Katherine Franke of Feminist Law Professors has a very nice, nuanced rundown of the promises and perils facing America’s anti-trafficking efforts under new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Director of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.
I heard little sign in [Clinton’s] testimony of a desire to change policy from the crusade undertaken by the Bush Administration that overdetermined the problem of human trafficking in sexual terms (thereby ignoring the enormous problem of other forms of forced labor), driven largely by an evangelistic judgement about sex work more generally.
Secretary Clinton may have had larger fish to fry at her confirmation hearing than human trafficking but it seems… unlikely that she’d give up entirely on the balanced, core-principles on human trafficking she forged with the late Senator Paul Wellstone back in the 1980s… and was consequently excoriated for by hyper, hyper-partisan Republican neoconservatives, hyper-partisan Republican evangelicals, and a handful of dupes and fellow travelers who believe that a) all prostitution is sex slavery b) all trafficking is trafficking in sex slaves, and c) anyone who, like Clinton or Wellstone, claimed otherwise was carrying water for rapists, pimps, and traffickers. (This latter construction, and it’s source, is a personally painful bugaboo of mine.)
At any rate, Secretary Clinton is and has been on the right side of the issue in the past and it’s difficult to imagine she’d let a pack of shrill right-wing knee-squeezers change her mind. Still, after eight years of not simply negligent or incompetent but overt malevolent foreign diplomacy Clinton, as I say, may have bigger fish to fry. So at least for the near future it won’t be Clinton herself that matters most but who she selects to run the State Department’s anti-trafficking and human rights divisions.
Katherine Franke also points out that, at least as currently constituted, federal-level enforcement of international trafficking falls heavily on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security. She’s very rightly concerned that at least so far Napolitano has kept Bush campaign attorney (see Florida, 2000 election) and patronage appointee Timothy Keefer on as Chief Counsel for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at ICE.
As for ICE’s overreliace on raids to protect the victims of trafficking, the Sex Workers Project in New York has just issued a report, Kicking Down the Door: The Use of Raids to Fight Trafficking in Persons, in which it documents how in the name of “rescue” these raids often result in the arrest, detention and deportation of trafficked persons because they are undertaken by ICE, together with local law enforcement officers, who are poorly trained or ill-equipped in identifying victims of trafficking, and who are, after all, focused on arresting criminals, people who pose potential terror threats, are dealing drugs and/or are sans papiers, that is, found without necessary paperwork demonstrating legal presence in the U.S.
I urge all who are concerned about this issue to read the Sex Workers Project report and to monitor the new team and policy being developed at Janet Napolitano’s “Homeland” Security and ICE.
It’s really great to see someone who seems interested in results rather than optics examining the nuts and bolts, inside-baseball side of anti-trafficking policy.
