Vulnerability and Exploitation – Human Trafficking After Natural Disasters

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) defines preparedness as “a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluating, and taking corrective action to ensure effective coordination during incident response.” This cycle is but one component of a larger National Preparedness System designed to prevent, respond to, and recover from natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other catastrophic events. To properly prepare, communities and private and public agencies must accurately assess risks and threats. Disasters inherently come with known and unknown threats. One looming emerging threat is human trafficking because traffickers capitalize on the vulnerability these events create to exploit victims. When properly trained, emergency management and disaster responders are uniquely positioned to identify, prevent, and mitigate exploitation before and after an emergency. 

Natural and human-caused disasters can wreak havoc on socioeconomic, political, and geographical landscapes. These humanitarian crises exacerbate preexisting vulnerabilities, which can be conducive to trafficking and exploitation of the people impacted. Disasters exploit and compound vulnerabilities often associated with trafficking, such as poverty, food insecurity, and gendered-based violence. Post-disaster, the sudden economic instability, employment losses, and rapid deterioration of living conditions embolden traffickers to exploit disaster victims for commercial sex and forced or exploited labor. 

Nefarious Opportunities in Disasters 

Traffickers are likely to exploit disaster victims or profit from the recovery efforts. Human trafficking exploits others for profit through force, fraud, or coercion, which decimates lives, fractures families, and exploits victims’ bodies and labor as renewable resources. Seeking vulnerable populations, traffickers use physical and psychological abuse, fear, and intimidation to exert control over their victims. Some may keep victims shackled, while others use less obvious methods, including debt bondage, wherein victims feel honor-bound to satisfy dubious debts. 

Human trafficking is commonly considered the second-largest criminal enterprise worldwide and one of the fastest-growing criminal activities. The International Labor Organization estimates this enterprise generates $150 billion annually worldwide. Preexisting factors in disaster-prone environments increase individuals’ susceptibility, with the most prevalent indicators being gender, economic disadvantage, displacement, and newfound orphan status to exploit the victims’ psychological state. 

Disasters push the impacted region into a state of heightened vulnerability, of which emergency managers and disaster responders must be conscious. The instability and destruction of the economic and social structure post-disaster drive ecoviolence insofar as malignant bad actors seek opportunities to prey on those most impacted. While the research on this nexus emerges, experts are starting to examine how well-trained responders can play a positive role in a “whole-of-government” counter-trafficking response plan. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services identified emergency management personnel as uniquely positioned to identify and report suspicious behavior that could indicate potential human trafficking or related activities. 

Generally, scholars analyze victim vulnerabilities through the “Push and Pull” migratory framework. “Push” factors consist of events that would cause an individual to leave his or her current location and seek safety or overall educational/economic betterment elsewhere. Some of the common “Push” factors include widespread poverty and unstable political structures. “Pull” factors are events or opportunities that would cause an individual to migrate to a specific location. Some typical “Pull” factors are access to education, access to higher-paying jobs, and upward social mobility. A destination country’s demand for inexpensive labor is often a driving dominant “Pull” factor. Driven by profit margins, underpinned by a globalized economy and buyers of sex, traffickers can leverage the “Push” and “Pull” factors as vulnerabilities in their victims to exploit. The following case studies demonstrate these factors and how exploiters deploy them in a disaster setting. 

Case Example: Worker Exploitation During Hurricane Katrina Rebuild 

Procedural safeguards in the United States deter labor exploitation in government-funded contracts, but they leave safety gaps when not fully enforced. The U.S. government’s primary tool is the Davis-Bacon Act, which applies to federally funded contracts for repairs, alterations, or construction of public works or buildings that exceed $2,000. This legislation mandates that contractors and subcontractors must offer their laborers comparable wages and benefits to similar projects in the area. In addition, when workers exceed 40 hours per week, employers must pay them one and a half times their regular pay on contracts exceeding $100,000. 

The other safeguard requires employers to provide proof of citizenship or eligibility-to-work documents to the Department of Homeland Security for their workers. These laws were designed to be symbiotically entwined to ensure taxpayer funds support legitimate work and provide stable and livable wages. These wages then would be infused back into the local economy to help rebuild and revitalize the affected area. Without one or both of these legal tools, recovery times would lengthen, and the likelihood of exploitation increase. 

After Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast region in 2005, President George W. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act to help increase the recovery pace by removing bureaucratic paperwork. The suspension of the act eliminated the requirement for federal contractors to match the prevailing wages, which repelled local workers but attracted migrant workers accustomed to lower wages. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security suspended the requirement that federal contractors provide proof of their workers’ citizenship status or eligibility to work. Although the Davis-Bacon Act was suspended for only two months, reenacting it did not include a review of the executed contracts or retroactive requirements for those months. As a result, federal contractors continued employing those migrant workers at bargain rates. 

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Defendant Signal International (Signal), a ship construction and repair company, experienced a significant decline in its workforce. Agents for Signal fraudulently recruited nearly 500 workers from India through the H-2B guestworker program. These recruiters used fraudulent inducement and coercion tactics that primarily consisted of false promises of lawful U.S. citizenship. Upon arrival, the recruiters confiscated the workers’ visas and passports, convinced them to pay exorbitant recruitment, travel, and immigration processing fees, and threatened legal action and bodily harm if they did not work for Signal. Once employed, Signal subjected the guestworkers to labor camps with unhealthy living conditions while enduring psychological abuse and being defrauded of their hard-earned wages. Upon conclusion of this civil case, the jury found Signal International, the attorney in the scheme, and the Indian recruiter guilty of labor trafficking, racketeering, and discrimination. 

