International Human Trafficking
11/13/2009
Mr. Schiff: Hello, I’m Neal Schiff and welcome to Inside the FBI, a weekly podcast about news, cases, and operations. Human trafficking is a major problem in the United States , and the FBI takes this very seriously. There was a big international human sex trafficking case that moved from Guatemala to the Los Angeles , California area, and you may be shocked at the ages of women who were victims.
Ms. Whitehill: “Ages of those women ranged from as young as 12 years old up to women in their mid-20s.”
Mr. Schiff: That’s Special Agent Tricia Whitehill in the FBI’s Los Angeles office. She says this case, which involved the activities of the Vasquez-Valenzuela family, and included nine subjects charged with conspiracy, sex trafficking, and various criminal immigration offenses.
Ms. Whitehill: “We work on a task force in Los Angeles called the Los Angeles Metro Area Task Force on Human Trafficking, and we work with various non-governmental organizations; one of them is called CAST—Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking. CAST had received a phone call that they had a man who had some information about a family who was bringing girls, young girls, in from Guatemala and forcing them into prostitution. And so that was in early October, 2006 that CAST called the FBI and gave us the information from a tipster.”
Mr. Schiff: We asked Ms. Whitehill what agencies make up the Los Angeles Metro Area Task Force on Human Trafficking.
Ms. Whitehill: “We have various federal and local agencies. We work with ICE—the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. At that time the Department of Labor was also on the task force, and then we also worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, and again, various non-governmental organizations, and some other local law enforcement agencies as well.”
Mr. Schiff: We talked with Ms. Whitehill about the tip that eventually reached the FBI, and also how agents and police investigated the allegations of a group of people forcing young women into prostitution.
Ms. Whitehill: “Well, in this case, fortunately the tipster, he worked for the family as a taxi driver. And he would drive, in this case it was a family from Guatemala , and each family member had their own apartment with their own victims. But they worked jointly, together, but each of them had their own little hut that they worked out of. In this case he worked for one of the main family members, the taxi driver did.
He would go pick her up with the girls that worked for her in the morning, and take them to the streets to find customers, and then take them to a different apartment where they would work as prostitutes.
And so he was willing to cooperate with law enforcement and helped us gather the evidence that we needed to indict the defendants in this case.”
Mr. Schiff: Ms. Whitehill then talked about investigators finding out what promises were made in Guatemala to these young victims to get them to come to the United States.
Ms. Whitehill: “My co-case agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and I actually went to Guatemala where the young girls were recruited and spoke to their families and, of course later, we got to know the victims as well. What would happen is, the perpetrators have family members in Guatemala who would go to these poor small towns where they had young daughters and ask the families whether their daughters would be interested in coming to work for their family in Los Angeles, and they indicated that their family, their daughters in L.A. had jewelry stores and restaurants where the girls could work and they would make a very good living and would be able to send that money home.
Of course these poor families in Guatemala were literally living in mud huts and had very little money and lots of children. So, that was basically the promise: jewelry stores and restaurants, mainly.
And then once they arrived in Los Angeles , they were immediately taken to get their eyebrows tattooed and their hair colored and they were told that now they had debts they had to pay off because the family had paid for them to be smuggled into the United States . So they were told they had debts between $10,000 and $20,000 and that they were going to have to work as prostitutes in order to pay that debt off.”
Mr. Schiff: And if the girls didn’t want to do what they were told, Ms. Whitehill says threats, strong threats, were made by this Vasquez-Valenzuela group they called a family.