 Trafficking is the severe exploitation of an individual through sexual exploitation or some sort of forced labor. People are tricked, are forced, are abducted, are threatened into situations against their will. Victims can be anyone. They can be men, women and children of any age, any nationality, they could even be a U.S. citizen. Human trafficking is a very profitable industry and it's one of the fastest growing crimes in the world. You can only sell a kilo of coke once. With these victims, you can make money off them again and again and again. These are somebody's kids, somebody's parents, somebody's sisters or brothers that are being held in conditions that no American and no reasonable person in the world would find to be suitable. As we all know, slavery has been outlawed for a very long time but in fact this is modern day slavery. I came here when I was 17 years old and I came here with a family from my country as a babysitter. When I got to this country, things were nice but after a few months, things changed. Many trafficking victims don't know that they've been trafficking victims. It's very hard for them to name what the problem is. They start treating me bad and I don't have explanation for that. A lot of the clients that come into a non-governmental organization for services may actually be trafficking victims. They're never easy to identify. However, I think it'll be easier to look for something when you know what to look for. So, how do you recognize a trafficking victim? I think there are some red flags. One is that the person seems to be under constant surveillance. They're watched, someone's always with them. I couldn't go nowhere. I couldn't have friends. I couldn't go to school. So it's critical to get that person alone because even if they're with somebody who may say they're a friend they may in fact be the trafficker or an affiliate of the trafficker. When you talk to them you have to ask them questions because they might not tell you anything at first and when you start asking them questions you realize they were forced into doing this activity. Other indicators, red flags of trafficking would be they've been working and yet they don't really know their way around. They live and work with their employer on the same premises. I was scared about to leave from the house to try to escape because I thought when I'm going after the house when I'm going to go I have no place to go. I don't know anybody. There are some visible signs that you could maybe look for. A person who looks abused, maybe some bruises, a lot of medical neglect, maybe you have untreated medical condition. Somebody who's very scared, who looks very intimidated not looking at you in your eyes. People may think that they're being attacked when they're not so they may become irritable or inappropriately angry. They may have lost their ability to manage their anger emotions, their defensive emotions. You need to try to find out whether or not they were held in a condition of compelled service in the past or there's somebody who's recently been liberated who you know was in that situation and then you have to open your toolkit to respond to their needs. They took me to a shelter for three months. They were great people. That's why I'm here now because they really, really helped me. When a big oil pipeline manufacturer in Tulsa, Oklahoma advertised job openings in India, dozens of skilled metal workers jumped at the chance. But instead of training for permanent employment, the men were treated like slaves, forced to live on factory premises and paid less than $3 an hour. Fifty-two men managed to escape and sought shelter and legal assistance with help from members of a nearby church. When we encounter somebody who's just been freed from a traffic situation, their needs are the basic needs. They need food, they need shelter, they need clothing. Those things have to be provided. Fifty-two people, they were living in the... four or five people living in the one room, you know, different rooms. And people were donating the clothes. People were donating the TVs and the air conditioners and the, you know, bad sheets and the blankets. And you can imagine, fifty-two people needs. Everybody has a different need, everybody has a different requirements. Traffic persons have an overwhelming need for services and the key is that each individual has such unique needs. Another important aspect is the physical health. So the person needs to generally get a complete checkup, make sure that they're okay physically, that they don't have any communicable diseases. Most trafficking victims have come here to make a better life. And they need to work, for example. So if that part is not taken care of, then it's going to be very difficult for them to make progress. So you have to teach them things like taxes, how to fill out an application for employment, how to fill out a lease to rent a house, how to open a bank account, how to go food shopping, how to get a driver's license. At my home in India, my wife, she got the threatening calls and this says, your husband left the John Beagle company. He has to go back and join the work. Otherwise, when he will become back, he will have a big trouble, a big problem in India. Trafficking victims are most often unaware that they have rights in this country and through the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which was passed in October of 2000, they do have rights extended to them and they are eligible for certain benefits. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 has three main goals, prevention, protection and prosecution. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act gave us those tools to do victim-centered prosecutions where we can catch the bad guys but also protect their victims. There is a process that traffic persons go through called certification and that comes when the law enforcement federal agents have deemed the individuals a victim most severe form of human trafficking. Once they are certified, that individual is eligible for all sorts of benefits, same benefits as a refugee or a political assailee which means cash assistance from the government, food stamps, they are work authorized. They can access Medicaid, Medicare services. And everybody was scared because everybody paid a lot of money to come here in the United States and we cannot go back to India under their circumstances. Law enforcement has the option of filing for something called continued presence which is a statement saying this person is a victim of trafficking and they are assisting me with my investigation. It's critical that they remain in the U.S. during my investigation or prosecution. Then they will have a temporary legal status while you're working to get a more permanent form of relief. TVCES are a longer term immigration status that happens typically after the criminal case is done. It allows the victim to stay in the country and even bring their family to join them to reunite the families. It's a very good way of making sure that the victims are not retaliated against by being deported back to the home country after they've cooperated with the investigation. And it was a very excited moment in my life. I've seen my family, I mean my wife and my son. Last year my wife should go to the boy here in the United States and he's like, now he's an American citizen. While it's important to give the victims hope you also can't tell them something that you can't deliver on. I think the most important thing to do is to give them the tools to make the decisions in their lives. Many of the early trafficking NGOs, the specialists who are now seen as the leaders in this field started off as battered immigrant women's service providers. SAFER hasn't expanded its mission to include human trafficking. We started to see a number of young women initially coming forward with these types of complex cases where they were undocumented, where they were being brought to New York or to the United States, having experienced crimes that