State Dept. reiterates prevalence of human trafficking in the insular areas

Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — The U.S Sate Department’s “2022 Trafficking in Persons Report” covering countries around the globe, including the United States has again reiterated that human-trafficking occurs in the U.S. insular areas, including American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI).

While there are no specific recent cases in American Samoa, the report points out that in Guam and CNMI, the U.S Department of Homeland Security (USDHS) continues to engage with community partners to provide victim services, train law enforcement, and share strategies for improving victim identification.

Additionally the U.S Department of Justice (USDOJ) continues to advance an initiative that enhances coordination with stakeholders in the Pacific Region on victim services, law enforcement responses, training, community outreach, and prevention programs.

For the insular areas in the Caribbean, the report noted that USDOJ and USDHS continue to participate, along with local authorities in Puerto Rico, in the crimes against children. In Puerto Rico, USDHS engaged with federal, state, and local partners to combat sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors, as well as the prevalence of online child sexual abuse material.

According to the report, the U.S Health and Human Services (USDHHS) provided comprehensive case management services to foreign national victims of trafficking identified in American Samoa, Guam, CNMI, Puerto Rico, and USVI, and two USDOJ grantees provided comprehensive and legal services to victims of all forms of trafficking in CNMI.

Additionally, USDHHS partnered with a non-government organization to provide virtual trainings on human trafficking and trauma-informed care for individuals with lived experience of human trafficking to government and nongovernment stakeholders in Guam, including what human trafficking looks like in the local context, identifying key partners that should comprise a multidisciplinary response, and providing trauma-informed practices for frontline professionals.

The report also states that USDHHS has a new program to fund local organizations in Pacific territories, including America Samoa, Guam, and CNMI, to deliver services to foreign nationals who have experienced trafficking in those territories.

(Samoa News notes that American Samoa currently has laws — enacted a few years ago — to combat human trafficking and this effort was led by former Assistant Attorney General Mitzie Jessop-Ta’ase, during her tenure in the AG’s Office. She is the current Senate legal counsel.)

Meanwhile, the report states that human traffickers exploit domestic and foreign national victims in the United States, and trafficker exploit victims from the United States abroad. And human trafficking cases have been reported in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.

Individuals who entered the United States with and without legal status have been identified as trafficking victims. Victims originate from almost every region of the world; the top three countries of origin of victims identified by federally funded providers in FY 2021 were the United States, Mexico, and Honduras.

“Human trafficking patterns in the United States continued to reflect the living legacy of the systemic racism and colonization globalized during the transatlantic slave trade through chattel slavery and regional practices of Indigenous dispossession,” the report says.

More information on the 2022 report — publicly released more than a week ago is online (www.state.gov).