Combating Human Trafficking in Slavery

COMBATING HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN SLAVERY

Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I want to speak on the resolution that I believe will be passed by unanimous consent of the Senate which pertains to something I thought we would never be talking about now in the year 2004, and that is human slavery and trafficking in human beings.

The good work that has been done by the U.S. Congress, since, of course, the ratification of the 13th amendment in 1865 abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, includes a remarkable tradition, and a bipartisan tradition, I might add, starting, after 1865, in 1909, when the United States Code criminalized slavery.

In 2000, the late Senator Paul Wellstone and Senator Sam Brownback joined together as the lead sponsors, together with a number of other Senators and Representatives, to advance legislation to strengthen those laws, specifically the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which was later signed into law by President Bill Clinton. That legislation was reauthorized in 2003 by a bipartisan effort and signed into law by President George W. Bush.

I expressly recognize the contributions of Senator Schumer, Senator Graham of South Carolina, Senator Leahy of Vermont, and Senator Clinton, who joined in cosponsoring this resolution. Indeed, this resolution lays out the terrible tale of the fact that as many as 800,000 human beings are literally bought and sold worldwide into some form of slavery or involuntary servitude. Approximately 16,000 of those human beings are brought into the United States each year, coerced into lives of forced labor or sexual servitude which, of course, is another way of describing slavery.

This has been a bipartisan effort. It is refreshing to know, particularly during an election year where there are differences that divide us, where we know sometimes the rhetoric gets a little overwrought, that we can come together on such an important issue.

The fact is the current administration has responded to the call by dramatically increasing efforts into devoting substantially more resources toward combating human trafficking. This has been done principally under the auspices of the civil rights division at the Justice Department which has prosecuted and convicted three times the number of traffickers over the past 3 years as had been done in the preceding 3 years, three times more in this last 3 years than had been done in the preceding 3 years.

The Department of Justice has created the Office of Special Counsel for Trafficking Issues to coordinate antitrafficking efforts. It has also published educational and awareness-raising materials and circulated them to officials across America and provided assistance to victims of this trafficking by installing among other things a toll-free hotline. Last week the Department of Justice sponsored a historic national conference on human trafficking in Tampa, FL, bringing together Federal, State, and local officials, social service agencies, and nongovernmental organizations to provide training and coordination to antihuman trafficking efforts across the country as provided in the fiscal year 2004 appropriations bill.

The problem we uncovered was brought home during a recent hearing I chaired for the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights of the Judiciary Committee. We heard testimony about the men, women, and children who continue to be trafficked into the United States. Each of these stories is tragic, disturbing, and heartrending. It is hard to imagine that this sort of thing continues to happen today. Let me mention two of them.

In January of 2004, several defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 4 months to 14 years after a ringleader of a human trafficking ring admitted to running a human trafficking operation bringing women from Central America and then holding them in this country once they were smuggled into the country. They were held against their will. Many of them were sexually assaulted. All of them were forced to work against their will until their smuggling fees were paid by their families.

Another instance involved a research assistant and his wife at a university located in my State of Texas who were prosecuted for leading a trafficking ring that victimized young women. These young women were brought from Uzbekistan. They were lured to the United States by promises of lucrative modeling jobs, extravagant lifestyles, and also based on the promise that they would be able to bring their families once they were established here in the United States.

The defendants in this case used fraudulently obtained J-1 visas to bring women into the United States through El Paso, TX. The visas purported to show that the women were scientists traveling to the United States to do scientific research. But once here, their immigration documents were confiscated, and these women were forced to work at local strip clubs for the benefit of the defendants who ultimately collected more than $700,000 as a result of their criminal enterprise. These defendants were ultimately convicted and sentenced to 5 years in prison and ordered to pay more than a half million dollars in restitution to their victims.

One of the things that was brought home to me as a result of this hearing was that the same routes, the same criminal enterprises that engage in smuggling of human beings, who prey on their hopes or their desire for jobs and economic opportunity, it is the same people in many instances and the same routes and organizations that engage in illegal smuggling of human beings who want nothing more than to be able to come here and work and then send money home to their families. It is just that the ones who are the victims of this trafficking are not freed when they are brought into this country but literally kept in involuntary servitude and slavery, some approximately 16,000, we think, although the numbers have to be suspect. They have to be low because, indeed, we know the victims of this activity are reluctant to come forward because they may have come illegally into the country.

This is a persistent problem, one that touches on a larger issue, and that is, as we go forward with border security measures, to try to make sure that we protect our sovereign borders and to make sure our immigration laws are brought into modern times and the realities of our demand and indeed our reliance on labor provided by immigrants in this country. I hope we will view this as one of the terrible symptoms of a larger problem, and that is the need for us, as we establish the security of our borders, consistent with the post 9/11 world, that we also address the need to bring our immigration laws into this century. The President's call for immigration reform is part of it.

Particularly for those who are, once they are brought into this country based on promises of jobs and opportunity, but then enslaved, that we redouble our efforts to make sure we bring an end to this scourge.

I appreciate the bipartisan effort we have seen, the expressions of support for the work that has been done across the years by this administration, by previous administrations in combating the scourge of human slavery. I commend the Justice Department in particular for tripling the number of prosecutions they have obtained in these last 3 years over the preceding 3 years. This is a fight worth fighting. These are some of the most vulnerable victims we could possibly imagine. Their punishment is well deserved.