Service providers were in unanimous agreement that emergency shelter and long-term, transitional housing are both the most immediate needs and the biggest challenges for labor trafficking survivors. A study conducted by Polaris Project found there are no beds exclusively designated for labor trafficking victims across the United States (Polaris Project 2012). Our study, particularly the interviews with survivors, revealed that the challenge of providing shelter was more than just a story of a lack of available bed space. The need for shelter was often driven by three main issues:
1. Shelter for the majority of labor trafficking victims was controlled by the trafficker; either the
victim lived in the workplace where they were trafficked (56 percent) or the trafficker controlled the victims’ movement to work (80 percent). This control typically involved traffickers owning or renting the housing of the victims and transporting them to the
workplace. As a result, when victims escaped their labor trafficking experience, they often lost their place of residence.
2. Victims who escaped their labor trafficking experience left without money, credit, references,
and often without immigration status (69 percent of our sample were unauthorized by the time they reached a specialized service provider). These factors, together with the significant time lag (sometimes several months or several years) that many victims reported between their escape and reaching a specialized service provider, meant that during this time victims lived under the radar and relied on strangers and their social networks, however limited, to find shelter and work.
3. The difficulty of obtaining long-term housing for unauthorized trafficking victims was often
exacerbated by federal law enforcement officials’ reluctance to grant temporary immigration relief (continued presence) and work authorization.47 Service providers can apply for a T visa, but it may take anywhere from three months to a few years for a T visa to be approved.48 If survivors are unable to legally work, they are unable to rent apartments and are in need of housing. Some survivors in our study also wanted secure shelter because their traffickers were still at large.49 In addition, some survivors had to move quite a distance from any social network they had in order to receive specialized services and/or participate in a criminal justice case. As a result of these major housing issues, secure emergency shelter was needed immediately after escape, and longer-term housing options were needed while survivors awaited approval of special visas and work authorization and/or while participating in civil or criminal justice cases. The factors above highlight the need for more nuanced immediate and long-term shelter and housing options for labor trafficking survivors, as well as changes in the process of granting continued presence and T visas.
The difficulty of obtaining shelter was further exacerbated by gender. For male victims of labor trafficking, who constituted 47 percent of our sample, gender appeared to add another layer of challenges in terms of access to shelter. As one service provider noted,
I think, very clearly male victims of trafficking, whether it was sex or labor, but obviously we saw more male victims of labor trafficking, lack of shelter options and lack of any services or support groups that were for men by men. I think that there were. I don’t actually always think that gender is the best way to divide things, you know. I think a lot can come from a diverse group of people coming together, but I did find that, you know, there was, it was often hard to find specific support, services. And especially for men who had been victims of some form of sexual violence that is harder to find support for. I think housing is a, number one. I can’t believe how little housing we have and throwing a victim of any kind into a homeless shelter in [city] is terrifying. Like a hundred percent terrifying. You know? (site 1a, former service provider)
Although it may appear that there are more shelter options for women, these shelters are usually designated for victims of domestic violence, and female victims of labor trafficking may be turned away. A young woman victimized in a large H-2B hospitality case with hundreds of victims throughout the United States recounted how she and three other victims were unable to receive shelter from one of the service providers charged with assisting their case. And in the case below, victims were granted CP, but they could not obtain housing due to a lack of credit history.
Right now I belong to a group of survivors—[name of advocacy organization]. Because there are so many things that we want to change. I came to [service provider state]. Nobody could give me some refuge here. They gave me places where I could go live. But two of the shelters—I went to two of them—and they didn’t accept me. So with my other three coworkers[trafficking
that whole time. . . . They [service provider] couldn’t help me. I had to wait there. Cockroaches, rats while I was sleeping. We didn’t have anywhere to go. So we just worked, and we saved money between the four of us. We couldn’t find another apartment because we didn’t have any credit. We would apply, but they wouldn’t give us an apartment. (site 1a, survivor 2, female, hospitality)
The fact that the majority of survivors were unauthorized immigrants at the time they needed shelter created extra barriers. The service provider quoted below, working in a large urban area, describes the challenges she faced in obtaining shelter and how there were no other options for unauthorized immigrant victims of labor trafficking in her city besides immigration detention centers.
I would say that for people who are in the lower poverty, or close to poverty line in [city], safe and stable housing is just a constant thing that has to be addressed. . . . And so to me, in my role it is the most stressful thing, is when somebody calls and there is that need for housing, it’s like “Oh, [expletive]!” Because there are domestic violence shelters within [city], but they don’t . . . they have like two spots for men, and I would say, generally speaking, that they don’t take men. And a lot of our clients have children but don’t have children with them so they’re singles, and that’s the hardest spots to find. And or don’t want to be in a confidential shelter. I think that we try to reinforce that there is not a huge difference between trafficking victims and like other victims of crime, and like it is very similar. But at the end of the day I think, if you’re very new to this country and you go into a city shelter or a city [domestic violence] shelter, you’re not going to look . . . and maybe you’re not going to feel comfortable. I mean I know I wouldn’t feel comfortable there either. I mean most people, even if they’ve grown up in it, don’t feel comfortable there. Yeah, so there is just that level of discomfort around it. But we work with this organization [shelter in city], and they have an emergency shelter and a transitional shelter that they just opened last year. So they can only house women, they’re a group of nuns. But then we have some other relationships with a sort of hostel hotel that we can use. Then we have some access to hotels through [city]. So we sort of piecemeal these things together, and there is a group of clients who go into DHS shelter systems,50 and then are there for a really long time because they can’t get moved to the program shelters because they don’t have immigration status and can’t get access to any of the housing vouchers, even though they all collapsed anyway. (site 1a, caseworker 1)
Another service provider in the city described above stated there were no real shelter options for non–US citizen trafficking victims in her community.
