The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Trump Administration’s Plan to Deport Victims of Human Trafficking

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

The New Yorker contributor Jenna Krajeski recently met with a woman who calls herself Esperanza. In her home country, Esperanza was coerced and threatened into prostitution, and later was trafficked into the United States, where she was subjected to appalling conditions. Esperanza eventually obtained legal help, and applied for something called a T visa. The T visa contains unusual provisions that recognize the unique circumstances of human-trafficking victims in seeking legal status. It has also been a crucial tool to obtaining victims’ coöperation in prosecuting traffickers. The Trump Administration claims to want to fight the problem of human trafficking, but Krajeski notes that its policies have done the opposite: T-visa applicants can now be deported if their applications are rejected. This dramatic change in policy sharply reduced the number of applications from victims seeking help. “If what [the Administration] cares about is putting traffickers in prison, which is what they say they care about, their prosecutions are going down and will go down further,” Martina Vandenberg, the president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, says. “Trafficking victims under the circumstances can’t actually coöperate.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the very few human rights issues that the Trump administration has shown an interest in is the issue of human trafficking. The president has argued that building a wall, the wall, would prevent kidnappers from taking people by force over the border, which is kind of a Hollywood version of trafficking,

that, in fact, is very rare. And yet some of the policies the Trump administration has put in place have made it harder, not easier, for victims of human trafficking to seek help. That's according to Jenna Krojewski, who's been reporting for the New Yorker and for the Fuller project about trafficking. Now, Jenna, you've written in depth about something called a T visa, which most of us probably aren't familiar with. So what is that?

A T visa is a specific kind of humanitarian visa for victims of veterans of human trafficking in the U.S. who are not U.S. citizens. And what it does is offer them a way to stay in the country legally. It offers them a path to citizenship, and it gives them a way to have family members from their home country, possibly join them in the U.S. And it's different from something like a refugee visa. The T visa really recognizes the unique circumstances that a non-citizen victim of trafficking might have in the U.S.

So, for instance, it recognizes that a victim of trafficking may have been forced to commit crimes while they were being trafficked, often related to their trafficking, like prostitution, for instance, and gives them a way to be pardoned by the government for those crimes. T. Visa was intended for people precisely like this woman I met recently. A couple months ago, I went to Washington, D.C., just outside. of the city in one of these new sort of booming suburbs, just block after block of office building and shops. I'm there to meet someone I'm going to call Esperanza. We met in a small office. She was with her translator and her lawyer, and I just wanted to hear her story. My name is Esperanza. Esperanza is now in her 30s. Esperanza is now in her 30s.

The childhood she described in a small town in Latin America was poor but happy. She had a big family. They worked in agriculture. She had to start working when she was quite young. When she was 18, she was approached by a man on the street who she described as,

being wealthy looking. He was well-dressed. He said nice things to her. He flirted with her. I met him like how you just meet people along the way. In a store or someplace, you just meet people by chance. And so we started getting to know each other. We started talking. She was naturally taken with him and they started dating. After a little while, she moved with him to his hometown, along with her two young daughters, who she'd had from a previous relationship, immediately things started to change. When they got to his hometown, he said that he didn't have enough money, and that because he had spent so much money on her, it was now her turn to help make ends meet.

She assumed that it was going to be working in a restaurant or agriculture and things like that. But he took her to a hotel and he said, this is where you're going to be working. And that was her first experience being forced into prostitution. When I got there, the hotel owner explained what I actually had to do. So they gave me room, they gave me towels, they gave me alcohol. They gave me alcohol. I didn't really even know what a condom. I didn't really even know what a condom was.

She stayed in that situation for a few months, and then her trafficker came to her and said, if you go to the U.S., you'll make more money. She had never considered moving to the U.S., and the idea of it was terrifying to her, not just because it was a foreign country, but because she had children. her children were one of the ways that her trafficker controlled her.

He would withhold them from her until she made a certain amount of money. He knew that she was worried about their well-being. He knew that she wanted to see them. And so he used both of those facts to keep her doing what he wanted her to do. For me, they're the most precious thing. of what sustains me. These girls are like the cane in my hand that prevents me from falling.

Clearly, you were not able to take them with you when you were forced to come to the United States by your trafficker. I couldn't bring my girls with me because it was part of the plan. In what way? plan of who is.

It was part of the plan of that man who was bringing me here. Did you get to say goodbye to them? I had the chance one week before I left to say goodbye.

Last time I saw them, I remember. My daughter said to me, Mom, why don't you spend time us anymore. I didn't know what to say. I just remember I told them I loved them.

What could happen in our lives. And no matter what happened, I would come back to them sooner or later. And we would be together again. And we would be together again. You may be thinking that Esperanza's story sounds really familiar. And that's because many, many people are trafficked in the U.S. every year. Some are sex trafficked and others are labor trafficked. Some are citizens and some are not. Some cross the border on foot. Others come in through legal ports of entry. Since trafficking

is notoriously underreported, it's virtually impossible for us to know how many people are being trafficked in the U.S. But in 2000, Congress came together and passed a bipartisan piece of legislation called the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, otherwise known as the TVPA. And that was really important because what they were saying is we don't know the scope of trafficking in the U.S., but we know it's a huge problem and we want to help survivors. One of the most important things the legislation led to was the T-Visa. Martina Vandenberg is the founder and president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center and was someone who really pushed for the TVPA at the time it was being drafted.

