Given the high level of surveillance, the remote location of some trafficking venues, and the language isolation many victims experienced, a victim’s ability to connect with outside support was limited. Victims also faced barriers in identifying supportive communities that would be sensitive to their ethnic identity and fluent in their native language. According to our victim case data, 74 percent of victims did not speak English during the time of the victimization. In some cases, labor trafficking venues were situated in remote areas with little ethnic and language diversity. In other cases,
individuals who shared linguistic or cultural ties with the victim were also connected to the trafficker, thus making it difficult for the victim to rely on them for support. The high numbers of nonnative English speakers reflect the ways in which victims had to cross both lingual and physical bridges in order to escape their trafficking situation. As one victim explained,
I was completely—I was afraid. I didn’t speak English that was also another impediment for me because in the town, there weren’t very many people who spoke Spanish. There were few Latinos who were there, and the Latinos who were there were with my aunt [trafficker]. (site 3, female, restaurants)
The physical and linguistic isolation of victims created challenges for first responders to get involved. However, actors traditionally tasked with the responsibility of responding to victims’ needs, such as labor inspectors and medical personnel, were limited in their ability to aid victims in their escape. This limited ability resulted from two main obstacles. First, victims’ circumstances prevented them from accessing services. Second, when victims did come in contact with first responders, these
responders failed to identify the victim as such and respond accordingly. As the following quotation from a legal advocate illustrates, the level of meaningful contact varied and was important in determining whether victims received support.
So you might be able to—you might have gone into town once or something by yourself. And then come back. This is because the worker completely understands that they don’t have an option. They have to go back. To other people on the outside, it looks like, “Well, you’re free. Why didn’t you ask for help? You were in town. There was a car driving by on the road. Why didn’t you flag it down if you were starving?” I think that’s the real challenge that we face. The labor trafficking cases in my experience never come in the neat box where it’s all the facts that you hear about. (site 3, attorney 2)
Medical personnel who would have been able to detect and remove victims from their victim- ization experiences were not readily available to most victims. Although victims reported experiencing injuries and health problems that required the attention of medical personnel, not all victims were allowed to seek medical assistance and had to rely on self-treatment. As the victims below relate, even when confronting serious medical conditions, they were prevented from seeing a doctor.
Because my medical condition was getting worse and worse, and I thought all the while that I did not come to the United States to be a slave. I thought all the while that despite what we did to the hotels, why is it that people are not listening to us? It was just very frustrating already and I figured that this is a . . . I am being jailed and I am just a toy that they can just . . . a key toy that they can just ask me to work whenever they want. (site 1, survivor 1, male, hospitality) And they say, “Hey you cannot go to doctor, you don’t have paperwork, if I take you to doctor you will be in trouble, and I cannot pay this much money to medicines, doctors.” (site 2, survivor 3, female, domestic servitude)
Some victims, however, were able to receive medical attention. During these rare occurrences, medical staff members acting in their official capacity were able to respond appropriately and bring the victim to safety. As the quotation below demonstrates, victims had to flee traffickers to access medical support.
