Smuggled, Held, Deported

NOGALES, Mexico – Enriqueta was wearing a faded black T-shirt with Playboy bunny logos printed all over it. Her hair was chopped short and her eyes were low. She never smiled, but neither did anyone else in the room.

It was the back room of a bus depot in the border town of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Enriqueta was living there with five or six other people. She’d been working nearly a month to save money for bus fare home — a thousand miles away in Mexico City.

The room stank of unwashed sheets and body odor.

In one corner a man warmed up food in a microwave; another man lay on his back on the beat-up couch, his hands folded under his head, watching advertisements on an old television. His shoes sat on the floor next to the couch.

On the floor lay old mattresses covered with a patchwork of tattered blankets. A woman sat up from one of the beds and spent a minute or two doubled over, putting on her shoes.

Enriqueta’s story didn’t sound very different from the others at first. But as she told it a man stood behind her, his back against the wall. He never took his eyes off of her. Enriqueta wore a cautious expression and leaned close to a woman sitting next to her.

She had decided to immigrate to the United States because she was 47 years old with five children at home in Mexico City. Her job couldn’t pay the bills.

“In Mexico, they pay very little. Everything is expensive; the money doesn’t cover it,” she said in Spanish.

So she made a deal with a coyote — $500 up front to smuggle her across the border, another $500 when they made it into the United States.

Her group started near Sonoita, Sonora and walked for five days through the desert. Enriqueta was the only woman in a group with 12 men. They treated her well, she said. But during the journey her feet were pierced multiple times by cactus spines and became swollen.

“I was very worried because I thought they would leave me behind,” she said.

But Enriqueta made it. Her group was eventually picked up at an arranged spot and taken to a house somewhere in Phoenix.

“The coyote came, got money, and they left us at the house,” she said.

Enriqueta knew she couldn’t leave the house, and she wouldn’t have tried. She still owed the coyotes $500, which “a friend” was going to pay, she said. She had no family in the United States.

“From there we were going to be taken somewhere else,” she said. She didn’t know where.

The house was a brief respite from the journey through the desert. The man watching them there gave her something to eat. He let her take a shower. Then, two hours after the group’s arrival, people were pounding on the door – police, Enriqueta said.

They yelled for all of the immigrants to come out of the house. When they obeyed, “They threw us on the ground,” Enriqueta said.

The police turned Enriqueta and the men over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She was shuffled through the deportation system.

The police told the group they had violated American law, she said.

Immigration officials handcuffed, booked, fingerprinted and detained her overnight before driving her to the border in a bus.

Enriqueta ended up at the bus station. She worked in the grape vineyards outside of town to try to make enough money for the bus ticket home. The men with her at the bus station watched her closely.

In the month since she’d been dropped off at the border, she’d saved 500 pesos, but she needed 700 to pay the fare. She was still $16 short.

As Enriqueta was interviewed by three American reporters, a man stood close by with an stern look on his face, watching her.
Enriqueta looked nervous. Her eyes filled with tears when the reporters asked her in Spanish, “Would you feel more comfortable talking with just women?”

There was nowhere to go to talk alone, she said.

There was a shelter a few blocks away that she could go to, the reporters told her through a translator. She would be safe there; she would be only with women there. In his response, the translator avoided telling her the name of the shelter or where it was.

Outside, after the translator had left with his payment a man approached the reporters. Taking Enriqueta out of that bus depot, he said, would be taking money away from the people who ran it – a woman with dead eyes stationed at the front desk, and a sharply-dressed young man who moved away from the cameras as they approached.

Was Enriqueta paying rent? Was she working off a debt? Was she being held against her will?

The answer was not clear.

THE GOODS

Enriqueta’s story is one of tens of thousands of women who risk more than their lives every year crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. For women, the border is more than deadly desert terrain. It’s a battleground and a marketplace – and women are often the goods.

They are the most vulnerable group of people traveling through the desert today: the property of coyotes – human smugglers for hire – and the victims of bajadores – gangs of bandits who roam the desert smuggling corridors kidnapping, robbing and assaulting groups of migrants and their guides as they travel north in the night.

Enriqueta was one of the lucky ones who avoided physical abuse, sexual assault and death. But she did not think so.

“I’m very sad,” she said, sitting in the doorway of the room in the bus depot. “All of the effort was for nothing. It was all to help my kids.”

“I wouldn’t ever try it again.”

If the police had not come so quickly, Enriqueta would have been taken to another underground, unknown location. She was not free to leave.

Had she not come up with another $500 to pay off her smuggling debt, they could have found a way to make her pay – with her hands or with her body. It happens to tens of thousands of immigrants every year.