It was a coming together of experts from, you know, across the spectrum, people expert in domestic violence, people expert in migration, people expert in human rights. People who had been serving trafficking victims, although they weren't called that then. What were they called? You know, they were called victims of, you know, victims of servitude or victims of involuntary servitude. It was the sort of crime that had no name, really, because trafficking at that point, people thought trafficking was something that happened in Nepal. It didn't happen here, right? That was some foreign problem that happened in Thailand, not in Los Angeles.

All trafficking victims are in a really perilous situation, but there are certain unique things, unique dangers to non-citizen victims. The T-Visa recognized that they're in a foreign country, maybe they don't speak the language, maybe they don't know anyone. They might be at risk of being arrested for crimes that they're, forced to commit because of their trafficking. Maybe they don't have proper documentation, and that gives their trafficker an incredible amount of leverage. If a trafficker says to someone they're holding in forced labor or forced prostitution, you have no passport, you have no

visa, they're looking for you, the police are my friends. If you go and ask someone for help, you'll be stuck in detention for months, and ultimately you'll be deported. So much better, says the trafficker, for you to stay with me and continue this life, than for you to go out on the street with no documentation and get deported. Esperanza crosses the border with a smuggler hired by her trafficker. This is in around 2006 that she finds herself in the situation. She ends up in Queens, New York. And just a warning, what we're going to hear is really difficult.

It involves details of Esperanza's data. day life being trafficked, so if you're listening with children, you may want to take that into account. In Queens, Esperance's traffickers have her living in an apartment. Where I was in a room with a mattress on the floor. There were two types of work. One where they have you working in apartments. the other one where it's like deliver jobs.

Like if they're delivering pizza or food, they would call by phone and then will be taken to the addresses they gave. How many clients, on average, would you see a day? On a slow day, like when no many clients enter, restore the minimum

was maybe 25, 35 clients. 35, 25. 25. 25, that's an incredible number. When it's

a day that no there's almost no work, that is what it is. But when the days are busy, they're more

to 50. Sometimes it's more than 50, 60, 70. On weekends, it's all day long. Wow, so 35 isn't average. So... Okay, she wants to take a break. Okay, okay, of course. If you've never been in a situation like this before,

you might wonder why didn't she try to escape? Esperanza was in a city. She was surrounded by people. Why didn't she tap a police officer on the shoulder and tell him what was happening to her? And actually, Esperanza did try to escape once. She left the apartment and then immediately found herself in a pretty terrifying situation. She's in a foreign country. She doesn't speak the language.

Her trafficker has told her time and time again that if she tries to escape, She'll be arrested for prostitution. She doesn't have any money. She doesn't have any food. And of course, she's thinking about her kids. And if she escapes, will the trafficker hurt them? So she goes back to the apartment and tells her traffickers that she got lost and that's why she's late. So given all of that, one of the most surprising things about Esperanza's story is that she managed to escape.

One night, she was coming home and something was wrong with her key. She's struggling to get into her apartment building. As she's trying to get in, she sees a man coming up to her. He forces her to a nearby park where he rapes her. She ends up getting pregnant by the attack, and her trafficker is so enraged. He beats her and takes anything that she owns out of the apartment, leaving her nothing.

And I think in that moment, with absolutely nothing having just been subjected to just a whole other level of trauma, she leaves. She walks out. Esperanza makes her way down to D.C., where her traffickers would send her to work sometimes. She meets a man, and she gets pregnant again,

and even though she doesn't stay with him, she has the baby. She also goes to a local church where she makes some friends, and in a real turning point, one of her friends helps her get a job as a nanny. I never imagined she would pay me

to take care of her kids. The first week, she gave me $175 for the two girls. Then she referred me to $2,000, other moms with kids. Just like that, her life starts to open up in this incredible way. That's how I went. That's how I was able to leave everything.

Now I work in construction. I'm learning electrical work. I'm still learning my numbers because I didn't go to school. That's still hard for me. She gets referred to a social services center in D.C. called Ayuda. And there she meets a lawyer who tells her about this special kind of visa for trafficking victims called a T visa, which will help her stay in the country and help her bring her kids over. She first comes to Ayuda in 2016, and 2016, of course, is also the year that

Donald Trump is elected president. So the rhetoric around immigration immediately starts to change. We're taking people out of the country. You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. These are animals. And we're taking about it. The Trump administration publicly condemns trafficking. And they claim to have made it a cornerstone human rights issue of their administration. We're getting it done. Human trafficking is a disaster.

