Tag: human trafficking
Offended By Ivanka and Pence, Nonprofits Boycott Trafficking Conference

Offended By Ivanka and Pence, Nonprofits Boycott Trafficking Conference

Anti-human trafficking groups are boycotting an event on the issue this week that is being hosted by Ivanka Trump, citing the Trump administration’s harsh policies against immigrants, who are often the victims of trafficking.

Along with Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump plans to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Martina Vandenberg, founder of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, told the Washington Post that the event has created “a chasm between rhetoric and reality” and noted that “this administration is undermining protections carefully built for trafficking victims over two decades.”

“I don’t think any of us have the desire to be a part of a photo op,” Vandenberg added.

Polaris, the organization that runs the national human trafficking hotline, along with the largest anti-trafficking coalition, Freedom Network USA, will not attend the event. At least eight groups have turned down invitations so far.

According to the Post, the groups argue that “although the president frequently invokes human trafficking, his administration is actively endangering a significant portion of trafficking victims: immigrants.”

Among the groups’ biggest concerns is the Trump administration’s decision to cut back on “T” visas as part of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration initiatives. Those visas have often been used to allow immigrant victims of trafficking to have temporary legal status while cases against their traffickers are built.

“It’s going to be very difficult to access those witnesses who can tell you about serious crimes or trafficking,” Jacinta Ma of the conservative National Immigration Forum told Bloomberg last year of the visa crackdown.

In 2019, only 500 such visas were granted, the lowest since 2010.

Donald Trump has often invoked lurid, unverified stories of people being bound up and brought across the border to justify spending billions on a southern wall between the United States and Mexico. As the New York Times noted in February last year, while there have been isolated instances of this, Trump’s claims are mostly exaggerated.

While she has spoken and written about the problem of human trafficking on multiple occasions, Ivanka Trump has tried to distance herself from her father’s anti-immigrant stances while serving in his White House.

Asked about the policy of separating children from their families, she told CBS in December the issue is “not part of my portfolio.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

EU Declares War On People Smugglers, Commissioner Says

EU Declares War On People Smugglers, Commissioner Says

dpa, (TNS)

WARSAW — Europe has “declared a war” on smugglers transporting immigrants across the Mediterranean, EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said Thursday, adding that the boats of human traffickers should be seized and destroyed.

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, will draw up an action plan by the end of May, which will include fighting people smuggling, Avramopoulous said.

Avramopoulos met with the director of the EU border-protection service, Frontex, in the Polish capital and referred to Frontex’s Mediterranean border-control missions Triton and Poseidon, which can also carry out rescues when they encounter people in distress at sea.

“No human should be left to drown at sea, and no country should be left alone to bear responsibility for the whole of Europe,” the commissioner said on the European Day for Border Guards.

“Some member states have received heavy pressure of migratory flows; others have not,” he said. “We have to share that pressure.”

Avramopoulos’ visit to Warsaw came after EU foreign and defense ministers agreed Monday to establish a naval mission to crack down on migrant-smuggling networks in the Mediterranean. The mission will need a UN Security Council mandate to meet its target launch date in June.

The European Union is trying to curb the loss of life at sea as an unprecedented number of immigrants are trying this year to reach the bloc’s southern shores by paying smugglers to place them on rickety, overcrowded vessels.

This week’s decision followed what the UN refugee agency described as “the deadliest incident in the Mediterranean…ever recorded” when an April 18 shipwreck claimed the lives of an estimated 800 people.

Photo: Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet via Flickr

Obama To Senate: Approve Loretta Lynch Nomination Now

Obama To Senate: Approve Loretta Lynch Nomination Now

By Lesley Clark, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Friday called on Republicans to schedule a vote on his nominee to replace outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, calling Loretta Lynch’s monthslong wait a case of Senate “dysfunction” gone too far.

At a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Obama also said he planned to make a “strong case” for his ambitious trade deal to skeptics within his own party and he left open the possibility that sanctions on Iran might be lifted at once if a deal over the country’s nuclear program is reached.

He said the details of the Iran deal would be hammered out by Secretary of State John Kerry and negotiators, but he noted that “there are a lot of different mechanism and ways” to lessen the sanctions.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that the deal would be signed in late June only if economic sanctions were lifted at once, though the U.S. has insisted they’d be lifted in phases.

But Obama said Friday that the negotiators’ job would be “to sometimes find formulas that get to our main concerns while allowing the other side to make a presentation to their body politic that is more acceptable.”

More important than the timing, the president said, would be ensuring that economic sanctions against Tehran could be snapped back into place if Iran doesn’t live up to the deal.

“Our main concern here is making sure that if Iran doesn’t abide by its agreement, that we don’t have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops in order to reinstate sanctions,” Obama said.

The president saved his most impassioned remarks for his attorney general nominee, Lynch, who he said had waited more than twice as long as the previous seven attorney general nominees combined to get a vote in the Senate.

