Feds focusing
help on human trafficking victims in Las Vegas
Las Vegas Sun
March 16, 2005
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Federal and local service providers were
training Wednesday on ways to identify and help human
trafficking victims working in sex, construction, restaurant or
housekeeping trades in southern Nevada.
The expansion of a Department of a Health and Human Services
program Tuesday to Las Vegas comes after the Department of
Justice and other federal and local authorities announced a law
enforcement crackdown on human trafficking in September.
The Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking effort
aims to help more than 30 southern Nevada service agencies that
shelter runaways and offer aid to trafficking victims, officials
said.
"We see these kids on a nightly basis," said Kevin
Morss, coordinator of a WestCare street outreach team that got a
$150,000 grant Tuesday to double in size to four members.
WestCare is a nonprofit agency that also offers substance abuse
and mental health treatment in the Las Vegas area.
Maj. William Raihl, Salvation Army coordinator in Clark
County, called the agencies "a safety net for the victims
of human trafficking, allowing them to come forward and get the
help they need."
The Salvation Army is getting part of a $500,000 federal
grant to provide shelter and other services to people brought
from a foreign country and forced into what Steve Wagner,
director of the Health and Human Services Trafficking in Persons
Program, called "modern day slavery." Las Vegas is the
11th U.S. city included in the effort.
Wagner said the problem involves children, women and men
forced against their will to engage in sex, prostitution,
pornography, escort services, or to perform labor in massage
parlors, farms, construction, restaurants and sweat shop
factories.
Most are persuaded to trust their captors and employers by
the promise of fame and fortune or a better life in America.
Emmett McGroarty, deputy director of the Trafficking in
Persons program, said Rescue and Restore aims to train those
likely to encounter human trafficking victims how to help, how
to report the crime and how to help authorities prevent it.
Victims are more likely to trust service providers than law
enforcement officials, McGroarty said.
Federal authorities estimate as many as 17,500 people are
brought into the United States each year in some form of
bondage.
Prostitution rings have been found involving Eastern European
women, Las Vegas police Sgt. Al Cervantes said, and authorities
have also found cases of women forced to work in Asian massage
parlors.
In 2004, Las Vegas police found 207 girls forced into
prostitution, Sgt. Gil Shannon said, with at least half brought
to southern Nevada from other states.
Shannon, of the police department's Juvenile Vice
Investigation Squad, said the girls are lured by pimps and other
girls into prostitution at hotels on and off the Las Vegas
Strip, and bound by threats and intimidation.
Those who are apprehended enter a program called Operation
Stop, where they are treated as victims and encouraged to help
authorities prosecute their pimps.
Shannon said most victims are reunited with family or placed
in programs helping them leave prostitution.
Since 2001, the U.S. attorney in Las Vegas has prosecuted
four human trafficking cases. Operation Jade Blade, a 2 1/2-year
federal investigation, led to the conviction of several people
for smuggling Asian women into Las Vegas for prostitution.
David Thronson, co-director of the immigration law clinic at
the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas,
said not all human trafficking cases involve the sex trade.
He said he recently helped three people, including a woman
who escaped forced agricultural work in another state, obtain a
T-Visa. The document is issued to human trafficking victims who
cooperate with the prosecution of their oppressors.
Thronson said some trafficking victims are lured into debt
bondage, by employers who help get them into the U.S. in return
for repaying a sum that gets bigger instead of smaller over
time.
Original link: http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2005/mar/16/031610193.html
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