Human Trafficking Detection Act of 2014

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5116) to direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to train Department of Homeland Security personnel how to effectively deter, detect, disrupt, and prevent human trafficking during the course of their primary roles and responsibilities, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks and include any extraneous material on the bill under consideration.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 5116, the Human Trafficking Detection Act of 2014, sponsored by the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Meadows).

This bill requires the Department of Homeland Security to implement a human trafficking awareness training program for Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security Administration, and other DHS personnel which is tailored to their professional roles and responsibilities.

Additionally, it directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to annually assess and update training, as needed, based on current human trafficking trends and then report to Congress on the number of suspected and confirmed trafficking cases reported by DHS officials.

Lastly, it authorizes DHS to provide training curricula to non- Federal entities that request assistance in setting up their own programs. The Committee on Homeland Security expects that this bill will primarily codify already existing training programs within the Department, thereby having little or no implementation costs.

Mr. Speaker, DHS plays a critical role in combating human trafficking which has, unfortunately, become one of the most profitable forms of transnational crime in the world, amounting to a $32 billion per year industry.

Trafficked individuals are often forced into prostitution and labor, and an estimated 100,000 U.S. children are victims of trafficking each year. This modern-day form of slavery is a heinous stain on our society.

Moreover, CBP personnel are often the first to come into contact with unaccompanied minors crossing the border, which we are seeing on a daily basis now. It has become a significant humanitarian crisis that must be addressed.

While these children are crossing under a variety of circumstances, it is imperative that DHS personnel encountering them are adequately trained to detect potential victims of trafficking and respond most appropriately.

As a member of the Committee on Homeland Security and chair of the Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications, I believe it is critical that we continue to equip Department of Homeland Security personnel with up-to-date training and the tools to detect and counter this growing challenge, including Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, employees and others who often are working on the front lines with local communities, and

we know they are working on the front lines of the southern border as we speak.

H.R. 5116 would not only strengthen and codify training requirements for DHS, but it would also provide Congress with a clearer picture of the effectiveness of the training, as well as the number of suspected and confirmed instances of human trafficking reported by DHS officials.

Finally, this bill will encourage partnerships between DHS, State, local, and tribal governments, as well as private organizations, to set up additional training programs, raise broader awareness, and further enable these entities to become a force multiplier in human trafficking detection and prevention efforts.

I commend Congressman Meadows for introducing this bill, as well as the chairman of the full committee, Mr. McCall, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Transportation Security, Mr. Hudson, and the ranking member of the subcommittee and the ranking member, who is here in the Chamber today, for the fact that we are working on this in a bipartisan way. I appreciate their continued attention to this critical issue.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 5116, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield as much time as he may consume to the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Meadows), the sponsor of the legislation.

Mr. Speaker, as I close, this bill, which will ensure that valuable human trafficking awareness training is provided to DHS employees, and that is so very important, the gentlewoman from California reminded me that when I was United States attorney between 2001 and 2007, we started one of the human trafficking task forces in Indianapolis.

At that time, human trafficking was not really a concept that law enforcement really understood, and so trafficking task forces did start up in this country. They have grown, and we have put a lot of resources at the local and State level educating law enforcement, nonprofit groups, and neighborhood groups to understand what human trafficking is.

I think what this bill does is it strengthens for the Federal employees, the Department of Homeland Security employees, their training so that they, as the gentlewoman from California mentioned, they who have so many responsibilities, whether they are coming through our ports, whether they are coming through our airports, whether they are coming through our borders, they need the same type of training, if not enhanced training, than what they already have. And providing DHS employees with the tools to identify and appropriately respond to the potential victims of human trafficking will only serve as a force multiplier as we work to combat this terrible crime. I urge all Members to join me in supporting this legislation.

I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 5116, the Human Trafficking Detection Act of 2014, and I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

This whole issue of human trafficking is one, in my 18 years in the Congress, that I have been working significantly on. I sit on the Homeland Security Committee, and one of the things that we were able to do many years ago was to direct funds actually into my area, into Orange County, California, to work on a collaboration of State agencies, police officers, and the Federal Government, and we funded this to make one of the first task forces on human trafficking in our Nation. Originally, there were six, and we were one of six. Now they are, I think, in the double digits.

So we have learned a lot. We have learned a lot about human trafficking. We have learned that there are some countries that are initiation or supply countries. There are some that just transit these young people, these children, these women. We have also learned that there are destination countries or demand countries, and, of course, the United States is one of the largest demand countries. We are also a transit country because we take our own children from one State and put them in the other States. We are also a supply country because we use our own children in this human trafficking process, these terrible people who do this. They are really just, most of the time, about making money any way they can.

