People
were shocked when federal prosecutors charged the owners of a motel in
Oacoma, S.D., a town of fewer than 500, with keeping Philippine women in
virtual slavery, forcing them to work 20-hour days under the threat of
violence and taking back their paychecks after they had been endorsed to
deposit in their own accounts.

Prosecutors said the enslaved
women performed cleaning and front-desk duties at the motel and were
expected to work second jobs at fast-food restaurants. Every aspect of
their lives, according to records in the 2007 case, was controlled,
including what they ate, where they lived, what they wore and to whom
they spoke.

Human traffickers had crept unnoticed into the small
Lyman County community, located on the west bank of the Missouri River
80 miles southeast of Pierre, the state’s capital. But the townsfolk
soon learned that Interstate 90, which roars right by Oacoma, is part of
the “Midwest Pipeline,” the superhighway used to deliver trafficking
victims to cities across the country.

In November, federal
prosecutors struck again in South Dakota, this time bringing
sex-trafficking charges against a couple in Tea, a city of 4,600 also
just off Interstate 90. They were convicted of using coercion and
threats to force underage girls, some as young as 15, into prostitution.

“It
was a shock to me to learn that people had been trafficked through
South Dakota,” said state Sen. Joni Cutler, a Sioux Falls Republican who
sponsored legislation in January making human trafficking a state
crime. She said South Dakotans like to think of the state as a place
“where everybody knows everybody or is related.”

“We don’t want a quiet, rural area like South Dakota to become a place where people are trafficked,” she said.

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed the Cutler bill into law on March 16.

Human
trafficking generates billions of dollars each year in illicit profits,
in the United States and globally, through the entrapment and
exploitation of millions of people, mostly women and children. The
growing illegal trade in human beings for sex or forced labor isn’t
limited to either rural outposts or the world’s largest cities.

Young
women have been forced into prostitution over the past year through
deception, fraud, coercion, threats and physical violence in Denton
County, Texas; rural Tennessee; St. Paul, Minn.; Norcross, Ga.; Memphis,
Tenn.; Fremont, Calif.; Harrisburg, Pa.; New York City; Los Angeles;
Honolulu; Woodbridge, Va.; Gaithersburg; Annapolis; and many other
cities.

Just last week, a 36-year-old Mexican national was
sentenced to 40 years in prison by a federal judge in Georgia on charges
that he tricked girls into leaving their families in Mexico, beat them
and forced them into more than 20 acts of prostitution a night in
Atlanta. The man had promised to get them jobs in restaurants. Five
co-defendants previously pleaded guilty in the case.

In Columbus,
Ohio, dozens of illegal immigrants from Russia, Estonia, Belarus and
Ukraine were forced to work as housekeepers and laundry workers after
their passports were seized. In Buford, Ga., Nigerian women were forced
to work as nannies and housekeepers after being threatened and
physically abused. In Falls Church, 20 Indonesian women were sold as
housekeepers after their passports were seized; some were sexually
assaulted and their families were threatened.

Tougher laws

Texas
state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, San Antonio Democrat, introduced
legislation this month to strengthen laws against human trafficking. She
said 25 percent of the people trafficked into the United States pass
through the state.

“We are trying to get at those who profit from
selling our children,” she said, adding that she became interested in
the issue in 2004 when two runaways from Oregon – a 16 year-old-boy and
his 14 year-old-sister – were forced into prostitution.

“Nobody wants to think there is human slavery in their neighborhood,” she said.

Attorney
General Eric H. Holder Jr. said nearly every country is affected by
human trafficking, either as a source for or destination of the many
victims. He told a human trafficking conference in Arlington last year
that the problem was “an affront to human dignity” and warned that in
the United States, “it is, unfortunately, growing.”

“Human
trafficking has become big business – generating billions of dollars
each year through the entrapment and exploitation of millions,” Mr.
Holder said. “The poorest and most vulnerable among us are being robbed
of basic rights to dignity, security and opportunity.”

Assistant
Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, who heads the Justice Department’s
Civil Rights Division, compared human trafficking to drug and gun
smuggling in that it frequently involves complex organized-crime
cartels. In October, during the 10th anniversary celebration of the
passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, he said, the number
of prosecuted cases has risen from four in 2001 to more than 50 last
year.

“We’re not just bringing more cases, we’re bringing cases of
unprecedented scope and impact, taking on international organized
criminal networks,” he said. “But this work isn’t about how many cases
we’ve charged or how well we work together; it’s about the human lives
restored to freedom and dignity.”

Nathan Wilson, creator of the
Project Meridian Foundation, which seeks to assist law enforcement in
identifying the traffickers and their victims, said the illegal trade in
human beings for sexual exploitation or forced labor has reached
epidemic proportions.

