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DOJ Launches New Initiative To Fight Human Trafficking
The Administration Creates a New Prosecuting Unit in the Civil Rights Division
By Martin King, NCPC Staff
It’s a heart-rending story that occurs again and again. Someone, usually a young woman, is brought into the country and forced into degrading labor, most often as a prostitute but perhaps also as a domestic servant or farm worker. She is treated cruelly, often isolated and threatened with severe punishment, including physical harm, if she tries to leave or get help. She leads her life in terror.
How serious is the problem? In terms of numbers, there is broad disagreement. In 1999, a State Department official put the number of human trafficking victims in the United States at 50,000, and, the next year, Congress passed an anti-trafficking and slavery law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000. In 2004, the CIA came up with a new number of victims: 14,500 to 17,500 a year. And even that number may be too high, according to a report in The Washington Post. However fluid the numbers may be, proponents of keeping up the pressure on the traffickers agree on a strong bipartisan basis that each victim rescued makes the effort worth it.
The
Bush administration has made the fight again human trafficking one of
the pillars of its foreign policy and early last summer tightened
sanctions against the dictatorship in Myanmar (formerly Burma) partly
because of rampant human slavery in that country. Democratic Sen.
Hillary Clinton has worked actively in Congress on the problem, having
earlier championed the issue as first lady. It’s one of the only issues
that virtually everyone in Washington agrees on. Few would doubt former
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ characterization of it as “an
enormous evil.” And those in both the Bush administration and Congress
are quick to say that if the United States is to criticize human
slavery and trafficking in other countries, we need to root it out here
at home as well.
In January 2007, the Justice Department created a Human Trafficking Prosecution (HTP) Unit within the Criminal Section of the department’s Civil Rights Division. The unit is designed to develop new strategies to fight modern-day slavery by focusing the division’s human trafficking expertise to further increase human trafficking investigations and prosecutions. The HTP Unit works to enhance the Justice Department’s investigation and prosecution of significant human trafficking and slavery cases, such as multi-jurisdictional cases and those involving financial crimes. The unit also provides training, technical assistance, and outreach to federal, state, and local law enforcement and nonprofit organizations involved in different aspects of the human trafficking program.
So far, the Justice Department has had increasing success in its anti-trafficking efforts. In FY2006, the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney’s Offices initiated 168 investigations, charged 111 defendants in 32 cases, and obtained 98 convictions involving human tracking. Since FY2001, 276 of the 386 defendants prosecuted by the Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney’s Offices in human trafficking-related offenses have been charged with or pleaded guilty to violating statutes under the TVPA. From FY2001 to FY2006, the Civil Rights Division opened 639 new investigations, almost four times the number opened in the previous six years.
But these figures don’t tell the whole story. The federal heat has probably kept some of the trafficking in check, and the number of victims saved far outnumbers the number of convictions.
In one example cited by the Justice Department, the owner of a garment factory in American Samoa was sentenced to 40 years in prison for holding more than 200 people in forced servitude. The victims were recruited from China and Vietnam and each paid $5,000 to $8,000 to work in the factory. Once there, they were subject to brutal conditions, including food deprivation and severe, routine beatings that cost one woman an eye.
In another case, two brothers were sentenced to 50 years in prison and an associate to 25 years for running a human trafficking ring that brought young girls from Mexico to work as prostitutes in New York City. Last February, the mother of the two brothers and 14 associates were extradited to the United States for trial.
Sometimes, human slavery can go on right before our eyes, and we may not realize it. The Justice Department points to the example of a married couple in Milwaukee, WI, who forced a woman to work as a domestic servant and illegally imprisoned her for 19 years in their home after bringing her from the Philippines when she was a teen. The couple, both medical doctors, were convicted of using threats of serious harm and physical restraint against their victim, who testified that she was forbidden to go outside and told that she would be arrested, imprisoned, and deported if she was discovered.
Thanks to the Justice Department, each of the doctors got four years.