So what we know is that there are many children being trafficked across our State lines, but also across our borders. They come in through our airports. They come in through boats in Miami and my State of California, and, yes, they pour across our borders just as we see the humanitarian crisis that my colleague mentioned earlier.

So some of the people who first see these young children, for example, or these women who are being trafficked are going to be our Customs people. They are going to be our Border Patrol. As you can imagine, depending on the circumstance, they have got a lot of other things going on in their mind. They are trying to stem people from coming across. They are trying to figure out whether these people have drugs in their stuff, and so they may not notice what you can notice, and that is the trafficking of people, because in order to traffic that person, you have got to have the trafficker coming along with them.

So, if we train them, if we give them the tools, our Department of Homeland Security, our Customs, our Border Patrol people, our transport people will have a better idea and will be able to see almost immediately, which is what I have learned to do through this task force that we have. The signs are always there. It is do we know, do we have something in our mind that can show us what is happening?

Now, the Department of Homeland Security has obviously tried, but they have got a lot of things that they have got to work with. So by actually doing and increasing the awareness and increasing the training of our frontline employees, we will do a better job. We will do a better job of stopping this trafficking.

I thank the other side for working with us to ensure that this bill moves forward and becomes law to give that additional training that I believe our Department of Homeland Security employees need and want.

With that, I will reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have no more

speakers. If the gentlewoman from Indiana has no more speakers, then I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to applaud Representative Meadows for introducing what I think is a very important piece of legislation in a bipartisan manner, and I am thankful that he cares enough and that he has a daughter who wrote a report.

These people who are trafficked live amongst us. In particular, they live in areas where there is lots of diversity, where there are lots of people going about doing their business, in crowded areas a lot. Trafficked, you are right, they are exploited for sexual purposes, about 70 percent of them; but the other 30 percent are used in homes in domestic servitude not even getting, sometimes, to sleep in a bed of the very house where they are worked as a slave, sleeping on the floor and getting the crumbs off the table. We have seen that. We have seen that in Orange County, California, in one of the richest areas of the Nation. In one of the nicest homes this was happening with a little Egyptian girl who was there who had been trafficked in by a family.

If it is not domestic and it is not sexual, then it is sweatshops where people literally have their passports and their papers taken away and they are working 18 or 19 hours a day, not being paid and barely being fed. So they are all around us.

Americans have to open up their eyes. We have to see it in our neighborhoods, and, of course, we have to stop them as they bring them from other countries. That is why I believe that our Nation's screeners and our Customs officers serve as the eyes and the ears on the front line of our ports of entry and exit from the United States. If they are properly trained, then they will see it, and they can help stop it.

Lastly, I am very grateful that tonight we have had a series of bills with respect to human trafficking. I just want to remind my colleagues that this humanitarian crisis we see on our southern border, that many of those children also have faced what we are talking about tonight; and, in order to stop it, we have to be as generous as possible with those young people to restart their lives.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to say ``yes'' to this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as a senior member of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees, I rise in strong support of H.R. 5116, ``Human Trafficking Detection Act of 2014.''

I support this bipartisan legislation which ensures that Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel the Secretary deems appropriate are trained to effectively detect, intercept, and disrupt human trafficking in a manner relevant to their professional roles and responsibilities.

As the ranking member on the House Committee on Homeland Security's Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the men and women of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency who do yeoman work on the front lines in combating human trafficking and rescuing its victims.

Mr. Speaker, worldwide there are at least 20.9 million adults and children human trafficking victims living as forced low-wage workers and exploited as objects of sexual pleasure; and 1.4 million persons are victims of national and transnational sex trafficking.

I have long advocated declaring unconditional war on human trafficking and I am pleased that the Homeland Security Committee is taking a leading role in this effort.

The legislation before us will result in a significant enhancement of DHS's capability to combat human trafficking and does so in a way that allows the department necessary flexibility in providing training.

Departmental personnel may be trained in-class or through virtual, computer-based learning programs. In either case, the training provided will include methods for:

1. identifying specific indicators of human trafficking victims and perpetrators; and

2. where appropriate, approaching victims of trafficking in a manner that is sensitive to the potential victim and includes steps to avoid alerting potential perpetrators of human trafficking.

The legislation requires the Secretary to certify to the relevant committees that all described personnel have received the training, as well as submit a report to the committees on the overall effectiveness of the program, as well as the number of reported cases by DHS personnel and which of those cases were confirmed cases of human trafficking no later than one year after enactment.

Mr. Speaker, trafficking in humans, and especially domestic child trafficking, has no place in a civilized society. Those who engage in this illicit trade should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Approximately 600,000 and 800,000 victims are moved across international borders every year and subjected to compelled service and millions more are enslaved domestically within their own countries.