“Sex trafficking has become so widespread
that no country, no race, no religion, no class and no child is immune,”
he said, adding that 1.6 million children younger than 18 – native and
foreign born – have been caught in the sex trade in the United States.
But, he said, the actual number of victims is hard to quantify because
of the lengths to which traffickers go to keep their crimes hidden.

Billions in profits

The
Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Project, which advocates stronger
federal and state laws on human trafficking and provides help to
victims, has said traffickers generate billions of dollars in profits by
victimizing millions of people around the world and in the United
States. It has said human trafficking is one of the fastest-growing
criminal industries in the world.

With an estimated annual revenue
of $32 billion, law enforcement authorities, government agencies and
others have said human trafficking is tied with arms dealing as the
second-largest criminal industry in the world – behind only drug
smuggling.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the
lead agency for investigating and dismantling human-trafficking
organizations, has estimated that 800,000 people are trafficked into
commercial-sex trade and forced-labor situations throughout the world
every year.

ICE Deputy Assistant Director James C. Spero described
human trafficking as “a global problem … driven by profit.” He said
the agency opened 650 trafficking investigations during fiscal 2010, up
from 560 in 2009 and 430 in 2008, and he is still trying to determine
the scope of the trafficking problem.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” he said.

In
a 2010 report, the State Department also said human trafficking claimed
800,000 victims every year. Earlier reports estimated that 80 percent
of the victims were female and half of them were minors. The department
also said in the 2010 report that 17,500 people were thought to be
trafficked into the United States each year.

Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton has said some Americans are trapped by abusive
employers and others are held in sexual slavery and that the department
has sent “a clear message to all of our countrymen and women: Human
trafficking is not someone else’s problem.”

The report, for the
first time, ranked the United States as a “Tier 1” country, meaning it
fully complies with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, but also
identified it as a “source, transit and destination country” for human
traffickers.

Lucrative way

The complex
criminal nature of human trafficking as noted by Mr. Perez also has been
reported by the Congressional Research Service, which said last year
that in many parts of the world, “trafficking in money, weapons and
people is largely conducted by criminal gangs or mafia groups.” The
research service called human trafficking a “lucrative way” for
organized criminal groups to fund other illicit activities.

“In
Latin America, Mexican drug cartels are increasingly involved in the
trafficking of people as well as drugs,” the report said. The
Congressional Research Service also said the links between organized
crime and terrorism may be significant, noting that the language school
that provided some visas for the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers also is
reported to have provided visas for prostitutes of a human trafficking
ring.

A Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet said
that after drug dealing, human trafficking is tied with the illegal arms
industry as the world’s second-largest criminal industry and is the
fastest growing.

That rapid rise is worrisome to Mr. Wilson, who
said he is concerned that profits from human trafficking could be used
to fund terrorists. He said trafficking profits were used to fund
terrorists in Iraq and that some of the proceeds from businesses such as
prostitution “may be diverted toward supporting terrorist groups.”

Mr.
Spero said ICE had not found any evidence that terrorists were
benefiting from human trafficking, but acknowledged that any financial
crime has the potential to be exploited by terrorists.

The Justice
Department also has identified human trafficking as one of the threats
posed by international organized-crime networks. It said in a 2010
report that global crime cartels were involved in Asian massage qingdao parlors
in Massachusetts, Ukrainian criminal networks exploited janitorial
service workers in Pennsylvania, and an Uzbek organized-crime ring
exploited Philippine, Dominican Republic and Jamaican guest workers in
14 states.

The department said human traffickers know no
boundaries or borders. It said the crimes exploit men, women and
children, whether they be citizens, guest workers or illegal immigrants –
extracting profit from the toil of others in farm fields, factories,
strip clubs, suburban mansions, brothels and bars.

Major piece

William
Carroll, a former district director for the now-defunct U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service, said human trafficking is a
“major piece of operating income for the cartels and other organized
criminal organizations.” He said the cartels are attracted to its
lucrative nature and because it does not require a distribution system
like drugs.

Justice brought 52 human trafficking cases in fiscal
2010, its largest single-year total. It noted in its latest report that
human traffickers often prey on those who are poor, frequently
unemployed or underemployed, and who may lack access to social safety
nets.

“Victims are often lured by traffickers with false promises
of good jobs and better lives, and then forced to work under brutal and
inhumane conditions,” the department said, noting that Somali gangs
forced girls younger than 14 into prostitution in Minnesota, Tennessee
and Ohio – passing them around like chattel for sex with other gang
members or to paying customers.

Calling the trafficking of
children for sex as “intolerable,” U.S. Attorney Jerry E. Martin, whose
office brought the case against the Somali gangs, said the problem is
widespread and difficult to prosecute. The victims, he said, “are not
likely to complain to the police.”

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.