A regional division of the Not For Sale Campaign

As the SlaveryMap Admin, I get the chance to review every case that is posted on the site. One recent case out of Houston, TX, brought to light a police intervention with a 23-year-old man named Victor Campuzano. An enterprising gent, Campuzano was pulled over by local police in McAllen, TX with four foreign nationals in his car. A subsequent arrest and search of Campuzano's home revealed 22 more undocumented aliens. The individuals were released to the Border Patrol and returned to their home country.

Clearly, this is a case of human smuggling.

When, however, does this translate to human trafficking? The answer is that it already may have been a trafficking case. When NFSC investigators talked with police, law enforcement officials noted that this type of arrest happens so frequently that ICE and other agencies rarely investigate beyond the initial crime of human smuggling. In this particular case, the number of victims is significant enough to have warranted a deeper investigation and perhaps waiting to arrest Campuzano. It is possible that Campuzano is a link a in a larger chain of smuggling and trafficking as one often begets the other.

Smuggling, according to our friends at the San Jose Police Dept., is the "movement of consenting people across an international border for a fee. The relationship with the smuggler ends upon arrival at the migrant's destination." Smuggling also carries much lower penalties, usually around 3 years or less in prison. Human trafficking is an ongoing presence in the life of the victim. Victims have usually no say in their captivity and have been brought into such a situation through force, fraud or coercion.

In Campuzano's case, bringing 26 migrants into your home does not support the idea that he was simply going to immediately release the smuggled persons. If he then put them into a situation of debt bondage or forced them into labor or sexual slavery, Campuzano becomes a trafficker and no longer a smuggler. An arrest in that situation could earn him as much as 10 years in federal prison for preying on these individuals.

The sad truth is that we don't know what Campuzano's goals for these victims were. It could be a simple case of smuggling. Many such victims pay as much as $10,000 per person to be smuggled into the U.S., so smuggling by itself holds strong allure for petty criminals. Trafficking such a person could earn the enterprising criminal 10 times that amount, so there's one of the key links for how smuggling evolves into trafficking. And if Campuzano's true goal was to traffick these individuals, then we owe it to the next batch of 20 migrants who come through to look at people like Campuzano more closely.

As our friends in San Jose say, "Smuggling violates a border...Trafficking violates a person."

Campuzano is out on bail and goes to trial in either the second half of this year or the first half of 2010. He is expected to take a plea bargain which will net him minimal jail time.

July 22, 2009

human trafficking

vs human smuggling

GEORGIA