Saturday, September 14th, 2019
Stephan: Beneath the Trumpian fecal storm, this country is coming apart because of Trump not just what he does, but the gestalt that emanates from him and his administration. I look at this data day after day, and the trend direction is not good. Here's an example, one you hear very little about, but which shapes the lives of thousands. Here is the data.
Credit: Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty
Several federal efforts to combat human trafficking in the U.S. have slowed under the Trump administration, according to government data and human trafficking advocates.
Why it matters: There are thousands of trafficking victims in the U.S. — including children trafficked into prostitution as well as agricultural and domestic workers who are paid little or nothing. But the Trump administration has cut back on prosecutions of these crimes and assistance to victims.
By the numbers: Last year, the National Human Trafficking Hotline identified almost 15,000 people who were most likely trafficked. That’s more than any year since at least 2012.
- But prosecutions are down: The number of defendants charged with human trafficking by federal attorneys fell to 386 last year, from 553 in 2017, according to the State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report.
- So far this year, federal attorneys have prosecuted 39% of the cases referred to them with child sex trafficking as the lead charge, according to data collected by Syracuse […]
Maybe not slow enough in some cases.
Lawsuit alleges profiling by Frontier Airlines. In what’s becoming a sadly regular occurrence, another multiracial family has been profiled by airline staff as being involved in human trafficking. In this case, 55-year-old Peter DelVecchia, a white man, was traveling with his adopted 12-year-old son, who is black. According to a lawsuit DelVecchia filed in federal court, Frontier Airlines staff accused him of sex trafficking his son and detained the boy in the back of the plane.
DelVecchia alleges that the only basis for this confrontation was the fact that he and his son don’t have the same skin color.
This wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. A rash of recent incidents on flights and at airports feature false fears of human trafficking that seem to be based on nothing more than staff or onlookers—including Cindy McCain—finding children or women traveling with a man of a different race or ethnicity to be suspicious.
https://reason.com/2019/09/10/another-multiracial-family-falsely-accused-of-sex-trafficking-while-flying/?utm_medium=email