A new bid to halt toll of human trafficking
By Claire Cooper and Christina Jewett -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 12:01 am PDT Saturday, May 20, 2006


Florencia Molina's sewing teacher in Puebla, Mexico, unwittingly wrote Molina and herself one-way tickets into slavery.
Good jobs, food and housing awaited them in the United States, the teacher said. Molina had three days to decide.

Both women learned after arriving in Los Angeles that the jobs were sewing dresses for 17 hours a day with three 10-minute breaks for beans and rice. The pay varied: one week $117, another $167. The factory was their home. They knew no one, spoke no English.

After 40 days, they escaped.

"I asked to go to church. The first time (the boss) said 'No.' I didn't give up," Molina recalls.

She was relatively lucky among the victims of human trafficking, a crime that's appearing regularly on law enforcement's radar screen since the Bush administration made it a human rights priority. Tricked or forced to come to the United States, victims may toil for years in city sweatshops, brothels or restaurants, or in private homes.

Now, state and federal officials are stepping up efforts to find victims and prosecute traffickers.

McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney in Sacramento, says federal authorities are urging local police and prosecutors to look at crimes such as prostitution from a trafficking perspective.

They also are reaching out to private organizations such as the Salvation Army, Catholic charities and domestic violence shelters "because they're the ones who are seeing it directly," Scott says.

Law enforcement has focused mainly on trafficking of women for prostitution, as in the Sacramento case of Hoa Tat, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to federal charges of importing, transporting and harboring Malaysian women. He kept them in three brothels near Florin and Mack roads and Stockton Boulevard. He received an 18-month sentence after cooperating with authorities.

Advocates surmise that large numbers of victims have been working undetected on farms throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.

Agriculture's need for cheap labor and immigrants' difficulty in entering the country legally are "setting the stage for people to be trafficked in illegally and exploited," says Ivy Lee, staff attorney at Asian Pacific Islander Outreach Program in San Francisco.

The only agricultural case known in California involved hundreds of Mexican asparagus harvesters, who worked for next to nothing at Victoria Island Farms near Stockton in 2000. Armed guards patrolled their living quarters. The harvesters won a civil suit for unpaid wages against the farms and JB Farm Labor Contractor.

Lee calls the asparagus workers' case "the tip of the iceberg."

With a new state law providing for police training in rural areas to recognize and deal with trafficking, more cases against valley traffickers are likely to develop in the next year, she says.

Recent federal legislation -- providing grants to prosecutors for trafficking cases and incentives to victims to help bring traffickers to justice -- also is expected to boost the number of state cases.

The federal laws permit the Department of Homeland Security to issue non-immigrant visas to cooperative trafficking victims, and the Department of Health and Human Services to certify them for benefits similar to those available to refugees.

The U.S. Department of Justice reported 60 federal cases filed against traffickers and 118 defendants convicted between 2001 and 2004.

Federal anti-trafficking grants in California have gone to Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, where most of the crimes have come to light.

In Sacramento, federal officials have been working with the District Attorney's Office to help police and private organizations identify trafficking victims and deal with them effectively.

Sacramento FBI Supervising Special Agent George Fong says Hoa Tat's case illustrates the typical victim's predicament: Women recruited to work in brothels generally are promised freedom after they work off expenses, but charges for rent, food, makeup and condoms keep them in debt to their captors.

Tat collected his victims' earnings and paid a percentage to a Malaysian smuggler.

For victims, who usually lack English and work skills, "once they're here in the business, it's hard to get out," Fong says.

In San Francisco a massive federal prosecution is heading slowly toward trial against the operators of 50 brothels and underlings who transported Korean women from airports to massage parlors.

Some victim advocates say the federal government has overemphasized sex trafficking at the expense of victims of other forms of forced labor.

A 2005 report by the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, on forced labor in the state, based on newspaper reports, interviews and surveys of social service providers, found prostitution or child sexual abuse to be involved in just under half of 57 reported cases.

Trafficking occurs in the darkest of shadows, however, and even the experts can merely guess at the extent of it. Various estimates put the number of trafficking victims in the United States at between 10,000 and 17,500.

In March, a California task force, created under new legislation, began mapping the state's human trafficking problem and identifying service gaps.

Molina, now a security guard and trafficking victims' advocate, has been nominated for a seat on the task force.

Four years ago, standing on a corner outside the sweatshop on her way to church, she realized she was free. She phoned a sweatshop co-worker, who took her in.

From there she moved to San Diego. Federal agents who had been investigating the shop soon picked her up.

They took her to immigration in Los Angeles, where she met a lawyer from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

Molina lived with that organization's director for more than a month. Then she was aided by the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, which helped her get a visa.

Today, she instructs police organizations all over the country and also talks to civilian groups about trafficking.

She tells her audiences this: Be alert to the people in your workplace who seem to be there all the time.

Talk to them if you can. See whether they're afraid. Contact nonprofits that can help them.