aunt? No problem, she’s ready to talk. She’s already given up so much, what more could she lose?

But the decision is not so easy for the niece, her story harder to tell.

The rape. The shame. She still hasn’t told her aunt about these things. And she’s thinking about the uncertain future she and her baby face. She just needs to think.

Her aunt is back in the kitchen, restless.

I’m hungry, she tells agents.

And there, in the same place where she cooked and cleaned for others, followed orders from men who stank and drank and did drugs, she serves herself breakfast.

First a glass of milk.

And then, without even thinking, she grabs the pan dulce, the sugary Mexican sweet bread that has been reserved for the traffickers.

On this morning, she takes a bite.

Because she can. Because, for the moment, she’s free.


http://www.kansascity.com/975/story/1633871.html

Hostage House, Part 3: Family link offers solace — and peril - KansasCity.com

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

Don’t act like you know me. Please!

The middle-aged woman from Central America, who has been held hostage in a Southern California drop house for the last two years and eight months, is desperately trying to signal her niece.

Shhhhh, she mouths.

No one can know they’re related. It will make life hell. If they find out, these kidnappers with guns, they may keep the aunt longer or the niece indefinitely. They may hurt or kill one of them. Already, the men have told the older woman she knows too much.

The niece doesn’t understand at first — why are you making funny faces? — but she trusts her aunt. On this morning, with a new load of “chickens” roaming through the house, the women are convincingly unattached.

Later, the niece will be startled by what her aunt tells her in stolen moments away from the men. About the extra fees. About the lack of freedom. About the abuse.

Up until today, the aunt had a clear conscience and a clear path out of this place. Work hard, cooking and cleaning, and pay off her debt to the traffickers $50 a week. But with only four months and $800 to go, her pretty, 26-year-old niece walked through the door and changed everything.

One day soon, the men will learn their secret, and it will spin their lives in directions they never imagined.

For now, the aunt worries.

What will happen to us?

•••

The young woman didn’t come to the United States for herself. She came for her family.

In Central America, she thought life was pretty good. Her parents were poor but they had enough for food, clothing and to send her and her brothers to school.

They were all together, happy. And that was enough.

Then her father got sick. The doctors said he had the beginnings of prostate cancer. A school bus driver, he could no longer sit for long periods. He started missing work.

I have to help, she said to herself. Help provide for my family.

But jobs in Central America couldn’t pay enough.

So the young woman, who had studied accounting at the local university for two years, planned her trip north. She used the same coyote her aunt did a couple of years before, unaware of what happened to her on the other side.

The first time she tried to cross into the United States, she got caught. And the second time. And a third. But during each trip through the Mexican desert, she thought of her parents. Of the help they needed.

She tried again and again and again.

On her seventh attempt, she made it.

She had no idea, though, that her aunt would be waiting for her in this house full of immigrants. Back home, they all figured she had reached America and taken that good job in Boston.

•••

The niece is standing in a bedroom just like her aunt years before. There are guns in the room. Not surprisingly, she too was part of a “special trip” and more money is now required.

This time, it’s $2,500.

She can’t pay. Neither can her male friend in America who has already made a down payment for her.

She is young and attractive, the kind of woman these traffickers like to keep around the house. She makes the same deal as her aunt. She will work it off over time cooking and cleaning.

As the weeks pass, the women whisper comforting thoughts to each other in private. They talk about family and life back in Central America. Was it really so bad? They have questions without answers, and no one really to ask.

And things are about to take a dramatic turn.

Two months after she arrives, the niece gets pregnant. She tells her aunt but leaves out one dark secret.

She has been raped by one of the traffickers and continues to be assaulted. The baby is his.

By this time, it’s becoming clear to the men that these women know each other. They share an obvious bond the others don’t. They’re both from the same town in Central America. And they’re always close.

This new wrinkle worries the niece.

If her aunt knows she was raped, the men may think they need to kill her.

•••

The father of the niece’s unborn child is determined. He wants to get rid of the baby. He threatens her often and this, more than anything they’ve seen in the house, terrorizes the women.

At one point, he tries to push the niece down the stairs of the two-story house. In the struggle, her aunt jumps in to protect her. She is viciously shocked on the back with a stun gun, but it is enough of a distraction to stop the attacker.

For the women, the baby is their whole world — innocent, a symbol of hope for the future.

But the man and his fellow traffickers have other plans. If they can’t abort the child in her belly, then they’ll murder both of them before the baby is born. They’ll cut them up in pieces and dump them in the trash that’s picked up every Tuesday.

No one will ever know you’re dead, they say.

The clock is ticking.

Already, the niece is in her third trimester. And the women have no idea if they’ll ever see this baby.

http://www.kansascity.com/922/story/1630987.html