City Cited as Human Trafficking Hub

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Slavery is more than a historical problem: It’s a modern-day phenomenon in New York.


The city has one of the highest human trafficking rates in the nation, government officials said yesterday, noting that Long Island was recently found to be home to the second-largest human trafficking ring ever prosecuted in America.


“Slavery has returned to American soil,” the director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ trafficking in persons program, Steve Wagner, said. The federal government estimates that between 14,500 and 17,000 people are trafficked into America each year, a third of whom are children.


While exact counts of slaves – commonly defined as victims being forced to work against their will – are impossible, Mr. Wagner said he believes there are more than 50,000 in America. “There is no doubt in my mind New York is one of the major trafficking places,” he said. The phenomenon can be found throughout the country, he said, but victims tend to be concentrated in immigrant destinations with large ethnic enclaves. “New York City certainly fits that profile,” he said.


Mr. Wagner spoke as part of a conference on modern slavery held at the Harvard Club yesterday. It was hosted by the nonprofit group Media 4 Humanity’s Children in Chains campaign.


There are two general categories of human trafficking cases: sexual and forced labor.


An assistant U.S. attorney for the eastern region, Pamela Chen, presented two recent New York cases as archetypes of human trafficking abuse.


One was a sex trafficking case where poor, young Mexican women were sold into brothels in New York City. “The basic M.O. in this case is similar to all the cases we see,” Ms. Chen said.


Male traffickers exploited the women, who came from the same small rural village in Mexico and were “looking for a way out of their lives,” Ms. Chen said. The men wooed them and as soon as they were alone, raped them. Imprisonment and prostitution followed, and then the traffickers coerced their victims to move to Queens. Once in the city, they were forced to work seven days a week, servicing about 25 men a day. The money they made was given to their trafficking boyfriends and husbands, who sent it back to the woman running the ring in Mexico.


If there is a silver lining to this story, Ms. Chen said, it is that an anti-trafficking law passed in 2000 has enabled the U.S. attorney’s office to prosecute the case and put away the traffickers. Under state law, they likely would have just been deported and the case viewed as a trafficking incident. Under the anti-trafficking law – which Ms. Chen described as “a law that is really comprehensive,” providing social services and criminalizing a wide range of trafficking conduct – the criminals in the Mexican case are subject to 30 years to life in prison. Such measures are “significant ways to close that revolving door,” she said.


In the second case, Peruvian girls were lured to Long Island with promises of riches in America. Instead, when they arrived they barely saw beyond a factory’s walls, where they were kept captive until they could pay off their smuggling fee. The Peruvian women, Ms. Chen said, owed $24,000, a typical amount for such forced-labor cases. “All the money goes to the traffickers,” she said. “They live in disgusting; substandard housing, and they theoretically work off this debt; which takes an incredibly long time and sometimes never gets paid off.”


Mr. Wagner encouraged anyone who knows of a potential victim to contact the federal hotline at 888-373-7888.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use