would typically be described as trafficking. People get scared when they hear about a new subject and think, I don't know how to do that. I wouldn't know how to work with that kind of person. And we had a discussion as any agency would about whether this was an issue we felt we could tackle, whether we were equipped to do this and we thought it was unnatural for us since we were a crime victim service agency. They were able to take the tools that they were using for one group of exploited people and immediately switch those over to trafficking victims. I'm from Mexico. When I was 16, I met someone who was older than me. I fell in love with him, so we married. He forced me to work as a prostitute. He told me a lot of lies about the police and his country, that we were legal. If I could say police, they're going to put me in jail. I believe him. In many of the cases, the traffickers have often recruited people from their hometowns, from their homes, so there's a real intimate knowledge about who they are, where they're from, and their family's situation. And there were a lot of threats made against her, against me, her child. I always want to quit, to run away. And he knew it because he always was watching me. He never left me alone. He don't let me carry any money, nothing. If you're in another country and you don't speak the language, if your documents are withheld, who do you believe, where do you go for help? Who's going to believe you? You can't even explain what you want. And that was the last day that I worked. Here at Safe Horizon, we have a counseling center. Lucia was referred to us by a law enforcement agency, and so we were able to respond to her needs. You have to know who to call. You don't want to call somebody for the first time when you hear that there's 50 people in a case. You want to already have your relationships built. Even though we have a very large agency here and a number of programs that we use, we have many partners in the community that add pieces to our program that we don't do. Project Reach's mobile response team, we offer initial crisis mental health services to trafficking victims and also support and technical assistance to providers. We'll work with the victims and work with the providers to address the immediate mental health needs of trafficking victims. In some ways they're very similar to other trauma survivors of domestic violence, but this other dimension of being in a context of a complex legal system, being out of the country and away from the families adds another level of stress that makes it very hard to hear from the specific types of trauma that they've gone through. It's definitely important to be aware of someone's body language, their fear level. The fact that for many people who are trafficked, there's a very deep shame factor. We need to help victims achieve a sense of safety. And when we think about safety, we sometimes think about safety in the outside. But I think we also need to remember that people need to learn how to feel safe inside. I think we have very effective services and I think that's the key that we've worked very hard on the relationships that we have in the community. In Austin, we started our Central Texas Coalition against Team and Trafficking after we had our first federal case. Three young girls were being made to prostitute and had gotten away from the traffickers. The victims were minors, and so all of a sudden we had a few social service providers and a few law enforcement saying, what are we going to do with these minors? At least here in the Austin Police Department, there wasn't a unit specialized to handle that type of situation. It took a lot of manpower and training to understand, to decipher what was going on. And we learned the hard way because we did not know what we were doing in the beginning, taking this case on. Who are you going to call at 2 o'clock in the morning where we need to house a victim, whether it be a human trafficking or a sexual assault? I just called every agency in town, and one person would tell me about somebody else. But I didn't know about the refugee service programs because we don't work with them. So that was eye-opening. None of our agencies are all to everything, and so we needed to really bring in all the experts within the community to be able to work with these victims and to make it less traumatic for them. Before, I would have to worry about, how do I get a hotel room to put these people and how do I get clothing? Many times, we were pulling money out of our own wallet to satisfy those needs. When I called Katrina, she was over in my office within an hour and just said, we'll help you out here. We know all these different services. We'll find shelter. We'll find this. And ultimately, what happened from that is that we dropped the seeds for the beginning of the Central Texas Coalition against human trafficking because there was no way any of us could handle this on our own. That was three victims. What if we'd had 60 or 100 victims? That would have been unfair for the victims. We met over at some church hall one afternoon and we called as many people as we knew from the various agencies and organizations in town and asked them to please come and let's put our heads together and let's start talking about what needs to happen. Immediately, we had law enforcement that had our coalition meetings. We communicate on a very regular basis and we built up a level of trust. Robert Sanchez, Austin Police Department of Victim Services. Mike Miller with the Refugee Services of Texas. Our mission is to find human trafficking victims and to rescue them. The more we work with each other and learn how we could take advantage of each other's services, we've found out that we could reach the objective much faster by working together as a partnership versus against each other. And as we grow, we also become more confident and we become more at ease with each other to actually bring up some controversial subjects. And she was making cell phone calls from the shelter we had her in in the city where she was rescued from to one of the traffickers in another city because he was her boyfriend. When I first got into this, I didn't quite realize the safety issues involved. We have to, one, be very concerned about the client and the victim. These traffickers are organized. The NGOs need to be aware that when they're dealing with the victim, that they're also dealing with the traffickers. We do not want to identify, well, our agency is the one who handles all the victims. That wouldn't take much, then, for someone to find out where their victims are located. We work with them, whether it's the Austin Police Department, the FBI or the immigration, you know, we work with them about these issues. And since the victim and the traffickers are both in the same city, that's what we're a little concerned about. We might be able to move one victim to a different part of the city or even to another city and that would help alleviate the threat level. Our goal is to take that intimidation factor away from these traffickers and keep these victims safe and knowing that they are going to be safe in our custody. Not only are our victims, but also, too, our providers, our NGO partners, are going to be safe. Having that partnership with the non-governmental organizations is vital to these cases. Being prosecuted successfully into the victim's safety and to them being able to get all the benefits that they are entitled to. The crime of trafficking is not a crime against our borders. It's a crime against humanity. Through interacting and networking with other agencies, we've been able to learn better how to identify victims of trafficking. Our efforts are to continue to do outreach, to continue to educate every member of society from law enforcement to social services agencies to different ethnic communities in the area of trafficking. And there's a lot that we can do about it, but we have to be willing to extend ourselves, extend our missions, learn, and get involved.