Several years ago, a young woman showed up at the offices of a social-services
agency in Albuquerque with a horrifying story. Her parents in her native
Honduras had sold her to an American man from New Mexico.
"He was a very old guy, and he had gone to this village in Honduras and found
this girl and made a deal with her parents," said Claudia Medina, director of
Enlace Comunitario, the agency on whose doorstep the woman landed.
The woman said the man kept her locked up in his home in a suburb of
Albuquerque, where he forced her to work and to have sex with him. The woman
told the agency's staff she eventually escaped out a window and flagged down
neighbors, who brought her to Albuquerque to seek help.
The woman returned to Honduras, and the man who had enslaved her went
unpunished, Medina said.
Medina said the case was one of the few examples of human trafficking she has
seen here in New Mexico.
US officials estimate that 17,000 people are trafficked into the United States
each year, forced to toil as private domestics, prostitutes, farmworkers and in
sweatshops.
Officials estimate that 80 percent of trafficking victims are women.
But the extent and nature of trafficking in New Mexico is poorly understood,
Medina said. That's why she has mixed feelings about a bill being promoted by
Attorney General Gary King that would make human trafficking a felony in New
Mexico.
Calling trafficking "modern-day slavery," King wants New Mexico to join the 24
states that have already passed anti-trafficking legislation. He is promoting
SB 778, sponsored by Sen. Mary Jane Garcia, a Las Cruces Democrat. The Senate
Public Affairs committee voted in favor of the bill Feb. 18. It is next due to
be heard at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The bill has sparked mixed reactions among immigrant and women's groups across
the state.
Medina favors an aspect of the bill that would create a task force to study
trafficking in New Mexico and train advocates how to identify and respond to
it.
"But I think it's premature to criminalize something when you don't know how
much of a problem it is," Medina said.
Marcela Diaz, director of the Santa Fe-based immigrant-rights group Somos Un
Pueblo Unido, said she also is concerned the law could have unintended
consequences, namely more harassment of immigrants at a time when federal
officials have stepped up workplace raids and deportations.
Some women's advocates in Southern New Mexico favor criminalization, saying the
state needs to bring resources to the issue because federal officials haven't
been willing to pursue possible trafficking cases the women's groups have
encountered.
"We understand the concerns about harassment. But we don't want people to be
doubly victimized, said Sally Meisenhelder a member of Amigos de las Mujeres de
Juarez, a Las Cruces organization that supports women's groups in Juarez.
Meisenhelder said that on a recent trip to the Arizona-Mexico border, she
encountered a group of migrants who told her they had been held captive by
their smuggler in Phoenix for five months, before being detained by federal
officials and deported.
Human trafficking is already a federal crime, and victims are eligible for
protection under a law passed in 2000.
But federal attorneys and investigators in New Mexico say no cases of human
trafficking have been prosecuted in recent memory.
"They're very, very rare," said Leticia Zamarripa, a spokeswoman for
Immigration Customs and Enforcement in El Paso.
Melissa Ewer, an attorney with Catholic Charities in Albuquerque who assists
immigrant victims of domestic violence applying for visas, said she has filed
no applications for a special visa set aside for victims of trafficking. She
said the visas have complicated requirements, including one that victims
cooperate in prosecuting their abuser.
Assistant attorney general Maria Sanchez-Gagne said lack of federal focus on
trafficking is a reason why New Mexico needs its own law. "One of the reasons
we're proposing it is that most of the federal effort is going toward
smuggling," Sanchez-Gagne said.
Human trafficking differs from immigrant smuggling in that it involves force,
fraud or deception for the purpose of sexual or economic exploitation.
Charles Song, legal director of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and
Trafficking, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles, said social-service and
law-enforcement agencies often fail to recognize trafficking when encountering
victims.
"In my view, trafficking is going on everywhere, but there's very little
awareness of it, Song said. "Service providers may have seen it, but they don't
know what they've seen. They might mistake it for simple domestic violence or
exploitation of farmworkers."
Song said he believes it is essential that states pass their own
anti-trafficking laws. He said victim's advocates in California spent a year
studying the issue before drafting legislation.
Immigration spokeswoman Zamarripa has one theory about the lack of
human-trafficking cases in New Mexico: While thousands of immigrants cross the
state each year, most are headed to cities with larger economies. "You could
have a scenario where the person enters willingly, but when they get to
Chicago, the smuggler won't release them," Zamarripa said. "That's when it
becomes trafficking."
But Marissa Silva, a member of Amigos de las Mujeres de Juarez, said federal
officials have shown a lack of interest in possible trafficking cases in
Southern New Mexico.
"(Federal officials) told us they were only willing to pursue cases with many
victims," Silva said. "They're not interested in Maria who is being kept
isolated without her documents."