Mr. Speaker, Texas has one of the longest international borders in the world, a 1254 mile border it shares with Mexico, our good neighbor to the South.

Texas also has a major federal highway Interstate I-10 which traverses the Southern United States from the state of Florida to the state of California.

Human trafficking is a problem for the United States because the U.S. State Department estimates that approximately 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States, the largest number of people trafficked into the United States come from East Asia and the Pacific and the next highest numbers coming from Latin America and Europe.

I support H.R. 5116 because it is another important tool in the national arsenal to combat and eradicate the scourge of human trafficking.

I urge all of my colleagues to join me in supporting passage of H.R. 5116.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the gentlewoman from Indiana for her leadership on this particular issue and for her time and her eloquent remarks in introducing this particular piece of legislation.

I would also like to thank the gentlewoman from California who is leading from the other side of the aisle. Much is made of headlines where the dysfunction of Washington, D.C., is in every newspaper on how things do not work, and yet a few hundred feet away from me is a gentlewoman from California representing a constituency many, many miles away from my home State of North Carolina. So today we are not only reaching across the aisle, but we are reaching across the country from California to North Carolina, because human trafficking affects us all.

I was first made aware of this by my daughter who was 15 years old when she did a report on human trafficking. I thought it was one of those things that was not a big deal until she informed me that it was in our backyard. It was in our neighborhoods. It was in our communities. Right now, some estimated 23 million people are trafficked, are caught up in human trafficking. And to give you a perspective of that, that equals a number that is very close to another slavery that we know as a horrific blight on our Nation and our world-- the African slave trade. Today we have more people caught up in modern- day slavery than at the height of that particular time, yet somehow we continue to not address it. So hopefully on our watch, Mr. Speaker, we will address that.

Mr. Speaker, I want to provide a little bit of the context of this particular bill. The genesis of it came from a hearing. Many times we have hearings over and over, Mr. Speaker. Some people say, well, why do you continue to have those hearings?

We had some Delta Airline flight attendants who came in to a hearing. They were talking about the effort that they went through, on a voluntary basis, to set up a program to train their flight attendants and, ultimately, now all of their customer service representatives who see people on a day-by-day basis, they trained them to recognize those that are being trafficked. Yet they did this on their own. So from that, we felt like it would be a good idea to not only partner with them, but to provide that same type of training for the Federal workers that get to see these people at our borders, in our airports, and places across our Nation.

I want to thank Chairman McCaul, Chairman Hudson, Mr. O'Rourke, and the entire Homeland Security Committee staff for their hard work on working on this bill to make it not only one that hopefully will be a useful tool, but also one that will make a difference. It is estimated that there is no additional cost for providing this training, and yet the benefits will be great.

Tens of thousands of people are trafficked through the United States every year, 80 percent of whom are exploited sexually, two-thirds of them women, but more accurately, most of them little girls.

We must stand together in a bipartisan way, and I thank my colleague across the aisle for working with us and her leadership on this. But if we are successful--well, the word should not be ``if.'' When we are successful, Mr. Speaker, we will have saved thousands of lives, and we will have changed thousands of lives. So it is with great humility that I ask my colleagues to come together and support this piece of legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I strongly support H.R. 5116, The Human Trafficking Detection Act of 2014.

I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this important, bipartisan legislation, which will ensure that DHS personnel continue to receive the training they need to detect and disrupt human trafficking.

As Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, I recently convened a field hearing in Houston to examine the issue of human trafficking. At the hearing, the Committee heard compelling and disturbing testimony on how human trafficking is destroying the lives of vulnerable populations across the globe, including here in the United States.

Simply put, human trafficking is a despicable crime, and it must be stopped. I believe this bill is an excellent step towards that goal.

The Human Trafficking Detecting Act of 2014 would ensure that U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security Administration, and other Department of Homeland Security personnel are trained to effectively detect, and to the extent appropriate, intercept and disrupt trafficking in persons during the course of their normal roles and responsibilities. Not only would this legislation require effective training, it would also ensure that these employees are regularly provided with the most current trends and information on human trafficking and are adequately equipped to counter this growing problem.

While the men and women at DHS carry out their everyday work, many of them are well-positioned to spot traffickers who may try to exploit our nation's transportation systems to move their victims, both from overseas and within our borders.

H.R. 5116 also ensures that Congress has insight into the level of success of the training being provided, and that the Department's State and local partners have full access to training curricula to establish their own trafficking awareness programs.

I applaud Mr. Meadows for introducing this legislation, and I urge all of my colleagues to vote yes on this common-sense measure.