“There’s no reason for it,” Obama said, noting that few have argued that Lynch is not qualified for the job. “Nobody can describe a reason for it beyond political gamesmanship in the Senate on an issue that’s completely unrelated to her.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he won’t give Lynch a confirmation vote until an anti-trafficking bill passes. But the bill to aid human trafficking victims is tied up in abortion politics, with Democrats objecting to an anti-abortion provision in the measure.

McConnell’s office noted, however, that he’d said Thursday night that senators were making progress on the trafficking bill and that he hoped it would be passed early next week. A vote on Lynch’s nomination would follow.

“I guess they don’t have C-SPAN down there at the White House,” McConnell’s deputy chief of staff, Don Stewart, suggested in an email.

Obama criticized the 160-plus-day wait, calling it a “crazy” situation: “Enough. Enough,” he said. “Call Loretta Lynch for a vote. Get her confirmed. Put her in place. Let her do her job. This is embarrassing, a process like this.”

(c)2015 McClatchy Washington Bureau, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Loretta Lynch testifies during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2015, in Washington, D.C. Lynch will succeed Eric Holder to be the next U.S. Attorney General if confirmed by the Senate. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)

Lynch’s Confirmation Vote Gets Tangled Up With Trafficking Bill’s Abortion Provision

Lynch’s Confirmation Vote Gets Tangled Up With Trafficking Bill’s Abortion Provision

By Maria Recio and William Douglas, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans and Democrats will face off Tuesday over the former’s demand to accept a bill with a controversial abortion provision or Republicans will postpone the already much-delayed vote to confirm attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who made the threat Sunday, has scheduled a procedural vote that could force the bill to be put aside if all Democrats stand firm. The legislation that includes the abortion language is a bipartisan effort to combat human trafficking. If the impasse continues, as seems likely, Republicans would retaliate by further delaying a vote on Lynch.

The GOP move incensed White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Monday, who called it a “reflection of inept leadership,” saying that Republicans had included an unwanted provision in an otherwise widely supported bill.

“The fact that Leader McConnell can’t build bipartisan support for a child sex-trafficking bill I think is an indication that his leadership here in the majority is not off to a very strong start,” Earnest said.

He called Lynch’s delay “unconscionable” and said not “a single legitimate question” had been raised about her qualifications for the job. Lynch is the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

But Republicans can claim the high ground in that the bill, the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, was publicly posted in January and debated and voted on by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They argue that it’s not their fault if Democrats did not read it.

“Do our colleagues who are filibustering this legislation really want to play politics with such a sensitive and vulnerable part of our population over an issue that some advocates have called a phantom problem?” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said Monday on the Senate floor.

Cornyn, the bill’s author, implored six Democrats to break party ranks and join Republicans, which would give them the 60 votes needed to proceed to a vote on the bill.

Tying the trafficking bill to a vote on Lynch only seemed to harden Democrats.

“But if hijacking the human trafficking bill with an unrelated abortion provision wasn’t already bad enough, the majority leader is now holding Loretta Lynch’s nomination hostage, too,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

He complained that Lynch was nominated 128 days ago, one of the longest delays for a confirmation vote in recent Senate history.

How did the provision prohibiting taxpayer money to fund abortions end up in a bill designed to fight modern-day slavery?

It is all intertwined with the politics of the Hyde Amendment, named for the late Rep. Henry Hyde, a Republican from Illinois and an opponent of abortion. The 1976 provision prohibits federal funding from being used for abortions.

Last year the Democrats controlled the Senate and Cornyn did not include the anti-abortion language when the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill.

The 113th Congress ended without a floor vote on the bill, and the new Congress — with Republicans in charge of both chambers — began in January with a clean slate, meaning all legislation had to be introduced again.

This time, Cornyn’s bill contained the Hyde Amendment language on abortion funding. The bill was posted and even approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Democrats didn’t see the provision and Republicans didn’t advertise it.

A Cornyn aide, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the controversy, said the new language was inserted last year. The aide said that Democratic staff was aware of the addition before the Judiciary Committee established the bill’s final wording in February.

But a Senate Republican Policy Committee summary of the bill does not mention the Hyde Amendment provision. A companion bill passed by the House of Representatives does not include the Hyde language.

Still, Democrats apparently failed to read the bill until the last minute, setting up the impasse.

Aside from saying they were blindsided, Democrats say the bill expands the provision, since it goes beyond the taxpayer funding specified in the Hyde Amendment and applies it to funds that the bill would collect to help victims from traffickers.

Cornyn countered Monday with a release listing dozens of bills that include similarly restrictive abortion language. “Why do Democrats now oppose Hyde language while scared, abused children await our help?” he asked.

But Democrats and their supporters are holding firm — especially with Lynch in the balance.

“It adds insult to injury to hold up the vote to confirm Lynch until that bill passes,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonpartisan advocacy group.
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Lesley Clark contributed to this report.

Photo: U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the Capitol Rotunda on the way to the State of the Union Address, Jan. 20, 2015. (James Cullum/Talk Radio News Service via Flickr)