Nobody knew too much about it until recently. Women are tied up. They're bound. Duck tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases, they can't even breathe. Trump brings it up all the time in speeches. His daughter Ivanka wrote an op-ed for. the Washington Post about trafficking. But the way Trump talks about it, it fundamentally misrepresents

what trafficking actually looks like on the ground. And the policies that he's passing, like ramping up deportations, like making it harder for people to get asylum, are really just making it that much more difficult for a victim of trafficking to leave their trafficking situation and stay safely in the U.S. And not long after he's elected, the people who actually work on T visa cases start to notice changes in the process. Here's Martina Vandenberg again. The Trump administration started making changes that seemed small, seemed like tinkering around the edges.

If you don't do T-Visa applications, if you're not dealing with these particular clients, you might not even notice. Katie Flannery is Esperanza's lawyer at Ayuda, and when I meet them, she starts explaining the whole process for applying for a T-Bisa. So the first one, this is, the application for the T visa itself. It is 10 pages long. Katie explains that one of the forms

her clients often have to submit with T visas has a fee of about $1,000 to file. In the past, the government has usually waived that fee, but under Trump, things have started to change. USCIS determined that there was insufficient evidence of her inability to pay. I mean, did this come as a shock to you? No. No. I mean, two years ago it would have. But basically every fee waiver that we submit gets denied. It's not clear to me that anyone is really even looking at them. Interesting. So when it comes to evidence for getting the visa.

So the standard for a T visa is any credible evidence. That is USCIS's standard of what is required. So they will consider anything. Right. And so it's kind of saying we believe the victim. What Katie told me is that the government started sending applications back, asking for more evidence that the person had been trafficked. And you can imagine how absurd and impossible that is for most victims of trafficking who just simply don't have receipts or leases on apartments, tax returns. I mean, what kind of evidence were they expecting?

just really wouldn't expect there to be a paper trail. But probably the biggest change in the T visa process involves something called an NTA. If you're not involved in immigration law, you've probably never heard of it. It stands for a notice to appear. And basically, if you get an NTA, it means you have to appear in immigration court. In November of 2018, the Trump administration announced that if you apply for a T visa and you're denied, you may. end up in immigration court. Here's Martina Bandonberg again.

In the past, what I could say is, if we lose, there's no downside. Because if we lose, the government doesn't go after people. Nobody's going to deport you. You're back in that same limbo that you were before, right? You're still in limbo. The change in the middle of 2018 said, any denial, you get a deportation notice. I have not filed a T-V visa application since November of 2018. So while the administration has claimed to make trafficking a priority,

it has made these changes that make it much harder for victims to come forward. Not only is that cruel to the victims, but it makes it much more difficult for law enforcement to pursue, to investigate, to prosecute these cases. I talked with a guy named Greg Dalga, a former special agent with Homeland Security Investigations. How are you doing, Greg? Good. Sorry to keep you waiting.

He worked on a trafficking task force for years before he retired in 2017. And here's how he put it. If you think about a drug crime and say you're driving down the street and there's a kilo cocaine in the trunk and you get stopped and they run a dog around the car, that's your evidence right there is that kilo. Now, put that over on either on the sex or labor trafficking side and you're driving down the street and you have a 15-year-old girl in the car or you have two 17-year-old males from Guatemala who are working at some egg farm and you're putting them in hoard conditions. If they get stopped by law enforcement and they won't talk to law enforcement as far as their predicament or what's happening to them, you have no case. for me as an investigator, but as a person to know that, okay, at the end of the tunnel, somebody on the other side may ultimately sit and say, okay, I don't believe your story or your story doesn't carry enough weight.

And then issue them, and TA, I think, is, it doesn't make for a good roadmap to be able to do a criminal case. The TV's a data for Trump's first full year in office. was recently released. The numbers show that the approval rate has been cut in half, so now about 35% of the applications are being approved. The wait times have nearly tripled. They used to be under a year, and now they are approaching three years. And really importantly, federal prosecutions are down about 20%. They're shooting themselves in the foot. Here's Martina Vandenberg again. If what they care about is trafficking prosecutions, if what they care about is putting traffickers in prison, which is what they say they care about, their prosecutions are going down and will go down

further because trafficking victims under these circumstances can't actually cooperate. Esperanza's application is in. She knows that if she's denied, she might be forced to show up in immigration court, but it's a risk that she feels like she has to take. She has kids in both countries in the U.S. and back home. She can't go back. She's terrified that if she does, she'll be at risk of violence from her traffickers. But her older kids are still there. Right now, they're with her family. They're safe. But she's worried about their future. She's worried they're vulnerable to the same things that she was vulnerable to. She's just, desperate to get them to the U.S.

The visa T is a new life for me. The T visa means a new life for me. A new opportunity for me. La visa T for me makes recobar my life that I've

had puted. It lets me recover the life I lost. With my whole family. When I decided to And I decided to do this, I asked God to give me wisdom, the strength I needed, to make a decision, a big decision. He's giving me the chance to live many times. From everything that's happened, I don't even know how many films I could make. There is so much.

This isn't even one quarter of my. my story of my life. And the fourth part of my story of my life. That's the voice of Camilla Osorio, translating for the woman we're calling Esperanza. Jenna Krogeski is a journalist for the Fuller project which reports on issues that impact

women globally. And she contributes to the New Yorker as well. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianning Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Andres O'Hara,

and Stephen Valentino, with help from Mung Faye Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.