This case actually involves a foreign national, a Mexican foreign national. She was living with . . . . This is an outcry. She was working for, we’ll just say, the four traffickers and she was just doing a domestic servitude kind of situation. They had their . . . she had a cleaning business. One of the traffickers did. So she was forced to clean office buildings at night. And then one of the traffickers had his own construction business, and she was forced to also to work construction as well as cleaning the house and making food. She was mowing the backyard and she got poison ivy and they wouldn’t take her to the doctor. So finally after like two weeks, she was in so much pain that she ran out of the house and got someone to take her to the hospital. And that’s when she made her outcry and we got her information. (site 2, ICE agent1)
Not all victims who came in contact with medical professionals were able to receive the support they needed. This testimony from a survivor trafficked as a minor demonstrates the ways in which individuals who were in a capacity to offer support chose not to get involved:
I showed up to her house and half of my hair was gone, basically was pulled out from the roots [from abuse by trafficker], and she said she recalled her mom, her mom was a nurse and now I remember it, her mom was a nurse and her dad was a minister, and I showed up at that door and it was raining and I was crying because you know they had just beat me and her mother’s response, who was a nurse was, you know, “We just don’t want to get involved in this.” I think my only attempt was that time when I went to [friend’s] house when I was in [state] when I ran to her house, but of course if a pastor and a nurse can’t help me, then I felt like nobody could. (site 2, survivor 7, female, domestic servitude)
Similarly, contacts with labor inspectors were rare, and when contact did occur, the officials were rarely able to assist the victim in leaving their abusive environments. Visits by labor inspectors were also restricted to specific industries. Victims employed as domestic workers did not undergo
inspection because they worked within the privacy of a home in an unregulated industry, and there is no oversight or inspection by the Department of Labor or the US Department of State for victims working for diplomats. However, even for industries that fell under the labor inspectors’ jurisdiction, such as agriculture and the hospitality industry, contact with labor inspectors was rare. Few victims who entered the country with a temporary work visa, such as the H-2A or H-2B workers, reported inspectors speaking with them about their working conditions and treatment. The lack of oversight can perhaps be credited to the high numbers of H-2B and H-2A visas issued by the United States. In 2012, for example, 85,248 H-2A and 75,458 H-2B visas were processed.40
Across our interviews, only two victims reported having contact with labor inspectors. In these cases, the inspectors failed to converse with the victims themselves and/or declined to follow up with the employer about concerns raised by victims. Scheduled visits by inspectors created opportunities for traffickers to manipulate labor environments and form the illusion that labor trafficking was not taking place. Despite reporting abuses to labor inspectors, one victim explained that the traffickers did not receive more than a fine, and no further efforts to investigate the case were made:
Two men and a couple young ladies came personally to interview us, just like you are doing. “How are they treating you? Does he bring you firewood?” But that day, the man brought us food, plenty of food. Yes, we told them that three or four days before you came, he brought us this stuff. Here is all the food. You have seen all the food, what state the house is in, that it was in bad conditions, and all of this to report I don’t know where. They told us they made the man pay a fine. That is also what part of the problem was also. He said, why we didn’t say we lived well, that he treated us well . . . so, basically lying. (site 3, survivor 8, male, agriculture)
Our focus group with agriculture workers produced similar findings. When asked about visits from labor inspectors, agriculture workers interpreted this question to mean if any inspector had entered
their working facility and talked at length about inspectors entering facilities to observe the conditions of animals and equipment, but failed to examine the conditions of the workers. As the quotation below illustrates, the priority was placed on workplace environments or the proper treatment of animals, never on the well-being of the employees themselves.
Well yes, an inspector does come, over there where the machines are, but it is from the farm. They just check everything. The worksite, the cleanliness, the milk, if it is coming out clean our not, so basically to make sure everything is clean. There are some that don’t speak Spanish, but they leave the manager in charge and he speaks a little Spanish and so then he tell us—like we need to maintain the machines clean or there will be an inspection this afternoon. When it is something more urgent, they have a translator for us in Spanish. . . . They go directly with the bosses or the managers. . . . Sometimes there are those who come to supervise the animals’ rights, that they shouldn’t be mistreated, that they shouldn’t be hit, something like that. (site 4b, migrant worker focus group)
The limited support emergency responders were able to grant victims, along with the restricted contact victims had with these actors, made it difficult for victims to rely on these external players for help escaping their trafficking situation. Often, as described in the next quotation, the first responders were there only to offer general assistance and were not trained to look for signs of illegal activity.
So LEOs [law enforcement officers] are mandated, their training is mandated, but you have people like firefighters, and they don’t have training mandated. And their perspective is so different, they’re trained to go in and help, and sort of look at the whole picture, and they’re not suspicious of anyone, they’re not trying to find who the bad guy is, they’re just there to help. So people see them differently, people see them as heroes, they disclose a whole lot more to these guys, but there are not mandated trainings. So that’s another big thing. (site 2, victim service agency executive directors 1 and 2)
When medical personnel or other first responders were unwilling or unable to offer assistance, victims had to depend on law enforcement for their escape. As the next section outlines, this was not always the most appealing option for victims.