SECRETARY BLINKEN: Good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome to all of you and welcome to those tuning in online.
This is our administration’s first meeting of the President’s Interagency Task Force
to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, which I have the honor of chairing.
And to kick off today’s meeting it is a great pleasure to introduce our first speaker,
a longstanding leader on these issues, the Vice President of the United States.
Madam Vice President, the floor is yours.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mr. Secretary, and good afternoon to everyone.
And thank you to the senior administration officials who are gathered here for all of
your tireless work.
Thank you also to the members of the U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking for
your dedicated work.
And congratulations to today’s award recipients.
You all are an inspiration.
So, many of you know, when I was Attorney General of California, I visited a town on
the northern side of the U.S. border named Calexico.
And I went to Calexico because I wanted to see for myself the tunnels through which I
knew guns, drugs, and human beings were being trafficked.
And during that trip, I saw, in person and in photographs, tunnels with walls as smooth
as the walls of your living room, complete with lighting and air conditioning.
And what became very clear to me is through those tunnels were being trafficked guns,
drugs, and human beings, where some people were making a whole lot of money.
And in fact, the officials in Calexico, when I was there, described to me — these are
folks who’ve been working there, you know, doing tough work — and described to me with
tears in their eyes about children as young as five years old who were being trafficked
through those tunnels.
And as Attorney General, I placed a particular emphasis
on combating transnational criminal organizations and on combating the money laundering that
accompanies human trafficking.
So, to see those tunnels, an obvious point was and remains clear: Trafficking is an extremely
heinous and profitable business.
In fact, globally, human trafficking is a $150 billion business.
And let’s be clear: When we’re talking about human trafficking, we are talking about
some human beings who are essentially buying and selling other human beings.
So, today, we are here to focus on the estimated 25 million people around the world — as
many as one in three who are under the age of 18 — who are currently victims of human
trafficking.
Now, to understand the severity of human trafficking, to take on the scourge of human trafficking,
we must all understand that human trafficking is multifaceted.
Human trafficking happens both abroad and right here in the United States.
When I was Attorney General, we found that 72 percent of trafficking victims in California
were born right here in the United States.
In 2020 alone, there were 11,000 instances of human trafficking that were reported in
the United States.
And mind you, those were only the cases that were reported.
Experts suggest that the number of people at risk has also grown during COVID-19.
So we must address, with a sense of urgency, what is happening in our own backyard.
In the United States and worldwide, there are many types of work for which people are
trafficked.
Some people are lured from their homes or their home country with promises of a better
future, only to be forced into sexual exploitation.
Others are coerced and forced into labor or indentured servitude.
Of the estimated 25 million people worldwide being trafficked, 65 percent are being forced
to do domestic work, construction work, agricultural work, or manufacturing work.
Last year alone, we seized nearly 1,500 shipments of merchandise made using forced labor, including
things like clothes and electronics.
The value?
Nearly $500 million.
To be sure, the economic impact of forced labor is significant.
And it undermines our own supply chain, displacing American workers, driving down American wages,
and creating an unlevel playing field for responsible American businesses.
As a nation, we must require serious consequence and accountability for those who commit these
crimes.
And we must work to stop these crimes before they happen.
In December, our administration issued our National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking.
Our plan centers on the key pillars of U.S. and global anti-trafficking efforts: prevention,
protection, prosecution, and partnerships.
Today, several of our departments and agencies will make announcements regarding how we will
advance this plan.
And there is a clear line that runs throughout our administration’s work: We are focused
on the most vulnerable.
And based on my experience, the most vulnerable are women and girls, racial and ethnic minorities,
LGBTQI+ people, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, migrants, and children
in the foster care system.
When we identify who is most vulnerable, we can tailor our tactics and improve our strategy,
we can look at what is putting communities at risk in order to improve our prevention
efforts, and we can look at ways to reach those communities to ensure that support is
trauma-informed and survivor-centered.
In this work, our government — while we need business leaders and non-profit leaders,
community leaders, we need all of you to partner with us.
I have seen in my career the power of public-private partnership to address human trafficking.
Whether it was the non-profit that I teamed up with to support survivors or the technology
company I invited to help identify search terms that perpetrators were using, it is
clear: When we pool our resources and our expertise, we can maximize our impact.
So, those many years ago, after I visited Calexico and I saw the tunnels, I reached
out to Attorneys General from across our nation.
And together we launched a unified effort to take on transnational crime.
What was true then is true now: It will take all of us to address human trafficking.
So I thank you all for being here today and for the work you do every day.
Thank you.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Madam Vice President, thank you so much, not just for starting us off
today but for your leadership on this issue for a long, long time, for the extremely evocative
words but also for demonstrating in what you’ve done and the focus you’re bringing to this
now how we can actually make practical progress in tackling the issue.
And we are grateful for that leadership.
We’re grateful having you here today to start us off.
Let me just say a bit more about why we’re here today and what we’re going to do over
the next couple of hours.
To pick up where the Vice President left off, we have an estimated 25 million people around
the world subjected to human trafficking, every one of them a human being exploited
in some way – for labor, for services, for sex.
Through force, through fraud, through coercion, traffickers violate the most basic right of
people everywhere to be free.
We know, we feel, the human toll.
