The shadow world of human trafficking 

The beating was the final straw. The relentless daily psychological abuse had been bad enough; the endless days of work stretching into weeks and finally into months had been exhausting beyond endurance. Somehow she managed to get through.

“I always just told myself to just take it, to just bear it, just for a little longer,” remembers Lucy, a young Kenyan woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name. But now after being slapped into near unconsciousness by her employer, she realized she was in danger of real physical harm. She would have to plan an escape from this home in a quiet upper-class New York hamlet. She picked up the phone and dialed her only friend in North America, a Kenyan priest living in Toronto, to finally ask someone for help.

There are thousands of people like Lucy, held against their will, in the United States today. You may have passed them on the street, begging for small change, watched one working in a neighbor’s yard or behind a kitchen door, or passed one cleaning a room in a four-star hotel. Some have helped put food on your table or sewn the clothes you wear. A large number of them are trapped deeply underground but still, like their brothers and sisters, in plain sight behind the black-filtered facades of massage parlors and strip joints.

They are the community of America’s enslaved people, trafficked sometimes legally, most often clandestinely across the U.S. border. They are held by force and violence or by the cruelest forms of psychological coercion and persuasion by individuals or by organized crime networks that reach all the way back to the homelands of the trafficked in Africa, Mexico, Central America, Central Europe, and Southeast Asia.

Catholic Charities’s Sister Joann Marie Aumand, S.C.C. works with trafficking victims at the Archdiocese of Newark’s Bishop Francis Center for Immigration Services. “We think this is something that is happening in Burma or Thailand or someplace far away,” says Aumand, “but [it’s] happening right here; it could even be happening next door.”

According to the U.S. State Department, each year about 800,000 people worldwide are trafficked across national borders bound for what most of them believe are better opportunities in a neighboring nation, Europe, or the United States.(Other estimates place the number as high as 3 million.) But instead of that hoped-for better life, these migrants find themselves entrapped in a kind of modern slavery, forced to pay off their travel and associated debts under often horrendous working conditions or in demeaning labor and intimidated into silence and compliance. Trafficking victims are typically obscured from public view by a painstaking system of isolation and surveillance or the simple remoteness of barracks-style housing where they are often kept.

Those who have been rescued from the U.S. sex trade are perhaps best known, but thousands of others are enslaved in less notorious trades: apparel manufacturing, agriculture, even among maintenance and cleaning staff in America’s hotel and restaurant industry.

“We’ve had domestic laborers, sex workers, restaurant workers, victims who have worked in construction,” says Sehla Ashai, an Illinois-based legal advocate for trafficking victims. “We’ve had people in just about every low-paying service industry job.”

“Trafficking victims can be found in all walks of life. They’re not going to be found in some dark alley,” says Nyssa Mestas, associate director of anti-trafficking services at the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Department of Migration and Refugee Services. “You’ll find them working in nice homes or even for legitimate businesses.”

Aumand is currently working with a group of women and girls who were trafficked from Togo and Ghana in West Africa. They had been forced to work in two small Newark, New Jersey-area hair-braiding salons. Following a typical strategy to better control their victims, the traffickers took passports and other ID away from the women. They worked without pay.

Prosecutors allege that the 20 women and girls were beaten if they did not return to the two apartments they shared immediately after work, if they had the nerve to ask for spending money, or if they otherwise disobeyed their employers. The women saw customers six days a week, 14 hours a day, but it took more than a year for their plight to come to the attention of authorities.

Some trafficked laborers end up working for big agricultural processors well known to consumers, but their abuse is distanced from respectable food companies by a kind of bureaucratic plausible deniability. “We had [traffickers] harvesting for two big citrus processors that put the orange juice on your table,” says Brigitte Gynther, a member of Interfaith Action of Southwest Florida working with the Coalition for Immokalee Workers (CIW).

“You often wonder how [growers] never seem to realize this is going on,” says Gynther, “but the citrus and tomato growers all use contractors. The workers never see the owners; there is a whole system in place of non-responsibility. . . . These guys are kept on isolated labor camps; nobody knows where they are.”

The invisible industry
The U.S. State Department estimates that there may be as many as 18,000 trafficked people living in some form of involuntary servitude in the United States, but few advocates of trafficking victims are confident that figure represents the extent of the problem.