Interviewer: Do they have shelters that are specific for international [non-US citizen] trafficking victims?
Service provider: Not really. Allegedly there are. There’s really no shelters for trafficking— supposedly a couple have opened recently. But I have never been able to get anyone in there. . . . I don’t know who goes there because I have never ever been able to get a client in there, never, ever. Not once. (site 1a, outside social worker 1)
In addition to the challenges outlined above, providing short-term emergency shelter could be especially challenging in situations in which a large number of victims (sometimes in the hundreds) were uncovered at one time. One survivor described her experience this way:
One day I got a call from one of the [law enforcement] agents and he told me that I have to go, we have to go with a family. I was like, “Where is it and why?” He’s like, “Well you know what? It’s a lot of people in [city 1] who are going through this too, and they don’t have enough money to support all of us, so that’s why they have [service provider in city 2] and they have an organization in [city 2] that are more than willing to help us.”
So that’s why we have to move from [city 1] to [city 2], and they’re going to take care of
everything. And now we can totally be 100 percent sure that we’re gonna be okay and it’s like, he told me it’s going to be a new life over there. I told them that we don’t have money because I loan money from my friends and we just ran out of money, so they gave us actually money to get to [city 2]. They gave us the phone numbers and the names that we have to find in [city 2]. We have to go to [city 2]. So they gave us all of this information, they gave us money, they gave us map. Everything to make sure that we’re going to be all right and we drove to [city 2]. (site 3, survivor 3, female, hospitality)
This story illustrates the challenges of providing shelter (and transportation) for a large number of victims identified at one time; such cases are typical of labor trafficking cases involving guest worker programs (H-2A for agriculture and H-2B for the hospitality, construction, and restaurant industries). In the case above, the victims, living for the first time in the United States, had to drive approximately four hours to the other side of the state to get to a second service provider who could provide them shelter. Secure shelter options were also needed in cases in which traffickers and their associates were still at large and may have retaliated against victims. Traffickers in the United States often have links to recruiters or associates in a victim’s home country who are able to threaten the victim and the victim’s family members; often for long periods after the labor trafficking has ended. The next two interview excerpts are just a few experiences that highlight the threats victims received from labor traffickers and/or their associates after they escaped, even for survivors who had obtained housing from service providers. In the first case, the victim recounts how he and other victims were shot at by an associate of the trafficker, just weeks after being moved by a service provider into a new living situation.
Interviewer: How long were [you] in [first city of victimization] for?
Survivor: Two days after. They gave . . . they turned us in to [service provider]. [Service provider] said they would give us assistance. They would take us to a place where we could live. They were going to give us food and anything that we needed like that. They took us to a hotel for a week. They gave us food and stuff like that. Calling cards for our family. Then after that they took us to another hotel, a different one. Two weeks there, and then a lot of difficult things happened. In one of my friend’s rooms, at 1:30 in the morning, somebody shot from one room to another. They shot towards her bed. They were aiming at her bed. (site 1a, survivor 2, female, hospitality)
In the case below, a survivor describes how her trafficker found her location at a shelter and how she continued to threaten the victim and the other residents. Rather than arrest her trafficker, the survivor explained that she believed immigration authorities paid the trafficker the $5,000 bond she stated the survivor owed her for her smuggling debt in an effort to get her to stop her stalking and
harassment. Despite this, the survivor explained she would run into the trafficker, and it took her over a year to feel comfortable walking outside alone.
Survivor: I went in the shelter. She’s still sought out from people she used to, you know, she talks and she can really do a good investigation, she investigated until she knew I was in that shelter. . . . So she went and to whoever is in in charge of [shelter name], his name is [director] and she went there and she went there and attacked that girl and it wasn’t really a good thing, everybody was afraid . . . she really threatened us there, yeah. Yeah, threatening them, telling them she knows much about the government and if anything they are the ones who will be in problems because they’re still seeking for their status. . . . I was afraid. Anytime even at the shelter I never used to go and buy anything from outside because I didn’t want to get out at all, at all.
Interviewer: And so that had to be very scary with her being in the same town as you. Survivor: Yes.
Interviewer: And what were you afraid would happen if you went out?
Survivor: We would meet, because anytime she kept on saying if she meets me, I’ll be in trouble. So I was like, maybe we might meet and she might just hit me with her car and run away or do something or use somebody because she knows so many people in [city]. She has been here for long, so she can use someone to hit me or she can do something to me even though the police kept on telling me, “No, we have her, and the police has circulated in all police stations anything that happens to you we will know.” But I wasn’t safe, I didn’t, I didn’t trust them. (site 4, survivor 1, female, domestic servitude)
Shelter needs for labor trafficking victims are significant and severe. A lack of short-term emergency housing and long-term transitional housing places survivors in precarious and sometimes dangerous positions, both from possibly being targeted by traffickers who may still be at large and from having to rely on the assistance of strangers or loose acquaintances to provide shelter. Delays in T visas and an almost continual refusal by authorities to grant continued presence to trafficking victims exacerbate their shelter needs.