Authors: Benjamin Perrin
Of the two countries bordering the United States, Mexico is likely the more alluring entry point for traffickers. Nevertheless, Canada's geographic proximity to the large U.S. market for human trafficking, coupled with fluid criminal networks and more liberal immigration policies, has made it an attractive option for some traffickers seeking to bring victims to the United States.
“There seems to be a good amount of information indicating at least two thousand people per year are trafficked through Canada into the U.S.,” says an analyst with the U.S. Department of State. The north-to-south flow naturally attracts a good deal of media attention in the United States, but it is not a one-way street.
“Despite activity in both north- and south-bound directions, there is a significant increase in illegal north-bound migration from the US into Canada,” according to the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada's
Report on Organized Crime
(2008). “Most human smuggling activity takes place at border crossings in B.C. and Quebec, and to a lesser extent, Ontario,” the report continues. “A small number of organized crime groups, mostly based in B.C. and Quebec, are involved in the facilitation of international trafficking in persons.”
Plugging a leaky dike
As joint efforts to patrol the U.S.âB.C. border have intensified over the years, traffickers and smugglers have begun to move eastward, in some instances crossing over from Alberta into Montana. The phenomenon recalls efforts to repair a leaky dike, in which plugging one location merely directs the water to another where it flows more easily.
In July 2004, eleven women from South Korea (accompanied by three South Korean men) were found soaking wet, afflicted with hypothermia and insect bites, in Waterton Lakes National Park. Using sensors that identify body heat, a U.S. border patrol aircraft first detected the party near the remote Chief Mountain border crossing in southern Alberta as they were heading toward Montana. The subsequent investigation revealed that organized crime had brought the women into Vancouver under the pretence that they were students at a now-defunct school in the B.C. Lower Mainland. Once in Canada, the women were transported to Alberta, where two local men had been hired to drop them off near the border and pick them up on the other side after they had made their way through the dense woods. The two men reportedly were paid two thousand dollars for facilitating this illegal entry into the United States.
Authorities believe that the women would have become ensnared in the sex industry in the United States. Like the women in Osoyoos, they were returned to their homeland.
Criminal networks have long operated boarding houses in Vancouver, British Columbia, to harbour foreign nationals destined for illegal travel to U.S. cities such as Tacoma, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. These networks help the individuals enter the United States, often by accompanying them on foot over uncontrolled areas until someone else meets them on the other side of the border and transports them to their ultimate destination. Many individuals entering the United States illegally are forced to pay their smuggling debts by being sold for sex in massage parlours and brothelsâa common means of coercion, as we have seen.
British Columbia has been identified by the U.S. Department of State as “an attractive hub for East Asian traffickers,“ with several hundred South Koreans apparently having been transported through that province for exploitation in the United States. In Vancouver, one criminal network alone allegedly illegally transported at least thirty-nine South Korean nationals into the United States between August 2004 and March 2007, when South Koreans could legally enter Canada, but not the United States, without a visa.
In January 2009, South Korean nationals received permission to travel directly to the United States without a visa. Traffickers and smugglers keep abreast of changes to visa policies, routing their victims through countries that allow for more ready access to the United States. How this de facto harmonization of visa policy will affect Canada's attractiveness as a transit country remains to be seen.
In May 2007, Canadian Pacific Railway police in Windsor, Ontario, intercepted six stowaways on a freight train headed for Detroit, Michigan. Among them was Rashann, a young girl who'd been in Canada for several months and was assessed as a foreign victim of human trafficking. Sergeant Steve Richardson of the RCMP's Windsor Immigration and Passport Section investigated the incident. Rashann told immigration officials she did not know where she was going, reported Richardson. “She was extremely nervous.... She speaks no English at all and has not been in school.”
In some instances, the trade in people flows in the opposite direction. Also in 2007, Canada Border Services Agency investigators found Tasha, a foreign child, among a group of illegal immigrants seeking to enter Canada from the United States. She owed four thousand dollars as a smuggling debt and had no family or friends in Canada and no obvious means of repaying the money, leading officials to consider her a potential victim of human trafficking.
