http://www.belleville.com/mld/bellevill ... 582905.htm

Posted on Mon, May. 15, 2006

Asian spa arrests fuel debate on human trafficking

BY PAUL MEYER
The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS - The women slept on carpets and Korean floor mats, stealing a few hours' rest before another day of turning $100 tricks in the shadows of Interstate 35.

Startled, they woke shortly before dawn as federal agents and Dallas police stormed inside. Dozens of South Koreans were arrested at eight Asian spas and shuttled to an immigration center a few miles away.

For the government, the raid marked a major victory in efforts to dismantle a nationwide network of South Korean brothels and brokers. For 42 women, it began a journey guided by questions at the moral center of U.S. policies governing human rights and human trafficking:

Were they common opportunists trading dignity for distant American dreams? If so, they would be returned to face uncertain futures in Seoul.

Or were they victims, prisoners of global flesh traders, trapped in a web of debts and threats? If so, they might stay in the United States for three years with the chance to become residents.

Over nine months, the cases would pit victims' advocates against federal immigration agents and spur Justice Department involvement on behalf of at least two detainees.

To date, 34 have been ordered home or are in deportation proceedings. Five have been identified as potential victims of trafficking. Three faced no immigration or criminal charges.

"At the end of the day, I thought we all felt pretty used," said Vanna Slaughter of Catholic Charities, a nonprofit group called in to help the women.

Slaughter and human-rights advocates nationally have become critical of government handling of trafficking cases under six-year-old legislation that offers refuge to forced-labor victims who cooperate with law enforcement.

The law permits up to 5,000 visas annually for such victims, representing about one-third of the estimated number of laborers trafficked into the country every year.

But fewer than 800 visas have been issued to date, as victims go unprotected.

"It's very common and sort of tragically so," said Terry Coonan, executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University. "It's a vastly underutilized law."

The Dallas Morning News followed the women's journey over 6,000 miles from Korea to Dallas. Most were lured by Internet sites, newspaper ads and word of mouth.

Five thousand dollars a month to work in Guam, one advertisement reads. Seven thousand two hundred dollars monthly to work at a Los Angeles salon, claims another, with guaranteed entrance to the "state government vocational school."

Kim came to work off high-interest debt incurred while unemployed in South Korea. The woman - whose name, like others, has been changed to protect her identity - said a Los Angeles spa owner threatened to kill her and bury her in "a Las Vegas desert" if she tried to escape.

June, with a junior high education and job experience in manufacturing plants, came after borrowing money to become a hair designer. She feared what the loan sharks might do to her family if she didn't repay her debt.

Some of the women traveled to America on visitor visas through California and New York. Others crossed Canadian and Mexican borders, aided by a chain of brokers and smugglers. Some call the middlemen "crocodile birds" - shore birds that pick food fragments from crocodile jaws and survive on the hope that they won't snap shut.

By the time most of the women arrived, their debts to transporters and smugglers exceeded $13,000.

They became sexual sharecroppers, working off the balance at hundreds of South Korean brothels across the country.

At one travel agency in San Francisco, brokers arranged airline tickets for women to travel to and from Oakland, Calif.,

Las Vegas, Dallas, New York and Boston. Special taxi services in many cities ferried them around.

"I believe it's the largest sex-trafficking racket out there," the human rights center's Coonan said. He calls the Korean sex workers "the oldest sort of ethnic group" that operates like this.

Of the 42 women arrested in the August raid, some worked in the sex trade in Seoul and knew they would work as prostitutes here. Others said they thought they were coming to restaurants and bars, only to be thrown into bathhouses. Most were in their late 20s and early 30s.

In Dallas, they arrived at small shops off Interstate 35E with names like Tokyo, Ginja, Jackpot and Pretty Women. It's a gritty industrial area dotted with small ethnic restaurants and shops.

It's also a shadow land of feudal bondage.

At each spa, the owner paid the broker for the girl, putting her debt in a ledger to pay down each night. They monitored the women with surveillance cameras. Some confiscated passports.

If the women tried to run away, many would have nowhere to go.

Some serviced a dozen customers a day. They'd work when sick, sore and bleeding.

"Usually they didn't give permission for treatment," one said. "You're crying. You're yelling, but there's no use."

Many ate, slept and worked in the same spaces and were charged extra for lodging, condoms and clothes.

In late July and early August, gossip spread that a police raid could be near. Raids in Los Angeles and San Francisco over the summer had netted more than 100 sex workers and produced indictments against about 50 owner-operators.

Dallas would be next, some surmised.

Agents moved in on Aug. 12, joined by translators from the West Coast. They found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, at least 117 tubes of surgical lubricant, more than 6,000 condoms.

And the 42 women.

Had any of them been kidnapped and forced into the trade? Who was deceived? Who was being held against their will?

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, lauded at the time by the government and victims' advocates, provides protection for immigrants who have been subjected to force, fraud or coercion, including debt bondage.

