Taking On Global Human Trafficking Rings

Human trafficking is an extremely profitable crime, the third most lucrative criminal activity in the United States following drugs and guns.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Krishna Patel came to the Quinnipiac Law School Thursday to describe some of the weapons federal law enforcement officials have employed against this global crime wave.

She also said she hoped some of the law students might become interested in going to work for the U.S. Justice Department and helping fight against new schemes crime organizations have utilized in our globally connected world.

Patel, who works out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Bridgeport, is an international authority on fighting human trafficking crime, according to Quinnipiac law professor Jeffrey Meyer.

"She’s managed to focus her investigations and enforcement on issues that really cross borders," Meyer said.

Patel joined the U.S. Justice Department in 1999. She moved to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Connecticut in 2003 where she became involved in enforcement of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA).

She said the victims of human trafficking crimes are usually women, teenagers and children who are forced to work as prostitutes, servants or laborers without pay. If they resist or attempt to escape, their captors beat them, torture them or even murder them.

Before Congress passed the TVPA in 2001, law enforcement officials only had anti-slavery laws to use for prosecution. The TVPA is far better, because it doesn’t require evidence that the victims were kept in chains or locked up to make the charges stick.

It also enables law enforcement to send human traffickers away for lengthy prison terms of 20 years or more, she said.

Patel said contemporary human traffickers don’t need to chain up their captives. They employ psychological coercion to control their victims, who have been lured to the United States with promises of respectable jobs and better lives. The victims don’t know English and have no one to turn to.

"You are dealing with groups of people from all over the world who don’t know the language. Getting them to trust you is the toughest thing in the world," she said.

Federal authorities have found non-governmental agencies (NGOs) and charitable groups who work with immigrants to be valuable allies, because they know the victims’ languages and customs and can gain their trust faster.

Rapidly gaining victims’ trust is essential for successfully prosecuting the traffickers, Patel said.

She said a strategy that has proven very effective is to form law enforcement task forces with immigration and FBI agents working with the State Police, local police and NGOs. When trafficking rings are arrested, she said the victims are taken to women’s centers or community centers where they meet with NGO representatives.

The TVPA has also given law enforcement new weapons for combating domestic human trafficking, which most often involves women and girls coerced into prostitution.

Patel said one trafficking ring was broken up after Bridgeport police discovered a 12-year-old girl in a local strip club. Her office investigated and discovered she was being transported around the country to major sports events where she was sold as a prostitute.

Sometimes girls are brought to the United States and forced to work as household slaves, working as nannies and maids, paid nothing and never given a day off.

Other trafficking victims are forced to work in stores, nail salons, sweatshops or farms. Patel said a human trafficking ring on Long Island had dozens of undocumented aliens living in trailers. During the day they were sent to work at jobs and then forced to turn over their paychecks to the traffickers.

Her office is also investigating a disturbing new crime involving Americans who go to foreign countries to exploit children for sex.

Patel led a high-profile investigation recently in which the head of a religious charity in Fairfield County was convicted of sexually abusing boys at a school he set up in Haiti.

She told the Quinnipiac students about the major obstacles she and her investigators had to overcome, not least of all was the disastrous earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, that took place about a month after the investigation started.

Also, Haitian government authorities were uncooperative and many local residents sided with the charity leader, refusing to believe he could have been at fault.

But many of the victims readily came forward to testify and Haitian newspapers followed the story extensively. Patel said the result is the case has become a major deterrent to child exploitation in Haiti.