Bringing human trafficking out of the shadows: Foundation grant shines light on the problem.

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A Tallahassee townhouse became a prison for Guatemalan women who thought they were escaping the poverty of $30-a-month jobs and coming to America to become maids who could make more in a single day. But their new domestic positions turned out to be coerced prostitution, as their captor shuttled them daily to trailers and apartments around Tallahassee to have sex with multiple men. They were ordered to work off the costs of being smuggled across the border from Mexico, walking four nights until they got to Houston, and then driven in a van to Florida's capital.

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In Miami, a former middle-school teacher took in a 14-year-old Haitian girl who had been living at a Haitian orphanage. This was no loving rescue mission, but a warped version of the Haitian "restavek" (Creole for "stay with") tradition, where a child is loaned to another Haitian family in exchange for an education or job-training skill. This girl received virtually no schooling and was forced to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, for years as a slave, frequently beaten and left to sleep on the floor.

In Destin, a tourist destination on the Emerald Coast, a 19-year-old woman from Eastern Europe was promised a job as a housekeeper at a hotel for the summer, earning enough to pay for a year of college back home. Instead, she wound up listlessly stripping at a topless bar against her will.

Toiling in orange groves, posh hotels, and even trapped in the house next door, modern-day slaves are held by invisible chains of fear and coercion, and a looming debt for their transport to America--a debt they can never pay off.

"Victims are not necessarily chained. They are not necessarily held at gunpoint. They are not necessarily beaten on a daily basis. It's actually psychological coercion, and also just threats: threats against them, against their families in their home country, and this notion that they owe a debt and someone actually owns them and controls them until it's paid off," said Terry Coonan, executive director of Florida State University's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, where a $85,000 grant from The Florida Bar Foundation helps bring hands-on legal representation to human trafficking victims in North Florida and training to lawyers.

"In many ways, that is actually far more effective than chaining someone to a carpet loom or a sweat shop, because that person does not appear to be a slave, but in fact they are," Coonan said.

"Behind drug trafficking, it is the No. 2 illegal business in the world. There are estimates that say there is as much as $9 billion a year being transacted through human trafficking. What organized crime is realizing--unlike guns and drugs, which after you traffic and sell, they are lost into the stream of commerce--is that human beings, especially women, can be sold repeatedly. And this is exactly what we are seeing in sex trafficking schemes: It's a product that continues to give back and to be able to be commercially exploitable by the traffickers."

With its large number of immigrants, influx of visitors, military bases, hotel and service industries, and agriculture's need for cheap stoop labor, the Sunshine State is a magnet for human trafficking--one of three top destinations in the U.S., along with New York and California.

Because it's so clandestine, it is difficult to know exactly how many people are trafficked into the U.S. every day.

A 2004 landmark research project conducted by the FSU Center, along with the Human Trafficking Working Group, Florida lawyer Robin Hassler Thompson, and others produced a 257-page report, Florida Responds to Human Trafficking, that cites recent estimates ranging from 18,000 to 50,000 annually.

A 2004 U.S. Department of Justice report said worldwide, each year, between 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked, and between 14,500 to 17,500 of those are trafficked in the United States.

"Every 30 minutes, another victim is affected somewhere in the world," said Anna Rodriguez, founder and CEO of the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking. "We must be educated and vigilant to look beneath the surface and find all victims of this horrific crime."

Marketing the American Dream 

Traffickers seize on people's poverty, illiteracy, and desperation for a better life.

In the 2004 research study, Mexican victims were lured by female recruiters in Veracruz, Mexico, with promises of the good life awaiting them in the United States. Once here, they were trafficked into trailer brothels on the edges of migrant farm worker camps from Florida to North Carolina.

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Why couldn't they escape?

"Every single one of them, the traffickers knew exactly where their parents lived, who had sisters, and the families were very much part of the coercion in the sense the traffickers said: 'If you ever escape without paying your debt, we will go back to Mexico and we will kill or rape your sister or we will kill your parents,'" Coonan explained.

"The families in Mexico were absolutely ignorant of what was being done to these young women. The women were actually taken once a week to a Western Union and allowed to wire home $50 or $100. The traffickers were standing there when they wired this money home to make sure there was no communication."

Some do manage to escape, such as the Guatemalan women who fled to the house of a neighbor in Tallahassee's Eastgate subdivision, who then called Tallahassee police, eventually setting in motion a federal prosecution against Colombian organized crime.

A concerned citizen tipped off the Okaloosa sheriff's office about the eastern European woman forced to be a stripper.

"Human trafficking is an insidious crime that preys in many ways on what is best about America," Coonan said. "It is the American Dream that is being marketed to so many of these victims. It will be one of the signature human rights issues that will have to be addressed in the 21st century, not only by the United States, but by the world, as well."