Case Example: Sexual Exploitation in the Wake of Hurricanes 

A failure within the disaster life cycle of hazard mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery can increase personal and property damage and delay recovery. Failing to properly understand or fully identify a hazard makes crafting a mitigation plan inert. For example, the City of Houston learned lessons after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that prepared communities when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in 2017. After-action reports for Katrina showed that the sudden influx of evacuees from New Orleans to Houston brought with it an increase in violence and property crime, with some evacuees falling victim to sex and labor trafficking. Additionally, the desire for an expedited recovery attracted low-wage laborers, some of whom became victims. With the 12 years of knowledge Houston agencies gained between Katrina and Harvey, they were better positioned to counter-trafficking efforts. 

The day after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, representatives from the mayor’s office assessed the disaster shelters’ landscape and communication capabilities. The Houston anti-trafficking task force distributed materials that illustrated the displaced persons’ vulnerability to being targeted and indicators for recruitment at shelters. That large-scale operation involved a “cot-to-cot” strategy of speaking personally with over 4,000 evacuees in their native languages. Following a steep decline in online sex advertisements during Hurricane Harvey, a significant surge occurred after the storm subsided: 

A number of factors could explain this massive uptick, including attempts by traffickers to recoup income lost during the storm, individuals entering or returning to prostitution because of loss of housing or income due to Harvey, or an influx of ads in anticipation of an increased population of male workers in the Houston area for storm recovery related work. 

The causation may be debatable, but the City’s foresight and proactive measures were well-informed. 

Disaster Responders’ Unique Positioning 

Emergency response units occupy real estate at a critical juncture of public health, safety, and homeland security. These units frequently include civilian Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members or professional emergency managers. Their emergency access gives them unique admittance to environments otherwise inaccessible to law enforcement or social service organizations. Emergency response personnel enjoy a level of community trust that some law enforcement and other personnel do not. Public perception is more likely to portray disaster responders as helpers rather than incarcerators, which facilitates personal contact and disclosure not typically bestowed upon law enforcement or federal immigration agencies. As such, these responders are well-positioned to interact with and support many of the vulnerable populations that traffickers prey upon. In keeping with the duty and obligation to protect vulnerable populations, emergency responders should be knowledgeable of ancillary predatory behavior they are likely to encounter, specifically human trafficking. 

Adapting to Address Human Trafficking and Exploitation 

Research indicates that the most effective means of curbing trafficking results from applying a comprehensive and holistic whole-of-government approach. The definition of comprehensive evolves as experts learn more about these operations and their exploitative tactics. A comprehensive strategy should enhance not only penal sentences but also the design of victim service parallel with legal advocacy programs and law enforcement training to ensure the curriculum includes victim-centered, trauma-informed care strategies. As research develops articulating the nexus between disasters and trafficking, emergency management agencies should be brought into the comprehensive counter-trafficking definition.

Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.

—Anonymous Navy Seal

Anyone who works in emergency and disaster response should have a basic awareness of suspicious activity. However, many are undertrained and under-skilled to identify this type of criminal activity correctly. In 2020, research submitted to the University of Chicago’s Master of Science in Threat and Response Management program focused on “Human Trafficking Awareness for Disaster Responders.” That study found survey respondents overwhelmingly (92%) believe that education on human trafficking is “very important” or “extremely important” to disaster support administration. However, only 40% of the same respondents reported receiving any level of trafficking-related training from their employers. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has begun recognizing this nexus, but emergency management still lacks a comprehensive training curriculum to build awareness. 

Updating State and Federal Agencies’ Hazard Mitigation Plan 

As emergency management agencies across the country collaborate with law enforcement activities, there needs to be a better appreciation for the disaster-exploitation connection. Anti-trafficking resilience and mitigation planning must be integrated into the disaster planning process. Addressing this current knowledge gap provides emergency response agencies an opportunity to demonstrate their dedication to public safety and community support. 

The FEMA National Advisory Council (NAC) advises the FEMA administrator on all aspects of emergency management: preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation for natural disasters, terrorism, and other human-caused emergencies. The NAC has six sub-groups for 2024. As human trafficking and exploitation best fall under the Gender-Based Violence Subcommittee’s jurisdiction, they will be discussing and exploring best practices on how to integrate this threat stream into the national disaster response structure. 

Conclusion 

As impacts from natural, human-caused, technological, and other emergencies continue exacerbating existing vulnerabilities, understanding of these threats must evolve. With this understanding, response strategies should evolve to address known or anticipated cascading impacts. Increased insight into the nexus between natural disasters and exploitation provides agencies the knowledge to update their response mechanisms, awareness, reporting, and mitigation measures to contemplate and plan for human trafficking. Expanding and refining a community’s awareness and identification protocols can help thwart trafficking operations and reduce the number of people traffickers prey upon after a natural disaster.