That’s when a bad situation becomes worse; that’s when a routine smuggling operation becomes human trafficking.

Hundreds of the most desperate people in Mexico and Central America go into debt every day to pay a well-organized network of smugglers to lead them through deadly desert terrain, pack them into the back of old trucks and drop them off north of the border.

Some of them make it. The U.S. Border Patrol apprehends another 600 a day. And unknown numbers remain under control of traffickers.

They are often held and forced to work to pay of a debt that keeps growing.

They work all around us, all the time, as anything – seamstresses, prostitutes, farmworkers, dishwashers, cooks. But they are actually the victims of the one of the most widespread, elusive crimes in the world.

THE ‘SEAMY UNDERBELLY’

In an underground world of labor, sex, money and exploitation, victims of human trafficking are nearly impossible to identify, mainly because they rarely realize that they are victims.

“If somebody is robbed or raped, you know that that’s a crime,” says Dolores Laparte-Litton, a counselor who works as the victim services supervisor for the police department in Austin, Texas. “But if they don’t know that what’s happening to them is a crime, they’re not going to call.”

Sgt. Clay Sutherlin, a 22-year veteran of the Phoenix Police Department and a member of the department’s vice unit, says his team often finds victims of trafficking working as prostitutes.

“There are some girls that we can’t even determine their ages,” Sutherlin said.

“We have this girl in custody and she appears to be a juvenile, but she’s in the country illegally,” he said. “There’s absolutely no records on the girl whatsoever.”

Sutherlin has been working on the vice unit for the last five years – investigating and infiltrating brothels and prostitution rings in Phoenix during a shift that runs from 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. He says the women and girls will not admit to being victims of trafficking.

“It’s mainly the threat of violence, of what will happen to them if they speak,” he said.

Traffickers also threaten victims’ families in their home countries. Victims know that “the ability to get other family members out of Mexico ends if they – if they’re going to turn on their traffickers,” he said.

Sutherlin says the police department promises the victims protection if they will talk.

“[W]e’ll take care of them, we’ll protect them, we’ll house them, we’ll feed them, we’ll find them jobs,” he said, incredulous. “They’re still reluctant.”

According to Rachel Braver, a paralegal at North Carolina Legal Aid who works with victims of human trafficking, victims often see their plight as normal.

“Some of these people think that this is just what they have to go through in order to get a better life,” Braver said. “That this is just kind of one of the hurdles that they have to get over – just like potentially running through the desert in the middle of the night.”

But most victims of human trafficking never even have a conversation with a law enforcement official about their situation.

Human trafficking is a hidden crime worldwide. According to the U.S. Department of State’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report, there are approximately 12.3 million people forced into labor or prostitution around the world at any given time. Last year, there were just 4,166 successful prosecutions of human traffickers internationally.

In the United States, which rated itself among the top countries in the annual report, the numbers aren’t much more encouraging.

Since 2004, the Department of State has estimated that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States every year. That’s just a guess. In reality, there is no way of tracking how many people fall victim to well-organized operations that feed countless numbers of people into brothels, lettuce fields, restaurants, meat packing plants or clothing factories every day.

The American Bar Association’s Trafficking Assessment Tool, part of its Rule of Law Initiative, estimates that there are 20,000 to 500,000 victims of human trafficking in Mexico at any given time. The Initiative was designed to analyze international anti-human trafficking laws and assist governments in combating the widespread crime. How many of those tens — or hundreds — of thousands of victims end up in the United States is anyone’s guess.

“We know the number of victims out there is very large,” said Bradley Myles, the executive director of the Polaris Project in Washington, D.C., one of the largest anti-trafficking organizations in the country. He is waiting for researchers at Northeastern University and the Department of State to come up with a more comprehensive count of victims being brought into the United States.

The Polaris Project runs the country’s only centralized human trafficking hotline, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. Myles said that it has received more than 20,000 calls on that hotline since December 2007.

The majority of the U.S. population wouldn’t know to call in about such a crime. Myles says there is “a much, much larger victim population out there” than what is reported.

Last year, the U.S. Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit, a unit of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, earned 47 convictions in 43 human trafficking cases, according to the Trafficking in Persons report. The same year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened 566 human trafficking investigations. As a result, the agency arrested 388 people and convicted 165 of them.

In 2001 the Trafficking Victims Protection Act became federal law. It was designed to aid victims of trafficking and give prosecutors a better chance of making cases against trafficking suspects. Between 2001 and 2005, federal prosecutors identified a total of 555 trafficking suspects, according to the Department of Justice. Just 75 of the suspects were convicted during the same time period.

