Newsday: HUMAN TRAFFICKING

By Bart Jones, Staff Writer

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.