* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Using human trafficking as a false premise for a non-existent crisis hinders our ability to credibly combat it
Alison Kiehl Friedman is a former Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons
In my career combating human trafficking, I’ve met children all over the world who, in an effort to secure a better life, took on risks that landed them in modern slavery. Sometimes they acted alone. Sometimes their parents helped. All the time, their exploitation could be traced back to their fundamentally human decision to hope.
They hoped that they might feed their family, or gain an education, or love. They hoped that if they put up the only collateral they had to invest in their future—their body and their promise of future work—that they might someday have, give, and find more.
It was the honor of a lifetime to serve in the US State Department on these issues because, no matter where I was, this was a fundamentally human story—an imperfect striving to improve your lot in life through hard work and risk taking.
And, I was proud to tell America’s story. We made grave mistakes. We excluded huge swaths of Americans from the very freedom and opportunity we were working to advance. We learned. We knew firsthand how fundamentally damaging in human policies were. We offered to help as a historically flawed, but nonetheless sincere partner intent upon ensuring other countries didn’t repeat our failures. That was a message that superceded any partisan posturing.
We fought human trafficking with the support of Senators Corker and Cardin, Congressman Smith and Congresswoman Bass. There was an understanding. You don’t score political points on the back of trafficking victims. That’s not who we are.
Only today it is.
For Secretary Nielsen and the White House to cloak their fundamentally inhuman policy of separating families at the border as an effort to prevent human trafficking abuse is as cynical and disingenuous a political move as I have ever witnessed. For Donald Trump to argue that he needs a wall to prevent human trafficking, and that is why he is shutting down the government is a baldfaced lie. It must not go unanswered.
If there are human trafficking concerns, there are immediate ways to address them (and longstanding protocols in place) that do not require the collateral damage to families, our constitution, and our humanity.
If there is a genuine concern on how best to combat human trafficking, there are coalitions of nonprofits that span the political spectrum who stand at the ready to help this administration tackle what is a truly horrifying and solvable crime, with concrete suggestions that are far less costly to our national treasure and moral character. If, however, human trafficking just seems a convenient political shield for abject cruelty and the shutting down of our Federal Government… Stop.
American exceptionalism is not born out of our innate superiority, but our willingness to learn and question and improve. Like the human trafficking survivors I have met all over the world and down the street, America has stood in service of the notion that our best days were still to come. There is no path there through ripping infants from their parents or shutting down the government in a childlike temper tantrum.
In 250 years, America had moved from selling people and dividing families to being a trusted, albeit imperfect, partner in advancing freedom around the world. We did that by engaging in the hard work of ensuring our domestic policies honor the human rights protections we ask of others. This administration’s policies of treating asylum seekers as criminals, separating families, and using the very real crime of human trafficking as a false premise for a non-existent crisis, not only doesn’t prevent human trafficking, it hinders our ability to credibly combat it.
Why should any country listen to our call to engage in combating human trafficking if our intervention is to take kids away from their parents? Why should any country reach out to us for legal guidance on how to better protect their people, when public statements lay bare the reality that our government is far less concerned with the letter of the law than who gets the blame?
If this Administrations truly wants to combat human trafficking, they can start by reversing their family separation policy and getting our public servants back to work repairing our human rights credibility that has been so critical to advancing protections here and around the world.
