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2000, the Freedom Network works “closely with trafficked persons to

ensure that they receive necessary services,” and is “engaged in moni-

toring the implementation of the law.”19

Florrie Burke, formerly senior director of International Programs at Safe

Horizon in New York, credits Lou de Baca with bringing them together.20

De Baca, who has worn several hats within the DOJ—including involun-

tary servitude and slavery coordinator, special litigation counsel, chief

counsel for the Human Trafficking Prosecutions Unit of the DOJ’s Civil

Rights Division, and most recently, counsel to the Committee on the

Judiciary—was actively involved in virtually every major slavery case

that came to light in the 1990s. “I was the vector,” he recalls, “the

‘Typhoid Mary’ of trafficking. I’d worked on everybody’s cases—Flores,

Ramos, El Monte, the Deaf Mexicans.”21 In early 1998, the DOJ hosted

a focus group on trafficking, and de Baca brought together people he

had worked with in the different trafficking cases. It made sense, he felt,

to introduce them to each other. And when various government agen-

cies began training sessions, it was through de Baca’s influence that “we

used the folk from the NGOs as instructors.”22

In 2001, the DOJ’s Office for Victims of Crime held their annual con-

ference, and for the first time trafficking was on the agenda. On the

panel were such antitrafficking pioneers as senior State Department

advisor Amy O’Neil Richard, Maria Jose Fletcher of the Florida

Immigrant Advocacy Center (FIAC), and Florrie Burke of Safe Horizon.

With so many antitrafficking groups in Washington for the conference,

it was the perfect opportunity to come together and look to the future.

Ann Jordan, then-director of the Initiative against Trafficking in Persons

at Global Rights, convened a meeting in her office that was attended by

around twenty professionals. They talked about what each was doing,

and discussed how they could be of help to each other.23

This handful of organizations decided to form a network of groups

that shared the same philosophy and provided direct services to sur-

vivors of trafficking. It has grown to include thirty organizations nation-

wide. In the words of Florrie Burke, “We started small; there weren’t

that many NGOs back then. The network was loose, and it remains

loose to this day. Our strength is in providing services, backed up by

solid experience. We’re here on the ground—as opposed to those relying

only on research and philosophy.”24

In 2003, with a three-year grant from the Department of Health and

Human Services (HHS), the Freedom Network created the spin-off

Freedom Network Institute to provide training on human trafficking. It

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consists of seven of the member agencies, who have created a training

curriculum entitled “Human Trafficking and Slavery: Tools for an

Effective Response.”25 This program was the first standardized curricu-

lum on trafficking awareness and regional action, and from the begin-

ning the response from law enforcement, government agencies, and

service providers was very positive. The curriculum had, according to

Florrie Burke, “ongoing technical assistance and capacity building to

help people prepare to do and sustain this work structurally.” It also

featured a substantial resource section and a separate specialized pro-

gram for law enforcement. Training was conducted by teams, consisting

of a service provider, an attorney, a representative of the DOJ, and some-

one from local law enforcement. “We got really good feedback, espe-

cially from the FBI and local police.” The courses were taught in a

modular fashion, and ended with manuals for the attendees. “Unless

you attended the sessions, you didn’t get a manual.”26

By late 2007, thousands of people had attended the courses, and it

remains unique. If the institute is criticized for anything, it’s for placing

its emphasis on foreign-born victims at the expense of domestic victims.

However, from the earliest days of the TVPA, the law has applied pri-

marily—and in some instances, solely—to foreign-born victims, and

this is where HHS mandated that the institute concentrate its energies.

By 2007, the institute was funded entirely by private grants and was

updating its curriculum to incorporate domestic trafficking as well. The

new, broader approach is also state and region specific: a training pro-

gram given in New York by Safe Horizon will encompass an under-

standing of New York State statutes, while an antitrafficking group

doing training in Miami will address Florida’s laws and how they apply.

“It’s a great group of people,” says Burke about the Freedom Network.

“Everyone here is a worker bee. We have no time or money for PR, no

glitzy materials, and little time to spend on the ‘Hill.’”27 Nonetheless,

federal agencies have come to know and rely on the network.

P O L I C E U N D E R T H E M I C R O S C O P E

Research on American law enforcement sheds light on the widespread

need for training like that offered by the Freedom Network. Barbara

Stolz, author of a recent study on America’s trafficking statutes, points

out, “Most law enforcement responsibilities in the United States fall to

state and local authorities. Ultimately, trafficking in persons crimes cannot

be addressed solely by federal investigative agencies and prosecutors.”28

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Federal government staff cannot ferret out trafficking on our streets and

in our communities; they are simply too far removed. That means local

police—the “eyes and ears on the ground,” as the IACP puts it—must

be involved. They are in the perfect position to recognize and address

both labor and sex trafficking.

