March 4, 2011 - Laura Bramon Good
"Trafficking is the crime du jour," the ICE Agent declared, slapping her hand against the steering wheel. I nodded from the passenger's side, careful to say nothing, the eerie, sunrise-and-neon glow of the New Jersey Turnpike shuttering past. "It's important, definitely, but it's just the pretty thing getting all the attention. Hype happens. It will pass."
On this fall morning a couple of years ago, I was riding shotgun from Washington, D.C., to post-human trafficking raid proceedings in southern New Jersey. As a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services colleague dozed in the backseat of the car, our pilot, a grizzled Mama Bear of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official, barrelled down the lonely interstate.
We all knew law enforcement was wary of allowing federal social services staff to join post-raid victim interviews, and the Mama Bear wasn't going to let our last-minute invitation go to our heads. Jack Johnson blaring on the stereo, she piloted her sedan with speed and proclaimed what she really thought of the federal government's anti-trafficking public awareness crusade, of which our agency was a prime sponsor.
An hour after daylight, we pulled off the turnpike at a nondescript Courtyard Marriott, where a Pia Zadora-esque social worker, her sidekick nun, a troop of state and federal law enforcement agents, and several girls from Togo awaited our arrival.
The newspaper report on that morning's New Jersey hair-braiding shop bust remembers a total of twenty girls trafficked from rural West Africa to a life of first-world squalor and forced labour. I know that the hand-drawn grid tacked to the wall of ICE's operational nerve centre--a dishevelled suite half-way down the hotel's top floor--held at least that many names.
READ MORE: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/2712/
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