17,500 may be victims of human trafficking
WASHINGTON – As many as 17,500 people each year are brought to the United States by human traffickers who trap them in slavery-like conditions for forced sex, sweatshop labor and domestic servitude, the Justice Department reported Tuesday.
“In the United States, where slavery was outlawed nationally more than 130 years ago, this tragic phenomenon should no longer exist. Yet it does,” the Justice Department said in a report to Congress.
“These untraced profits feed organized crime activities,” John Torres, of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told a House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration.
From January 2001 through mid-May of this year, prosecutors have charged 149 individuals in trafficking cases and won 94 convictions or guilty pleas, about twice the number recorded over the previous three years, according to the report.
Some recent examples:
• Seven people pleaded guilty in 2003 in south Texas to charges they brought women across the Mexican border to trailer homes where they were forced to cook, clean and submit to rape. The ringleader, Juan Carlos Soto, was sentenced to 23 years in prison and the women were paid restitution.
Two people pleaded guilty and one was convicted of illegally bringing more than 250 Vietnamese and Chinese women to work as sewing machine operators in an American Samoa garment factory. The women experienced food deprivation, beatings, physical restraint and were forced to live in guarded barracks. The main defendant, Kil Soo Lee, faces a June sentencing date.
• Ramiro Ramos was sentenced in March to 180 months in prison for illegally transporting Mexican workers to fruit harvesting fields in Florida, where the victims were threatened with beating and death if they tried to leave and were kept under constant surveillance.
The Justice Department report estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 people are victims of human trafficking each year in the United States. About two-thirds of the cases prosecuted involve prostitution or sex slavery, with most of the rest involving forced labor.