Donald Trump pledged on the campaign trail for his second term to “end the scourge of human trafficking.” He amplified conspiracy theories linking liberal politicians to underground sex trafficking rings and said he’d release alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list.”
But anti-trafficking activists in Massachusetts say that the on-the-ground actions of the Trump administration are hurting, not helping, the most vulnerable victims of sex and labor trafficking.
“We have seen some programs lose some funding with very little notice and very little recourse and attempting to challenge those funding pulls,” said Hema Sarang-Sieminski, the executive director of Jane Doe Inc., a coalition of sexual violence and domestic violence advocacy organizations. “And then we see the bulk of us who are sitting in this anticipatory space wondering what impact we will see in the coming weeks or months or years.”
Since Trump took office in January, experts say his administration has cut staff and funding, having direct and indirect impacts on the survivors trying to find stability, stay off the streets, keep a roof over their heads, detox, and often not go into or return to “the life,” as prostitution is colloquially known.
Massachusetts nonprofits like trafficking-focused RIA are facing current and future federal budget cuts that impact the hiring of counselors specializing in housing, mental health and drug addiction, among other services.
Immigrants who survived human trafficking are waiting longer for visas, too.
Julie Dahlstrom, director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program at Boston University School of Law, says these actions are weakening a national effort to help exploited and trafficked people that has been gaining traction for two decades.
“We’ve learned quite a lot in these 20 years. And there’s also been an infrastructure built of lawyers, of social service providers, of survivor-led programs that know what works on the ground,” she said. “We’re seeing the dissembling of those programs, really going back to ground zero.”
What’s been lost
Human trafficking — which encompasses sex and labor trafficking — is hiding in plain sight. Victims of labor trafficking often work in people’s homes, restaurants and local businesses.
RIA, a Massachusetts nonprofit that supports adults who’ve been through the sex trade or sex trafficking, relies on two critical federal grants administered by Jane Doe Inc. that could be cut by the Trump administration because of their equity and inclusion focus. New requirements that could limit RIA’s funding are in limbo while being challenged by a coalition, including Jane Doe Inc., in federal court.
Dating back to before Trump took office, state and federal officials have been slow to hold traffickers accountable, partly because cases are hard to nail down and victims are already scared. In Massachusetts, two years ago, a New Bedford man was the first known person to be convicted under a 2011 labor trafficking state law.
Now, there are fewer people and resources to do the work. The Trump administration this summer fired 70% of its staff of the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. A Guardian investigation found that federal agents with the Department of Homeland Security were taken off of investigating human traffickers to prioritize immigration.
Vulnerable communities — like people of color and LGBTQ+ youth — are more likely to be affected by trafficking, reports show.
“Once you’re on the street, the biggest way for you to make money is to sell your body,” said the Rev. Bonnie Gatchell, cofounder of the Dorchester-based Route One Ministry.
But experts say resources for those groups are being gutted, too, under the Trump administration’s targeting of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
When Ivette Monge, a local trafficking survivor, hears Trump officials say they are working to help victims, she cringes.
Monge says she brings her experience with her into the streets every day in her work as an outreach manager for RIA, a scrappy survivors’ organization in central Massachusetts.
“What the Trump administration’s actions are showing me [is] that they don’t give two craps about nothing, because if you did, you’re cutting all the resources that are needed for these people that are out here,” she said. “It’s the vulnerable ones — the ones with mental health, with the drug addiction — they’re cutting all these funds for. It’s just going to get worse.”
Foreign-born victims losing hope
Undocumented immigrants are especially vulnerable to trafficking since employers can wield the threat of calling immigration services.
“We see uncertain immigration status weaponized by people who want to cause harm and keep undocumented survivors silent,” said Sarang-Sieminski with Jane Doe Inc.
Certain visas for victims of human trafficking, known as “T visas,” now have a processing time of about two years — longer than any other point in the last five years, federal data shows.
Some worry that the presence of federal agents in local court houses and on the streets of lower-income communities is making victims afraid to seek help.
“There are real challenges to survivors stepping forward amid fears of deportation and removal,” Dahlstrom said. “What we’re seeing is greater collaboration among local, state and federal law enforcement — and greater risks of detention and removal for survivors if they do step forward.”
