17,500 People Trafficked To U.S. Yearly, Agency Says

Up to 17,500 people are trafficked to the United States every year, held in captivity and coerced into sex, sweatshop labor and domestic servitude, the U.S. Justice Department said yesterday in a report to Congress. "In the United States, where slavery was outlawed nationally more than 130 years ago, this tragic phenomenon should no longer exist; yet it does," the report said.

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, a top Homeland Security Department official yesterday told a House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration that human trafficking generates $9.5 billion worldwide each year. Most of the money is then used to feed organized crime activities, the official said. According to Associated Press, changes in U.S. law in 2000 allowed prosecutors to bring new charges against human traffickers. Since 2001, 149 people have been prosecuted in trafficking cases, a threefold increase compared with the period of 1998-2001. Two-thirds of the cases involved prostitution or sex slavery, while most of the rest involved forced labor. Among the people prosecuted was a ringleader sentenced to 23 years in prison last year for bringing women from Mexico to Texas and making them live in trailer homes where they were raped and forced to do housework (Curt Anderson, AP/Boston Globe, May 19).