And of course, that is borne most of all by the victims of trafficking.
But it’s also worth noting that the impact extends far beyond those subject to trafficking
to society as a whole.
Human trafficking erodes the rule of law, the safety of our communities, the security
of our borders, the strength of our economy.
Forced labor, as the Vice President was speaking to, which is used to produce so many of the
things that we buy and that we use every single day, from the food on our tables to the essential
minerals that go into the devices probably a number of us are using at this very moment
to log on to this event.
The use of forced labor gives an unfair advantage to businesses that exploit workers, hurts
those that follow fair labor practices, and misleads consumers about the real costs of
production.
This is, by definition, a global problem.
Victims come from every part of the world, as documented in our annual report.
Traffickers operate in virtually every country, including here in the United States.
And because this is a global problem we have to have a global coalition to confront it,
one that cuts across government, business, civil society, all other parts of our society.
We also have to find more ways to put effective pressure on governments that engage in or
enable human trafficking – China, Cuba, North Korea, Russia.
The recent bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which cracks down on the profits
Beijing can make from state-sponsored forced labor in Xinjiang and beyond, is one example
of how we can do this.
And I want to thank Congress for its leadership on this front.
We need more efforts like that one.
This is a crime that all parts of our government have to work together to address, and I think
we have evidence of that commitment today just on the screen with the participation
of 20 cabinets or departments and agencies.
That shows, it demonstrates very vividly, that this really is a whole-of-government
effort.
Every agency has a role to play, and our new National Action Plan provides a roadmap for
how to do that – again, here in the United States but also around the world.
So what we’d like to do is to ask principals from every federal government agency involved
in this effort to set out their major priorities in tackling the trafficking problem with a
special focus on what’s new in these efforts.
And let me just add that this is an effort that has been underway for some years across
multiple administrations, and a torch is passed to this administration to carry on the work,
to dig even deeper, and to make genuine progress in combating trafficking.
Before we hear from colleagues, I’ve got something that is a particular pleasure, and
that is to recognize the recipients of the 2021 Presidential Award for Extraordinary
Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons.
So if you will bear with me for a few minutes, I want to recognize the awardees.
As the Vice President said, one of the core priorities of the new National Action Plan
is to persistently work to engage survivors in every part of the anti-trafficking effort,
from prevention to protection to prosecution.
Survivors are uniquely positioned to ensure that our policies and strategies are victim-centered
and trauma-informed, which is crucial to their effectiveness.
And that’s exactly what Tanya Gould, who spent decades at this, has been doing.
A survivor of domestic sex trafficking, Tanya has dedicated her life to helping people who
have been victimized by sexual violence, and she has made herself an indispensable ally
of institutions and individuals working to help and to empower survivors.
She’s developed trainings that teach doctors and nurses what to listen and look for to
identify trafficking victims and how to communicate in a way that’s respectful and meets victims
where they are.
She helped the Department of Education improve its guidance to teachers, to counselors, and
others in schools to prevent kids from being targeted, to spot warning signs of trafficking,
and to support students who are survivors.
She’s traveled the country sharing her expertise with faith groups and student groups, with
advocates and practitioners, and even helped write and produce a short film – all to
help raise awareness about this crime and what we’ve got to do to tackle it.
Tanya’s – Tanya calls her work, and I quote, “love in action,” and Tanya never
seems to run out of love for some of the people who need it most.
Let me just read the award citation: “For her unyielding commitment and contributions
to the fight against human trafficking and bringing greater awareness of the issue to
her community and the nation.”
Tanya, thank you, thank you, thank you, and congratulations.
The second awardee is the Thai Community Development Center, known as the Thai CDC, represented
here today by its founding director, Chanchanit Martorell.
In many ways, the story of this organization is intertwined with the story of the fight
against human trafficking in the United States.
Back in 1995, the Thai CDC led a group of NGOs assisting 72 individuals in escaping
from a secret sweatshop in El Monte, California.
Many of the workers had been held under armed guard for seven years while being forced to
work up to 18 hours a day for virtually no pay.
The Thai CDC has – had never worked with trafficking survivors before, but the approach
they pioneered became a model for efforts for decades to come.
The organization provided the victims with treatment for trauma; legal aid as they fought
to stay in the United States and to be reunited with their families; and support as they built
new lives, from finding places to live to providing training on how to start their own
businesses.
In the more than 25 years since, the organization has worked on several more human trafficking
cases, accompanying more than 500 victims.
Beyond these cases, the Thai CDC’s advocacy was instrumental to the passage of the Trafficking
Victims Protection Act.
It led to reforms in the garment industry, broadened the definition of human trafficking
to include practices like debt bondage.
The organization’s formal citation reads, and I quote: “For its unending support in
the fight against human trafficking and for bringing a greater awareness of the issue
to the Thai community in an effort to see an end to human trafficking.”
So please join me in congratulating them, to congratulating Tanya, for what has literally
been and remains life-changing work.
Thank you.
(Applause.)
So thanks again to our awardees.
Thanks for the recognition that everyone is giving them.
And now, to move on with the agenda, I’d now like to ask our senior official, Kari
Johnstone, to give us an update on the interagency efforts, the Senior Policy Operating Group.
Kari, over to you.