Consider the case of Marta Portillo Vasquez. The 58-year-old woman from El Salvador says she went to an immigration center in Revere in August to provide fingerprints as part of an application process for a visa for victims of human trafficking.
Instead of support, Portillo Vasquez says she was arrested by federal agents, shackled by her hands and feet, and whisked away to a detention center in Vermont for 30 days.
“It was very traumatizing,” Portillo Vasquez recently told GBH News in Spanish. “I’m still panicking to the point I don’t want to go out.”
Portillo Vasquez’s case is pending.
Her attorney Todd Pomerleau claims the detention is part of a strategic effort in the Trump administration to prevent victims of human trafficking from accessing immigration protections they are entitled to by law.
While the T-visa process does not guarantee immunity from arrest and prosecution, it was designed to protect the safety and rights of human trafficking victims from other countries.
“The government deliberately prevented her from seeking a determination that her T-visa was viable,” he said. “People that have come forward are being arrested.”
Nobody from the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to questions about Portillo Vasquez’s case or T visa–related detentions.
U.S. Attorney Leah Foley, who Trump appointed to the post this year, inherited a human trafficking unit from her predecessors.
Foley told GBH News she is committed to assisting survivors and victims of trafficking and arresting those who engage in it. She said survivors of trafficking can be assured “it is our goal to achieve justice for every victim regardless of their status in the United States.”
She said most trafficking cases in the United States involve U.S. citizens exploiting other U.S. citizens, including the recent conviction of a Worcester couple that was successfully prosecuted by her office. Her office is stepping up the arrests of sex buyers to put a dent in demand, she said, including areas like Worcester where sex-buying routinely occurs on the streets.
Foley insists that the Department of Justice is not using the process “as an end run to get anyone deported.”
“I am not familiar with a single instance where a victim has reported a sex trafficking crime and has ended up in removal proceedings,” she said.
Bracing for more to come
Survivors are wary about what else could change in the months and years to come. The national trafficking hotline, for instance, will soon be operated by a new contractor.
Late last month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that, instead of re-upping its contract with longtime operator Polaris, it had selected conservative Texas-based child welfare group called Compass Connections to run the hotline.
Compass Connections will “as appropriate, share information with law enforcement to help survivors leave their trafficking situation or find justice,” DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison said in a press release last month.
Leaders with Compass Connections and Polaris couldn’t be reached for comment, though Polaris wrote in a press release that it was “disappointed” by the change.
Jose Alfaro, a local trafficking survivor and a member of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking, worries the Trump administration is failing some of the most vulnerable members of society. He told GBH News that the hotline saved his life when he was looking for help, struggling as a gay youth trafficked by a man in Texas. Now he’s concerned Compass Connections could do more harm than good.
“There are many, many people that are fearful that this administration is going to want to share personal information with law enforcement without the survivors’ consent of what has happened to them,” he said. “This has a lot of ramifications for a lot of the survivors that are choosing to come forward.”
In a basement office of a church in central Massachusetts, a small group is fielding calls. Together, they make up the team that powers RIA.
Kat Santiago, the director of peer mentorship, says they are receiving more calls each day from survivors who need help.
People are more desperate now than they were a year ago, she says, with day-to-day needs like food and housing.
“We ask: ‘From 1 to 10, how much are you stressing around your basic needs?’ ... And I get a lot of people saying ‘8,’ ‘9,’ ‘10,’” said Santiago, sitting in a bare but brightly colored room filled with bags of donated clothes. “Food prices have gone up, and the amount of food stamps that they get is not enough for them to feed themselves and their families.”
Now, Santiago worries this desperation will lead more people into greater risk for exploitation, selling sex for money.
Heather Wightman, RIA’s executive director, says the organization is trying to protect girls and women they work with from anticipated cuts to Medicaid, housing assistance and food stamp programs laid out in the recently passed tax and spending federal bill. Wightman fears the further shredding of the country’s social safety net will drive some formerly prostituted women back into what is colloquially called “the life.”
Wightman said the number of people calling RIA for help already has increased risen substantially from last year — and she expects numbers to rise.
“I’m disgusted, nauseated most nights,” she said. ”Everything chips away at an already vulnerable community of people that we serve.”