Victim status would give them access to an array of social services. If they agreed to help law enforcement in the investigation of brothel owners and brokers, they could also qualify for a three-year visa with the possibility of permanent residency.

"Consent is always the question. Did they consent initially, and did they continue to consent?" Coonan said.

"Even if they initially consented to doing this, even if they knew they were going to come over and work, did they know they were going to ultimately be held as a slave or not have recourse to leave and do anything else?"

It's the difference between being voluntarily smuggled into the country and being trafficked unwillingly. The distinction is easier to make in cases of farm laborers found shackled in sheds or women bruised and battered by their keepers.

But for the Korean women, the line was blurred.

They spoke little English. They had been trained to either not talk openly with law enforcement or to give canned answers to common questions, according to victims' advocates.

Those instructions were often coupled with threats against family members back home. And those familiar with Korean sex workers say they're notoriously reluctant to talk about themselves as victims. It's part culture and part trade, they say.

"If you ask the standard questions about human trafficking, most of the answers we find with Korean clients is `no' across the board," said Katherine Chon, co-executive director of Polaris Project, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to fighting trafficking.

"The traffickers convince the women to buy into the system of exploitation and see it as being normal."

Two days after the arrests, Dallas' lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney, Paul Hunker, asked Catholic Charities to meet with the women

. The nonprofit group helped lobby for the 2000 trafficking legislation and had been involved in cases in Honduras and American Samoa.

Catholic Charities representatives said they were called to interview the women and help ICE determine whether they were victims; ICE said it invited Catholic Charities to give the women legal representation.

Slaughter, head of the nonprofit's immigration counseling services in Dallas, said the situation was "helter skelter" from the start. She said the women were treated as criminals in an environment hostile to building trust or learning their histories. The government, she said, seemed predisposed against seeing them as victims.

Immigration agents deny that, saying they went into the process looking for victims.

Lawyer Katie Holbrook was one of two Catholic Charities representatives who traveled to an ICE office in Dallas to conduct interviews. She said the women seemed to be wearing the same clothes they were sleeping in on the morning of the raids. One of them appeared to be menstruating and had bloodstains on her pants.

Holbrook and Slaughter said it can take days to build trust with trafficking victims. Instead, they said, the government offered 15 minutes with some of the detainees.

"Then they were all taken to . . . (a detention center). They never followed up with us," Ms. Holbrook said.

The lawyers returned to the office shaken.

"They would meet the definition of a victim of human trafficking in my books," Slaughter said of most of the women.

But immigration agents reached a different conclusion.

Ken Cates, then the special agent in charge of the Dallas ICE office, acknowledged the subjectivity of some of the determinations but said his office looked at the circumstances of each woman.

"The single biggest reason in this particular case is, I think, because the lion's share of the girls had the ability to move from one facility to another," said Cates, who has since retired.

"It's a bit of a misnomer to say voluntarily, because if you have five options . . . then you still have a limited option. But they were not completely restricted, not all of them," he said.

"Many of them . . . knew that they voluntarily came to engage in this business with at least a bit of an understanding of the circumstances that you'll find when you get here."

Cates' replacement, John Chakwin, said the operation was a textbook example of how to handle smuggling or trafficking cases. He said ICE conducted numerous interviews with the women to help determine whether they were victims and could help in criminal proceedings against brothel owners and brokers.

"The women arrested for prostitution at the spas were not teenagers - most were mature women in their 30s," he said. "A clear majority were professional prostitutes who knew exactly what they were doing.

"The very thorough screening process that ICE used afforded these women multiple opportunities to come forward and cooperate, including opportunities to obtain their own counsel. Some of them took advantage of these opportunities. Some did not. However, we can't make people cooperate, even when it's clearly in their best interest."

The handful of Dallas women judged to be victims were given social services at Mosaic Family Services.

"It's our hope that these people who are in situations like this can really be viewed as victims rather than as criminals," said Bill Bernstein, Mosaic's deputy director.

"These people have been through very serious psychological and physical torment, approaching on torture really, and we're just trying to help them."

Nongovernmental organizations in Dallas and across the country have become critical of the small number of victims who have been offered protection by the government.

In its most recent report on trafficking, the Justice Department acknowledged what it calls "a noted disparity" between the estimated number of victims and the number found and helped.

In Los Angeles, people familiar with the investigation into Korean trafficking and smuggling say potential victims there also have been overlooked. They say none of the women arrested or detained during the summer raids was initially identified as a victim or screened by a nongovernmental group.

But up the coast in San Francisco, they say, many Korean women were treated as victims.

"I know that if they had really interviewed them carefully about how they were recruited and how they got here . . . I can't help but think there would have been a number of victims," one victims' advocate with knowledge of the cases said on the condition of anonymity.

"There's such a hue and cry in the federal government that `we've got to find more victims, we've got to find more victims.' And then to find zero victims doesn't make sense to me."