Coonan has conducted more than 120 trainings for law enforcement and prosecutors around the country, including nationwide training that the U.S. Justice Department uses, as well as helping create training for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Regional Community Policing Institute. Coonan has taken his training across the globe to Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, Chile, Argentina, and Panama.

He also trains young people about the dangers of human trafficking.

Increasingly, Coonan said U.S. citizen runaway minors are subjected to sex trafficking. Again, Florida, with its nice weather and lure of beaches, is a prime destination for vulnerable runaways. A U.S. minor under the age of 18 subjected to any kind of prostitution is a victim of sex trafficking under the Trafficking Victim Protection Act, Coonan said.

Coonan said the parking lots at Orlando theme parks, it turns out, is a magnet for teenage runaways and pimps, as well.

"We are finding that there are children between the ages of 14 and 18 who come to Florida and, increasingly, are getting pulled into street pimp operations. That is another area where we have been reaching out."

Foundation Takes Stand

When Orlando attorney Bruce Blackwell became president of The Florida Bar Foundation in 2007-08, he wanted to take a strong stand against human trafficking in Florida and urged his colleagues to approve the $85,000 grant to FSU's Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. He said he hopes the grant will be renewed this year to expand training to lawyers.

"We try to use our money in a way that we actually can make some level of systemic change. The FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights is doing so much good in Florida, and so, candidly, we have been thrilled to have the opportunity. This is a problem we need to give money to," Blackwell said.

"The Foundation board is made up of some of the most committed lawyers in Florida who are concerned about access to justice for everyone. So it was not a hard sell."

Blackwell said he first learned of the problem of modern-day slavery from his daughter, who had worked in Eastern Europe with the International Crisis Group, and knew about cases of young women trafficked in sex rings after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Now, he said, "Every time I go into a hotel and see some young woman at the front desk--and they are always pretty and almost always from the Ukraine, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and their English is good--I wonder: Are they making enough to live? What happens when their shift at the hotel ends? I wonder every single time.

"It is really an insidious societal problem that most people would like to not know about," said Blackwell. "But it's important for us to be aware that essentially there is economic and sexual slavery going on in this state.

"It's something no one wants to hear about, but it is destroying lots and lots of lives of men and women on the sexual slavery side, and we are collapsing the American Dream on the economic slavery side."

As part of its efforts, the Foundation is sponsoring an anti-human trafficking initiative led by Coonan that brings together attorneys, law enforcement officials, and service providers throughout the state to coordinate anti-trafficking efforts and to identify best practices.

On May 29, about 400 lawyers, including assistant state attorneys and public defenders in the Ninth Judicial Circuit, gathered for a criminal law seminar to learn more about how to recognize the signs of human trafficking.

"We are looking to get our legal services providers conversant with the issues," Blackwell said. "It's very complicated. Few lawyers understand immigration law and few are willing to take on one of these types of cases. The first thing we have to do is get our prosecutors and law enforcement to understand the issues, so they don't misread the signs and think it is a standard prostitution case."

Hands-on Advocacy

Foundation grant money pays the salary of Wendi Adelson, a program director for the Human Rights and Immigration Law Project at the FSU Center. Before joining FSU's faculty in 2007, she was a staff attorney in the University of Miami School of Law's Children and Youth Law and Community Health Rights Education Clinics.

"I was a one-man shop for most of seven years, so when Wendi came here, it was like the cavalry arriving," said Coonan. "Wendi has a tremendous background, especially in immigrant juvenile cases. She is taking on a wider variety of the human rights cases we have been litigating through the center."

Begun in 2000 by Sandy D'Alemberte, former FSU president and law dean, and an anonymous donor who was an FSU graduate, the center was created with a mandate that it not be limited to theory, but to include hands-on advocacy.

About 30 FSU students from varying disciplines are sent all over the world to do human rights work, including social work students in human torture treatment centers and law students at Sudan refugee camps. Film students travel the world working on documentaries. One award-winning 20-minute film, "Fields of Mudan," by FSU grad student Stevo Chang, is a drama about a young Chinese girl forced into sex slavery, and was nominated for an Oscar. Art therapy students help sex trafficking victims as young as four years old in Thailand. Music therapy students treat Puerto Rican street children abused and abandoned by their families.

At the center's office across the street from the FSU College of Law, Adelson provides legal representation for trafficking victims, asylum-seekers, victims of torture, and abused immigrant spouses.

"Their husbands tell the women: 'If you report us for abusing you, we will report you to the Department of Homeland Security for being illegal,'" Coonan said.

While the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center is a "phenomenal group" that does this same work in South Florida, Coonan said the Foundation grant money helps cover the increasing need in North Florida and the Panhandle.