But, in Arizona, where tensions on both sides of the immigration debate are reaching an all-time high, it’s hard to find a cross-border trafficking case. Since 2002 there have been cases opened against 18 individuals, 13 of whom were charged with human trafficking. All of those cases were domestic, dealing mainly with domestic child sex trafficking over state lines and involuntary servitude cases.

“I like to say human trafficking equals slavery whereas human smuggling equals movement,” said Josh Parecki, assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona. “There could be no movement and somebody could be trafficked.”

Katie Resendiz of ALERT, the Arizona League to End Regional Trafficking, says human trafficking has everything to do with forced labor. A victim of the crime must have been forced or coerced into working, she said.

But as members of the Greater Phoenix Area Human Trafficking Task Force, both Resendiz and Parecki recognize that the first hurdle in prosecuting human trafficking cases in Arizona is recognizing them at all.

“From the line levels of the Phoenix Police Department to the most sophisticated FBI agents, there’s difficulty in detecting this kind of seamy underbelly that exists here in the United States and in the state of Arizona,” Parecki said.

And in the seamy underbelly of the borderlands, exploitation of the powerless only multiplies. And the women are the most vulnerable to it.

EASY TARGETS

Jennifer Long has been working with immigrant women and men as the executive director of a community shelter called Casa Marianella in a shade-filled neighborhood in Austin, Texas for more than 10 years. Immigrants from around the world come to Casa Marianella for a few weeks at a time, including many who have recently been released from the nearby detention center, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, TX.

She has watched the women come and go for a decade, and she has seen a pattern of abuse rule their lives.

“They were battered in their homes, then they go on this journey where they probably get assaulted again. God only knows what happens to them in detention,” she said. “So they’re already really traumatized by the time we see them.”

“And they’re easy targets,” she added.

As a counselor with the Austin Police Department, Laparte-Litton often compares human trafficking to domestic violence, another crime that is difficult to detect but much more widely understood.

She said domestic violence is a widely understood issue in Texas.

“[W]e don’t blame the victim and we help the victim and we understand why the victim doesn’t leave,” she said. Victims of domestic violence are caught in what Laparte-Litton called a love-hate relationship with abusers. To some degree the victims depend on the abusers. “It’s very similar with the human trafficker,” she said.

“These people are threatened, their families are threatened,” she said. “They are here without papers, without their support system, not knowing the language, not knowing anything.”

“There’s no way out.”

It was only 10 years ago that U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., made human trafficking a federal crime in the United States. In 2000, he sponsored the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The law states that victims of trafficking will be protected and provided for even if the victim entered the country illegally.

The act created two kinds of visas for victims of certain crimes on U.S. soil and, more specifically, victims of human trafficking. Both visas can become paths to citizenship for immigrants – the answer to the prayers of innumerable immigrant women who have been victimized at every step in their search for a better life.

But, in the state that’s lighting the fire under the nation’s immigration debate, the visas are not being used to shield victims because no victims are being found.

A SIMPLE CHOICE

In the last eight years, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona has prosecuted no international human trafficking cases.

“We just haven’t had a lot of investigations that have yielded prosecutions here in the district with relation to international victims,” Parecki said.

He joined Phoenix’s anti-trafficking task force in December of last year. Parecki recognizes that there are many barriers to break down before that number of prosecutions will get any higher, from outreach and education about the most basic definition of human trafficking to providing enough resources to fight the crime.

But, with people constangly being smuggled into and out of Phoenix, just detecting victims is the greatest challenge.

“Phoenix has long been what’s called a hub city,” Parecki explained. It’s rarely the final destination for traffickers whose pollos — their human cargo — might end up working at a brothel, in a factory or on a farm somewhere on the other side of the country.

“So at the point that they’re here in Phoenix, it’s hard for us to conclude that, ultimately, they’re going to be trafficked,” Parecki said.

Those immigrants likely don’t know, as they are being smuggled across the border through Arizona, that the house they cannot leave in Phoenix is just a stop on the way to that brothel or factory or farm. But for those about to be forced into what some call modern-day slavery, waiting for the crime to happen to attempt in order to detect it is not enough.

Parecki, for one, is hoping to cut it off at the source, using a combination of international cooperation and training for those who patrol the streets every day.

Local law enforcement – police officers, sheriff’s deputies, Department of Public Safety officers – are the most likely to be the first and, often, only officials to come into contact with victims of human trafficking, until they end up in the custody of ICE.

“Law enforcement can play a huge role,” said Braver, the paralegal with North Carolina Legal Aid and a member of the state’s human trafficking task force. “We think it’s really important that they get trained.”

