Human Trafficking on Long Island

She says she came to America after being forced to abort her second baby and undergo sterilization, but had her paperwork confiscated upon arrival by the “snakeheads,” a violent Chinese gang that specializes in human smuggling. They insisted that she work off the $75,000 fee they charged for giving her false travel documents.

Growing weary of long hours on her feet working in a Chinese restaurant, she opted for work in a nail salon, at her captors’ suggestion. But when the salon’s chemicals began affecting her health, she was given a false masseuse license to work in a parlor.

Lien protested when urged to perform sex acts at the end of each $60 massage, $20 of which she was allowed to keep. But then her captors reminded her of her debt, a form of imprisonment known as debt bondage that served as the foundation of her enslavement.

Her debt grew: She was charged for basic necessities such as toiletries, housing in an apartment complex in Flushing, Queens, and rides to “work.” The drivers of the vans, who shuttle victims to and from work, are soldiers of trafficking rings, according to Birbiglia. When girls arrive in one van at nail salons, he explains, “It’s a fair indication that there’s some sort of control there.”

Police regularly raid seedy illegal parlors like those run by Lien’s captors, who were later convicted. In the last decade, here on LI, the captive women have often been repeatedly arrested and charged with prostitution.

Despite this, the brothels generally keep doing business—until someone cooperates with the police. And authorities now provide an incentive for those who testify or who can prove they were working against their will. Victims who can show they were coerced, forced or deceived into captivity are able to apply for a T Visa, unless the sex trafficking victim is a child—then it is not necessary to prove coercion.

Since passage of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which increased funding to crack down on human trafficking, the testimony of victims like Lien has become increasingly valuable in combating this scourge. Now she helps cops gain the trust of other potential victims. (Lien’s caretakers denied Press requests for interviews with her and victims like her.)

“Here is the perfect example, where she fully cooperated, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency [ICE] is working with us to get her to become a U.S. citizen,” says Birbiglia. But it was a slow process, spanning a seven-month jail stay, for her to be assured that the detective was not like the Chinese cops who had enslaved her.

“It’s tough to move up the ladder because down here nobody trusts us,” says Birbiglia, who describes the trafficking trend as an “epidemic.” Victims like Lien are “seasoned,” he says, often a brutal process involving rape, torture, starvation and threats against the victim’s family. Once their will is broken, the victims are trained to reiterate a specific prefabricated story to police if they are arrested. Many victims don’t speak much English, making it much more difficult for investigators to win their trust.

Birbiglia was able to gain Lien’s trust with simple gestures, like sending Chinese-language newspapers to her cell while she was incarcerated, and appearing in court to make sure she saw someone who was not a threat.

The stern-faced detective, a 34-year veteran of the force, describes how “it gave me goose bumps to see her walk into court to see me, a friendly face.”

OF HOMETOWN BONDAGE

Slavery still exists—but no longer is it just in some faraway Third World nation, where imprisoned servants are lorded over by reclusive gangsters. Instead, in this country, obscured by the foreground of local American commerce, today’s slaves are forced to work in inhumane conditions, ruled by fear and living in squalor. They are made to believe that nobody will ever help them.

Aside from being enslaved in the sex or domestic trades, victims are exploited by those who run restaurants, farms, car washes, landscape companies or other businesses.

Just how many people are secretly victimized by trafficking is nearly impossible to verify, but the multi-billion-dollar global crime is estimated to be at least the third- largest international illegal trade, keeping company with arms trafficking and drug trafficking.

Besides the countless Asian victims, traffickers lure slaves from Latin and South America, Europe, Africa, Korea, India and Russia, among other regions. To this end, federal investigators are trying to root out the problem abroad.

Just last year, ICE initiated 299 human trafficking investigations that resulted in 184 arrests and last June, ICE and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) launched the Extraterritorial Criminal Travel Strike Force, designed to attack foreign-based human smuggling networks.

But trafficking is also a crime of opportunity in America, New York and on LI, with an influx of immigrants making easy prey.

“Human trafficking is modern-day slavery and among the most repugnant of crimes,” said Gov. Eliot Spitzer, after the Legislature unanimously passed an anti-human trafficking bill that he signed into law on June 6. New York is now one of 28 states that have updated criminal codes to include trafficking offenses. The new statute makes this a felony-level crime and enables local law enforcement to investigate and prosecute crimes that were, until now, largely handled by the feds alone, who have granted asylum to about 400 victims since 2000.

The law will make it easier for survivors to gain the services they need, like assistance with housing, medical care and psychological services, as well as translators for those who require them. It also adds deception as one of the modes of trafficking, an important addition, since fraud is defined differently in state law than in federal law. Perhaps most noteworthy is the fact that victims don’t need to promise to testify in order to receive a T Visa, which can provide peace of mind for those rescued from the indescribable stress of captivity.

On LI, the frequency of such cases landed the region on the DOJ list of 21 human trafficking hotspots in 2004, according to HumanTrafficking.org, a Washington, D.C. project focusing on anti-trafficking measures. That year, LI gained notoriety as the site of one of the nation’s largest human trafficking busts, when 69 Peruvian men, women and children were held as slaves to work in sweat shops in Amityville, Brentwood and Coram.