"We are the only folks providing free pro bono legal services in immigration law to Tallahassee and areas of the Panhandle," Adelson said. Besides human trafficking victims, Adelson describes her clients as "mainly victims of domestic violence with immigration needs. They are battered and abused, abandoned and neglected immigrant women and kids."

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Currently, Adelson is helping the Guatemalan women forced into prostitution in Tallahassee maneuver through the intimidating court system. Their captor, whom Coonan said was part of Colombian organized crime, is scheduled to be sentenced in Tallahassee's federal court on June 16, more than a year after a jury found him guilty of conspiracy to harbor aliens for financial gain and importing female aliens for the purpose of prostitution.

Coonan and Adelson walk the women through the U.S. justice system, serving as victim-witness advocates.

"It is even more frightening for someone where maybe the police and law enforcement are corrupt in their home country. So there is an immediate lack of trust toward prosecutors and law enforcement that has to be overcome," Coonan said. "Their traffickers have drummed into their head that they are illegal and will be jailed, that they will be deported."

Because the case is pending, Karen Rhew, supervisory assistant U.S. attorney in Tallahassee, couldn't talk details, but said: "In general, the center has been very helpful, and we have enjoyed an excellent relationship with them, particularly Terry Coonan."

While Adelson didn't want to talk in detail about the Guatemalan women until the case is finally concluded, she said, "A large amount of fear goes into the process of appearing in court against their traffickers. It's a very scary thing to face the people who kept exploiting them for a long time. They are trying to regain their lives, but they have to go to court and relive the experience."

The victims, Coonan said, are "applying for legal immigration benefits that victims are now entitled to under the Trafficking Victim Protection Act."

The "T Visa"--available from the U.S. Department of Justice--provides a carrot-and-stick approach with victims of severe forms of human trafficking, who are entitled to immigration relief if they cooperate with the prosecution. The T Visa allows the victim to live and work in the U.S. for three years, and can be immediately segued into an application for permanent residency. Because their family members at home are in danger by retaliating abusers, the victim can petition to have spouses and children brought to live with them in the U.S.

What Can Florida Do Better?

There have been improvements in the law since the federal government first addressed the issue by passing the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. But more needs to be done, Coonan and Adelson agree.

"We go back to the Florida Legislature on an annual basis. What can Florida do better? We learn from our cases. We learn from what victims tell us. We learn from what law enforcement tells us and what prosecutors tell us and what service providers tell us," Coonan said. "It's a complex equation. Actually, this alliance--law enforcement and prosecutors working closely with human rights groups--that is an unprecedented alliance. When it works, when it actually happens, it is extremely effective."

During the 2008 Florida Legislature, Adelson helped pass a bill--CS/SB 1442; HB 606 sponsored by Speaker Marco Rubio, R-West Miami, and Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, which passed both chambers unanimously. The legislation matches federal legislation by eliminating the "force, fraud, or coercion" requirement for a child to prove that he or she was induced to perform a commercial sex act. The bill, Adelson said, will "bring greater protection for prostituted children in this state, and it marks an important first step in addressing the needs of trafficked and prostituted children."

In their work in helping human trafficking victims, Coonan and Adelson said the politics of anti-immigration sentiment filters into courtrooms and in the attitudes of jurors who may have little sympathy for the plight of illegal immigrants.

"One of the innate hurdles prosecutors have to jump over is that sometimes jurors, in the back of their minds, may be thinking, 'That sex trafficking--it's forced prostitution, but that person came here illegally and this is a risk they took.' Or, at times, jury members think: 'Well, it's still better than what they had back in their home countries. Why should we be concerned?' That attitude very much affects us," Coonan said.

"It really is poisonous and misguided, because it ignores the fact that as a country we have benefitted on a daily basis from the work those immigrants offer. Immigrants do the work that U.S. citizens choose not to do. It is one thing to say the U.S. has not enforced immigration law. We have an immigration crisis. The country is entitled to enforce its borders. But to demonize immigrants is short-sided.

"The notion that most illegal immigrants swam the Rio Grande River is a fallacy. No, the vast majority of illegal immigrants came in on a visa, but never left," he said.

Coonan said he is hoping to speak more about the issue to bar groups across Florida. Beyond training Department of Children and Families employees and law enforcement, they hope to do more sessions for lawyers on how to spot trafficking hidden from view and how to help represent victims.

"We'd like to do a version of our training for The Florida Bar, so this could be put out in a legal context with the very people who have legal skills and opportunities to assist victims."

Adelson urges lawyers to become educated on these issues: "Don't listen to the talking heads. If you are an attorney, Lou Dobbs should not be your source of information on immigration legislation."

By Jan Pudlow

Senior Editor