LOCAL POLICE AND BORDER PATROL
ON THE FRONT LINES

In Austin, Texas, Laparte-Litton heads a staff of 28 counselors on the city’s payroll who work with victims of violent crimes alongside Austin police officers.

A few years ago, the department realized that it needed cooperation from victims who were immigrants “because our cases were going nowhere,” she said.

Now, it’s the officers on the streets in Austin who are charged with recognizing the victims and perpetrators of a crime this hidden.

“We usually train our officers for them to recognize these things because we, as counselors, are not going to be first responders to a scene,” said Laparte-Litton.

That kind of front-line response is exactly what Parecki is aiming for in Arizona. Citing an example in Florida where a local officer on routine patrol saw the signs and called in the experts, Parecki said, “I want our DPS officers to be able to say ‘This smells a little funny.’”

But nowhere in the country are local law enforcement agencies required to receive training on how to recognize the signs of human trafficking. It is just not a priority.

“The truth of the matter is the people I really want to know about it probably don’t,” Parecki admitted.

In one state, at least, all of that is about to change.

Jennifer Fisher has been a law enforcement officer in North Carolina for 13 years, She spent the last year and a half preparing a comprehensive curriculum on human trafficking for the state’s law enforcement officers as the in-service Coordinator of the North Carolina Justice Academy, a branch of the state Attorney General’s Office.

Starting next year, it will be mandatory for every new recruit to the state’s 600 local law enforcement agencies to complete that course.

Beginning at the same time, all current officers will have the option of completing Fisher’s human trafficking course for their mandatory annual in-service to maintain their certifications. Fisher’s program will go a long way in training North Carolina’s 30,000 sworn law enforcement officers.

Fisher has offered voluntary courses on the topic since 2008, “though attendance has been fairly low,” she noted.

On the federal level, half of ICE’s regional offices around the country have hired victim specialists like Laparte-Litton — 13 specialists to augment the work of 250 “collateral duty” Victim Assistance Coordinators who work with victims. Collateral duty means that working with victims is their secondary job. That adds up to 263 full or part-time victim specialists in an agency of nearly 19,000 employees.

The agency has conducted some kind of face-to-face outreach to over 20,000 non-government organizations and law enforcement partners worldwide, but only a little more than 6,000 law enforcement agents have been trained on the issue, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

For many immigration lawyers around Arizona, it comes down to a simple choice for local law enforcement: to identify victims or deport illegal immigrants.

“When law enforcement comes into contact with those people, I guess they have only a couple of choices: They can choose to try to help use the person and get them to help in an investigation to prosecute the human smuggling network,” said Regina Jeffries, who has been an immigration attorney in Phoenix for the last five years. “Or they can just turn them over to ICE.”

In North Carolina, the situation isn’t much different, but at least one woman in a position of power is working to change all of that. As it stands, Fisher recognizes that the first priority of most law enforcement officers in her state is likely deportation, but she says it’s “because they don’t understand what human trafficking is.”

“I’m hoping that through the education and training that will change and become more of a victim-centered response,” she said.

Fisher is a trailblazer in the area. Few, if any other, states require training on a crime that is common but often undetected.

Getting the word out about human trafficking means saving a life to Fisher. She has been to Kosovo to work against the crime, “So no place is too far,” she said.

‘PEOPLE ARE SCARED NOW’

In Arizona, the debate over immigration has reached a fever-pitch.

“Things have become much more radical and polemicized,” according to Judy Flanagan, who has been an immigration attorney in Phoenix for more than a decade. “People are scared now.”

And, in the heart of that volatile environment, she thinks victims of crimes like human trafficking will become even more lost in the immigration war.

“There’s going to be more refusals to really cooperate and help victims of crime,” Flanagan said. “I think it’s certainly going to lead to more deportations, more people in removal proceedings.”

“I think, instead of thinking of somebody ‘Oh, this is a victim of a crime?’ it’s ‘Do you have papers?’ she said.

Now, she said, “the focus is on deportation.”

“I’m not saying police shouldn’t check the status of someone who’s committed a double homicide,” Jeffries said. “They shouldn’t be asking questions about victims.”

Building a partnership with the community is written on the wall of the Tucson Police Department in the agency’s mission statement. To public information officer Lt. Fabien Pacheco, enforcing federal immigration laws in his city would counter that most fundamental duty.

“We’ve spent many, many years working out that relationship with the Hispanic community,” he said. “We’ve gotten to the point where they trust us to be able to report crimes.”

Lt. Bob Wilson, 23-year veteran of the police department, agrees.

“If they don’t call us, unless we have the patrol officers noticing something out there that’s very obvious in their face all the time, we won’t know about it until it’s too late,” Wilson said. He said community trust and involvement is increasingly important as the department continues to face budget cuts and a shrinking staff.