The problem is that most local law enforcement officers don’t know

any more about modern-day slavery than you do (or did, until you

began this book). And those officers who actually do have some aware-

ness of it generally haven’t been trained to detect it or to work appro-

priately with victims. More often than not, they’ll miss the signs and

mistake a trafficking victim for an illegal alien. Too often, the result is

jail and/or deportation. To get a better understanding of this situation,

in 2005 the National Institute of Justice funded a study of human traf-

ficking awareness and activity among the nation’s police forces. Jack

McDevitt and Amy Farrell at Northeastern University’s Institute on

Race and Justice carried out the study. Both have worked in the area of

racial profiling, and they share an interest in gender injustice in the

criminal justice system.29

The Northeastern survey—“Understanding and Improving Law

Enforcement Responses to Human Trafficking”—extended over a two-

year period and took as its subjects the chiefs of the nation’s police

forces or their designees. It also documented the “experiences of multi-

agency human trafficking task forces”—the forty-two federally struc-

tured groups designed to “help local, state and territorial law

enforcement agencies partner with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and victim

service agencies to ensure a victim-centered response to human traffick-

ing locally.”30

The report was designed to evaluate the present response of local,

state, and county law enforcement to human trafficking and to describe

the steps taken by local law enforcement to identify human trafficking.

To determine effectiveness, it measured “how often identification of

trafficking victims led to their rescue and the prosecution of traffick-

ers.” The survey’s goal was to provide America’s local law enforcement

“with the necessary tools to successfully identify, investigate and prose-

cute cases of human trafficking.”31

To answer these questions McDevitt and Farrell randomly sampled

the country’s roughly eighteen thousand police forces, which included

municipal departments, county sheriffs’ offices, and state police, as well

as subsampling all 525 communities with populations over seventy-five

thousand. In all, some three thousand agencies, including state police

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headquarters in all fifty states, 588 county sheriff’s offices, and over

2,300 municipal law enforcement agencies, were surveyed.32

The task was daunting. Farrell explains, “The whole way in which

trafficking is viewed by law enforcement differs from state to state. In

the states with trafficking laws, it’s a state crime, whereas in the other

states, it’s federal and requires partnering with federal agencies.”33

The survey addressed four key questions. The first asked about the

perceptions of trafficking held by law enforcement and what prepara-

tion agencies had taken to address the problem. The answer to this ques-

tion was disappointing if not unexpected: “Generally, local law

enforcement officials perceive human trafficking as rare or non-existent

in their local communities. There is little difference in perceptions of sex

trafficking versus labor trafficking among local law enforcement—both

types are perceived as non-existent.”34 Larger communities were some-

what more likely to acknowledge human trafficking, though they were

also more likely to focus on sex trafficking.35

The second question asked about the frequency with which law

enforcement identified and investigated human trafficking cases. It

turned out that about one in five of the nation’s local, county, and state

forces had “some type of human trafficking training,” fewer than one in

ten had a human trafficking protocol or policy, and only slightly more

than 6 percent had created specialized units, or assigned personnel, to

investigate trafficking cases. In the larger cities the numbers were some-

what higher. Only 7 percent of the agencies in the random survey had

actually investigated a human trafficking case, with the numbers rang-

ing considerably higher for the cities larger than 250,000. Farrell and

McDevitt estimated from these figures that around nine hundred agen-

cies in the country had investigated at least one trafficking case.36

If a law enforcement agency had investigated a trafficking case, they

were requested to provide more information, but of those asked, only

two-thirds responded. Their answers provided data for the third key

research question: What were the number and characteristics of the

human trafficking cases investigated? The results showed that the
over-

all
number of trafficking cases investigated had grown significantly each

year from 2000 to 2006 and that the average number of cases for each

agency had risen from three in 2000, to eight in 2006. Nearly three-

fourths of these agencies reported that they had only investigated a

single
type
of case—sex or labor. Those who found sex cases in their

area investigated them and tended to continue to investigate only sex

cases; the same was true for the agencies that concentrated on labor

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trafficking. Of all agencies with trafficking cases, roughly a third had

investigated only sex trafficking cases, a third only labor cases, and a

third both. All agencies reported that more time
per case
was spent on

sex trafficking investigations than on other crimes and that, not surpris-

ingly, most sex trafficking victims were female and most labor traffick-

ing victims were male.37

Finally, the fourth research question explored how human trafficking

cases were investigated and prosecuted. Over half the respondent agen-

cies reported uncovering human trafficking while investigating other

types of crime such as drug offenses or domestic violence. Four out of

five agencies indicated that the victim’s appearance was “one of the most

important indicators . . . particularly whether the victim appeared fear-

ful and non-cooperative.” And more than nine out of ten law enforce-

ment agencies connected human trafficking to “other and existing

criminal networks such as drug distribution or prostitution.”38

Since 2000, a little over half the agencies that are investigating traf-

ficking cases have actually brought charges. Of these, a third have filed

federal charges, and of
these,
around 60 percent have actually prosecuted

cases under the TVPA. Law enforcement agencies stated that “a large

number of investigations do not result in arrests, but if an arrest is made”

a conviction was likely. As a result, in the reported cases about a quarter

of foreign victims received T visas, while roughly the same number were

deported. The biggest obstacles to victims’ cooperation were reported to

be “fear of retaliation to themselves or their family” and “a lack of trust