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Their plight has catapulted Long Island
back into the national immigration spotlight - 59 Peruvian
men, women and children who federal authorities say
were held in virtual captivity by three of their compatriots.
The undocumented immigrants worked two and sometimes
three jobs a day, handed over their pay to their alleged
captors and lived in single-family houses crammed with
up to 34 people, authorities say. They ate meager rations
provided by a "meal plan" and suffered barrages
of verbal insults and threats of deportation.
For up to four years they lived in fear. Then, as day
broke on June 21, authorities raided three homes in
Brentwood, Amityville and Coram and rescued them.
Their case is one of the largest human trafficking rings
uncovered in the United States, according to federal
authorities. Unlike most undocumented immigrants who
come here by way of a smuggler and then strike out on
their own, every aspect of the Peruvians' lives was
controlled by their traffickers, the authorities say.
Their situation was so dire, it is attracting the attention
of high-level officials in Washington, D.C., mobilizing
national advocacy groups and turning into a stark illustration
of the widespread yet little-known problem of modern-day
slavery.
"This is huge," said John Miller, director
of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons and senior adviser to Secretary
of State Colin Powell on human trafficking. "The
only case I can think of that's this big in the United
States" was in 2001 in American Samoa, he said.
In that case, at least 200 Vietnamese and Chinese women
were freed from a garment factory where they were subjected
to food deprivation, beatings and physical restraint.
Experts say the 59 Peruvians were fortunate in some
respects, because they didn't languish in their predicament
permanently, but were rescued. Today, they are living
on their own in houses and apartments on Long Island,
adjusting to a new life of freedom.
"Even though some of them have been here three
or four years, they only knew their way to work and
nothing else," said Carmen Maquilon, who is heading
efforts by Catholic Charities to assist the victims.
"They hardly know anything."
While the Peruvians were rescued, authorities concede
they are failing to reach the vast majority of the 18,000
to 20,000 men, women and children trafficked into the
United States each year, by government estimate. Independent
experts say the figure may be far higher.
Worldwide, trafficking is a thriving underground business
that generates at least $10 billion annually and involves
at least 800,000 victims a year. After drug dealing,
it is tied with arms dealing as the second largest criminal
industry in the world, according to the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services.
"It's a multibillion-dollar, mob-infested enterprise,"
said Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), who wrote a landmark
anti-trafficking law in 2000 that cracked down on the
industry.
'Modern-day slavery'
In addition to Smith and Miller, other high-level officials
such as Wade Horn, assistant secretary for Children
and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services,
are closely following developments in the Peruvian case.
Horn, who oversees a $10 billion annual budget that
includes a trafficking victims program, said the Peruvian
case "is significant for a variety of reasons."
Beyond underscoring that human trafficking is a widespread
problem, the case illustrates how the industry is spreading
from immigrant-heavy cities to the suburbs, Horn and
other experts said. It also shows that trafficking involves
not just sex slavery but forced labor as well.
"It's hard in the 21st century to imagine that
there would be modern-day slavery like this among us,"
said Kevin Appleby, director of migration and refugee
policy at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
in Washington, D.C. But "it can happen in Main
Street, U.S.A."
Long Island first attracted national attention for immigration
issues in 2000 when two Mexican day laborers who lived
in Farmingville were beaten and stabbed nearly to death
by two out-of-town white supremacists.
The attention heightened in July 2003 when five Farmingville
teenagers were involved in firebombing the house of
a Mexican family who barely escaped alive. And earlier
this year, a Brookings Institution study declared Long
Island a major immigrant gateway with a foreign-born
population of 396,939 - the 18th largest in the United
States.
With its immigrant population booming and communities
still grappling with the violence, it is not surprising
that Long Island is now the site of a major human trafficking
case, experts say. It is a region heavily dependent
on immigrant labor and where traffickers could easily
find work for their victims.
"We're getting this terrible reputation for keeping
Third World people in Third World conditions on Long
Island," said Legis. Paul Tonna (R-West Hills),
who has led efforts to resolve the day laborer dispute.
While Long Island has gained attention largely because
of its estimated 100,000 undocumented immigrants who
work in everything from landscaping to restaurants,
human trafficking is a distinctly different phenomenon,
experts say.
Most undocumented immigrants pay a smuggler to bring
them into the United States and then are free to pursue
their lives while they pay off the smuggling fees. In
contrast, traffickers typically transport laborers,
farmers, domestics and prostitutes to a specific destination
with the promise of a guaranteed job. But once they
arrive, the immigrants find the traffickers have deceived
them about the terms of the job, and they are forced
to work against their will through force, fraud, coercion
or debt bondage.
Traffickers often confiscate their victims' passports,
money and identification, and threaten to turn them
in to immigration authorities or physically harm their
families back home, experts and authorities say.
"The more you shine the light of scrutiny on this
terrible problem," Smith said, "the more horrific
it reveals itself to be."
Chains of servitude
The suspects in the Long Island case, Mariluz Zavala,
her husband José Ibañez, and their daughter,
Evelyn Ibañez, who all live in Coram, deny they
were operating a trafficking ring. They contend they
were running boarding houses and were trying to help
the immigrants adjust to life in new surroundings. The
couple and their daughter are being held without bail
at the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow
on federal charges of smuggling and harboring illegal
aliens.
Despite the suspects' contentions, authorities say the
operation is a textbook case of trafficking. They allege
the three promised the immigrants jobs and visas to
come work in the United States, and then held them in
a state of captivity after they arrived.
The family told the immigrants they could not leave
the houses and establish independent lives until they
paid off smuggling debts that ran as high as $12,500,
officials said. But the debts never seemed to be reduced.
The immigrants told advocates and officials that often
they were never told how much they still owed.
"A lot of people paid a lot of money," one
victim said in Spanish during a brief interview recently.