“If crime is allowed to foster and nobody does anything about it, it will just grow and grow until there’s decay in the neighborhood,” Wilson said.

IDENTIFIED, FINGERPRINTED,
HANDCUFFED AND DETAINED

For many criminals, the border is a market and women are merchandise. They are the bought and sold by coyotes, smugglers, traffickers. And if they are intercepted by law enforcement or immigration officials their troubles don’t end.

On any given day, more than 2,700 women are held in immigration detention centers in the United States. Some of them are assuredly victims of trafficking, who, according to by federal law, should be protected. But the victims are rarely identified.

The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report recommended that action be taken to identify crime victims within detention centers. The State Department also ranks countries on their ability to combat crime and protect victims. One of the standards for the rankings is whether victims are unnecessarily detained.

But some researchers and victim’s advocates have questioned the U.S. government’s resolve in protecting victims. In April 2010, Meghan Rhoad and Alison Parker of Human Rights Watch in New York wrote a letter to the State Department in which they identified eight victims of human trafficking who had been held in U.S. immigration detention centers.

“It is our understanding that it is the position of the United States government that victims of trafficking are rarely, if ever, held in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities,” wrote Rhoad and Parker. “However, in the course of research for numerous reports on immigration enforcement activities, Human Rights Watch has been confronted with cases in which trafficking victims have in fact been detained, sometimes at great length.”

Nina Rabin, director of Border Research for the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona says detention centers are not effective at helping victims.

“I think that it’s probably more prevalent than anybody could report… because … it’s so difficult to communicate with people once they’re in detention,” Rabin said.

“There’s just no real mechanisms for a safe place for them to talk about what’s happening to them,” Rabin said. Her report on women in immigration detention facilities in Arizona, “Unseen Prisoners,” brought national attention last to the lack of basic health care in the ICE facilities.

“The system gives very little in the way of opportunities for them to voice it because, especially if they’re in expedited removal, it’s all going to happen really fast,” she said.

“It’s really likely that they’re going to go through the system without any chance to really talk to anyone.”

Many detainees will never go before an immigration judge, she said. And most will not ask for help even from the resources that are available in the detention and deportation process. “It’s not just going to be as a matter of course you get psychiatric or psychological support,” said Rabin, who talked to dozens of women being held in Arizona’s three detention centers for her report.

“A lot of women, I think, whether they’re trafficking victims or [domestic violence] survivors or whatever, I think they’re really unlikely to seek that kind of help out,” Rabin said.

But, from Border Patrol and ICE agents to local law enforcement officers statewide, it seems as if it’s no one’s job to recognize victims as they’re shuffled through the immigration pipeline in Arizona.

According to Border Patrol agent David Jimarez, a public information officer in the Tucson Sector, investigating crimes that may be reported by illegal immigrants in the desert is not their responsibility. “That would have to be local law enforcement,” he said. “There’s no reason for us to gauge that, because we don’t investigate. We gauge the flow of the people, and that’s what we do.”

“How much manpower does it take to do an investigation?” he asked. “You see what I’m saying?”

“It just got overwhelming,” he said.

The Tucson Sector is the busiest in the country. It covers 262 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border and 90,000 square miles of the desert terrain. There are more than 3,000 agents in the sector, Jimarez said, and, in fiscal year 2009, agents apprehended more than 240,000 people.

And for the size of the area there is a relatively small number of local law enforcement officers on patrol. They can’t begin to investigate all of the crimes that happen in the region. “We are, oftentimes, the only law enforcement out in the desert,” Jimarez said.

According to Rabin, neither local nor federal law enforcement are focused on human trafficking.

“I don’t think there’s somebody whose job description it is to do that right now, but I think it should be built into the system,” Rabin said.

Rabin says victims should be brought before judges who can “weigh whether it really made sense to detain somebody that’s dealing with that kind of trauma.”

But Rabin says it’s unlikely that a victim in the immigration detention system will come forward to a law enforcement official of any kind – federal or local.

“I think, ideally, you would have someone removed from the system that they could turn to,” she said.

Even then – and even if a woman got the rare chance to tell her story to an official along the way – it doesn’t mean she’ll be released from ICE custody. Once someone is detained, he or she is isolated from the outside world.

“Part of it is that there isn’t enough notification,” Rabin said, “but the other part is even when there is notification, they often don’t release people.

On the whole, there is a system of well-meaning laws, watchful local officers, investigating federal agents, prosecuting attorneys and altruistic lawyers in place to combat human trafficking in America. There is a system in place.

But the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable place are slipping through the cracks.