Kevin Kozak, acting special agent in charge of ICE investigations in Los Angeles, disputed the criticism.

"We make every possible effort to identify victims. I do not say that lightly," Agent Kozak said. "Oftentimes what we find, as distasteful as it seems, is that women who were in prostitution in Korea come to the U.S. believing they would make more money and have a better life."

In late summer, the Dallas detainees made their first appearance in immigration court. More than two dozen appeared via video from jail. The women, dressed in orange jumpsuits, averted their eyes from the camera and spoke in hard monotones. Some played with their nails and chattered in the background.

While the government laid out the case for deportation in immigration court, it was building a different case in criminal court against the owner of some of the spas, Mi Na Malcolm.

The indictment of Malcolm illustrates a system of coercion, including debt bondage, surveillance, restriction of movement and 24-hour workdays. It describes debt added to the girls' ledgers for rent and food.

Some of the women never had legal representation; others did. Lawyer William Chu represented eight.

Chu, who was handling trafficking cases for the first time, began rallying support for his clients, asking for additional government interviews with them in the fall and early winter.

"Do you think they're going to suddenly go from prostitutes in bathhouses to permanent residents in the U.S. with . . . visas?" immigration Judge Anthony Rogers once asked him incredulously in court.

Rogers had no role in affirming or denying trafficking claims but said "it bothers me that these girls are continuing to stay in jail if ultimately they're going home."

In September, at least three women were sent home.

Some who chose to cooperate with the government gave depositions in the criminal case against Malcolm and were sent home in the winter.

But Chu said he was able to convince the Justice Department that two of the women might be victims eligible to remain in the country. Both were removed from the detention facility, he said. One had been ordered deported before her last-second reprieve.

Cates confirmed that the Justice Department reached a different determination than ICE in "a couple of cases" about whether the women were victims.

"From time to time, you'll find that special prosecutors out of . . . (the Justice Department), I think, make a bit more of a liberal determination of victim status than we do," Cates said.

The Justice Department declined to comment, citing active litigation in the cases.

June was detained through the winter.

Her attorney, Chu, tried to secure trafficking protection, but without government support, he said, it's nearly impossible.

"You ask the question, `Where is the line drawn?' She's pretty much trafficked. She's pretty much in that scenario. Everything fits except for the fact she knew she would be performing sex acts for money," he said.

June said her ordeal began years ago in Korea, where a friend introduced her to a man who told her he'd pay for her to become a hairstylist if she worked in a local bar. She couldn't just run away, she said, without putting her family in danger.

Another friend soon introduced her to someone who said he could get her to Canada, and she left on Christmas Day 2003. There, she was taken to a massage parlor and told about a transportation fee she didn't realize she'd face.

In May 2005, two men smuggled her to Los Angeles. She thought the trip would cost $8,000. Instead, it was $12,000. Soon she arrived in Dallas at Venetian Body Work, where the owner assumed the debt and took control of her. After a shopping trip for tools of the trade - cosmetics, shoes and clothes - her debt peaked at $13,000.

Asked why she didn't run away, she let out a laugh.

"Obviously I couldn't think that way. I cannot run away," she said dismissively. "How?"

Asked whether she considers herself a victim, she paused.

Sometimes, she said, she feels like one. Other times she feels guilty because she was in the country illegally.

"It's the biggest mistake of my life," she said of coming to America.

June returned to Korea in February.

Less than a month later, on March 3, the government declared victory in its criminal case against Malcolm, the spa owner.

It touted the case in moralistic terms in a news release: "These criminal human trafficking organizations imprison and exploit aliens who are at their most vulnerable," Chakwin stated.

"Human trafficking is a brutal crime and an assault on human dignity," U.S. Attorney Richard Roper added. "It victimizes society's most vulnerable individuals - frightened runaways and illegal immigrants who become trapped in a cycle of violence, prostitution and forced labor.

"This case should serve as a warning to all who would traffic in and harbor illegal aliens that we will find them and make them pay the price."

Malcolm pleaded guilty to harboring the women, but there was never a trafficking charge.

And most of the women were already gone.

---

WHAT IS TRAFFICKING?

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act defines "severe forms of trafficking in persons" as:

1) Sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion or in which the person induced to perform the act is not yet 18.

2) The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage or slavery.

To qualify for a trafficking visa, victims must cooperate with reasonable requests to assist law enforcement in investigations or prosecutions of traffickers. The person must also show hardship if returned to their native country.

BY THE NUMBERS

3,000 - Traffickers convicted worldwide last year

$361 million - The amount that legislation provides over the next two years to combat trafficking and protect victims

14,500-17,500 - People trafficked annually in the United States

600,000-800,000 - People trafficked annually worldwide

68 - Sex-trafficking cases filed by the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney's office from 2001 to 2005

91 - Trafficking cases filed by the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney's office from 2001 to 2005

SOURCES: U.S. State Department; U.S. Justice Department