He and his wife confirmed the Peruvians were forced
to work up to 16 hours a day and to hand over their
pay to the suspects.
Zavala and Jose Ibañez confiscated the Peruvians'
passports and threatened to turn them in to immigration
officials if they left, authorities said.
Often, the traffickers would bring a husband to the
United States first, and threaten to harm his wife and
children in Peru if he fled, authorities said.
They also warned the men that they would not bring the
wife and children to Long Island if the husband did
not comply with their demands.
Beyond that, officials said the traffickers confiscated
the deeds to the immigrants' homes and land in Peru
as collateral on the smuggling fees, and threatened
to throw their families who remained in the country
out on the streets if the Peruvians here fled.
"The immigrants were psychologically terrorized
by her [Zavala] if they didn't do exactly what she said,"
according to one law-enforcement official, who asked
not to be identified. "It's almost as if they were
abused spouses."
While the victims are free today, they remain terrified
of the traffickers, Maquilon said. Some may be called
on to testify in court.
"The number one question is: 'What if she [Zavala]
is released and she's going to come back and get us?'"
Maquilon said.
Besides finding housing, Catholic Charities has provided
the victims with medical attention, counseling and help
in applying for legal status. Horn's agency has officially
certified them as trafficking victims, putting them
on the path of possibly gaining permanent legal residency
if they cooperate with prosecutors. The case is among
the most notorious encountered by officials in years.
It reminds experts of a case in 1997 when 51 deaf Mexican
adults and nine children were freed from a ring that
held them against their will in apartments in Queens
and Chicago and forced them to sell trinkets and pencils
on the streets.
A year later, authorities broke up a ring in Florida
where between 25 and 40 women - many of them teenagers
- were lured or kidnapped from Mexico, raped, beaten
and then turned into "sex slaves" for hire.
Gaining national attention
Those types of abuses are igniting the ire of public
officials from President George W. Bush on down who
are focusing increased attention on the issue.
"Human trafficking is one of the worst offenses
against human dignity," Bush said in July in Tampa,
Fla., at the first-ever national training conference
on the topic. "Traffickers tear families apart.
They treat their victims as nothing more than goods
and commodities for sale to the highest bidder."
Bush's speech came on top of his well-known address
in September 2003 before the General Council of the
United Nations in which he focused on Iraq and Afghanistan
but also devoted a third of the talk to human trafficking.
"To my knowledge that's the first time any world
leader has brought that kind of attention to sex trafficking
or trafficking in general to the United Nations,"
said University of Rhode Island professor Donna Hughes,
a leading expert on the topic.
Bush's offensive is part of a larger effort that culminated
with the passage of the landmark Trafficking Victims
Protection Act in 2000. It was the first U.S. law to
recognize that people trafficked against their will
are victims of a crime, and not simply undocumented
immigrants.
Congressman Smith says he wrote the proposed legislation
after hearing of so many cases of human trafficking
in part as the vice chairman of the International Relations
Committee in the U.S. House.
"I think many congressmen would be surprised to
find that there is such a nefarious enterprise right
under all our noses," Smith said. "Nobody
is immune from it, Long Island, New Jersey, Kansas City
- you name it."
The 2000 law permits victims to receive temporary and
possibly permanent legal residency if they cooperate
in the prosecution of suspects. It also authorizes the
issuance each year of 5,000 "T visas" ("T"
for trafficking), which grants the victims legal residency
for three years and can lead to a "green card"
or permanent legal residency.
But only 403 victims have received T visas since 2000,
even though a total of 20,000 were available, according
to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement.
Horn's office is in charge of officially certifying
people as human trafficking victims once they are rescued.
Their total since the 2000 law was passed is 584 people,
including the 59 Peruvians. "We don't think 600
over three years is good enough when there's good reason
to believe tens of thousands of them are trafficked
into the United States," Horn said.
Part of the problem is that many officials, social workers
and ordinary citizens are not aware of the problem and
are not on the lookout for trafficking victims, who
can work anywhere from a cosmetics company to a factory
to a landscaping business to a massage parlor or brothel,
experts say.
"I get this all the time," Miller said. "When
I say I'm working on slavery, they say, 'Slavery? Didn't
that end with the Civil War?'" While government-sanctioned
slavery based on skin color did end in the United States
and throughout most of the world in the 19th century,
he said, a new form - trafficking - has emerged in recent
decades.
Cracking down on trafficking
Authorities say they are making greater efforts to crack
down on the industry, with some success. On Sept. 7
Miller's post at the State Department was elevated to
U.S. ambassador-at-large, giving him even more prominence.
"The new ambassadorship is a sign to the entire
global community that the U.S. considers human trafficking
a gross abuse of human rights and will do everything
in its power to stop these organized criminals both
at home and abroad," Smith said. A renewal of the
trafficking act he authored was signed into law by Bush
last December and mandated the elevation of Miller's
post.
For its part, earlier this year Horn's office at Health
and Human Services launched a $10 million "Rescue
and Restore" publicity campaign to help identify
and rescue trafficking victims and to encourage the
formation of local coalitions to tackle the problem.
They've kicked off the program in Atlanta, Philadelphia,
Phoenix and Newark and hope to hit a total of 20 communities
by next September.
Horn's office in conjunction with Covenant House, a
nonprofit agency for runaway and homeless children,
also established a hotline number in April for victims
or people with information about trafficking rings:
1-888-3737-888. That's in addition to another hotline
set up by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
1-866-DHS-2ICE.
Despite the efforts, experts say the vast majority of
trafficking victims continue to languish, hidden in
the corners of many communities, and that far greater
efforts are needed to find and help them. "You're
only seeing the tiniest bit of the iceberg," Hughes
said. "There are thousands of victims we have not
even looked for, much less found."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
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