In February 2001, the Vancouver Police Department identified an eleven-year-old child who'd been abducted in Portland, Oregon, and brought to Canada. The child had been forced to engage in sex acts for money, and a joint law enforcement investigation led to the
prosecution and conviction of this child's traffickers, who received lengthy sentences to be served in an American prison. Under U.S. law in force today, sex trafficking of a child under fourteen years of age using force, fraud, or coercion is punishable with a mandatory minimum term of fifteen years imprisonment. In some instances, the offence even carries a sentence of life in prison without parole. Canada's legal system, which is far more lenient toward convicted child traffickers, is discussed in a later chapter.
In Hollywood films like
Taken
(2009), abduction is the method of choice used to ensnare trafficking victims. However it is high risk, being easier for authorities to detect at most stages of the trafficking chain. Nevertheless, abduction has been used to bring some victims from the United States into Canada.
Castana, a Mexican woman, had a green card and was living in the United States. In early 2006, she was kidnapped by a man from El Salvador who forced her into his car at gunpoint and drove her to Canada. Before he was able to sell her, Castana seized an opportunity to escape. After being questioned by police about the incident, she returned to the United States, believing her would-be trafficker had continued on to Toronto.
Trafficked Canadians in the “Land of the Free”
Up to this point, all of the incidents related have involved foreign victims. However, the United States is also an alluring market for sex traffickers who transport Canadian victims to a wide range of destinations. From Central and Eastern Canada, victims are usually brought to upstate New York and down the eastern seaboard as far as Florida. From Western Canada, the usual route leads to Las Vegas.
In February 2008, police in Clearwater, Florida, asked the RCMP for help investigating an international human trafficking operation that was spiriting unsuspecting Canadian women over 2200 kilometres from Toronto to Florida's Gulf Coast. Investigations revealed that American traffickers were approaching women in Canadian shopping malls and, after earning their trust, offering to take them to Florida for a vacation.
In the words of the investigating officers, on arrival the women were forced to “work in the commercial sex business under duress.”
The executive director of an NGO for sexually exploited women in Toronto estimates that at least forty prostituted women assisted by his organization over the last ten years had been “flipped” into the United States for a time, destined for Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Atlantic City, and New York. The movement of women was well organized, with an individual in each U.S. city awaiting the victims' arrival and prepared to initiate and control them. There are several gangs seemingly involved, including Jamaican street gangs, as well as Asian and Russian criminal organizations.
In Western Canada, the Edmonton Police Service has publicly revealed that young women from Alberta were drugged, beaten, and gang-raped by traffickers who forced them into prostitution. Once the victims were firmly under the control of the traffickers, they were shipped to Las Vegas, where they were sold to wealthy men for up to ten thousand dollars per weekend.
Heavily censored police-incident reports released by the RCMP National Headquarters in Ottawa under the
Access to Information Act
confirm the brutality involved in some of these cases. A September 2005 “occurrence summary” by the RCMP Northwest Region stated that the victim was “lured from Edmonton to Las Vegas, raped and beaten, then flown to Fort Lauderdale, raped and beaten again then forced into prostitution.” Despite all this, the victim did not want the police to lay charges.
Incidents of Canadian victims being exploited overseas have been less well documented. Nevertheless, the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada has received reports of “Canadian females being lured by false modelling opportunities overseas that result in their exploitation in the sex trade.”
The Canadian parents of these suspected victims of human trafficking are going to great lengths to rescue their young daughters. Perhaps no case illustrates this in more heart-wrenching detail than that of Jessie Foster.
What happens in Vegas â¦
Glendene Grant last heard her daughter's voice on Friday, March 24, 2006, when twenty-one-year-old Jessie Edith Louise Foster (her real name) called from Las Vegas, Nevada. Jessie told her mom that she wanted to come home, that she would be leaving in the next couple of days and would arrive back in Canada in time for Easter. Tragically, she never made it.
A year earlier, Jessie, a bright-eyed slim blonde, had been working at Boston Pizza in Kamloops before moving to Calgary to live with her father. She met a man at a party who offered her an “extra ticket” to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Despite warnings from her family, Jessie agreed to go with him. Within a few days of their arrival, the generous stranger claimed to be broke and demanded that she repay his “generosity” by being sold for sex. Over the next few months, Jessie was transferred first to New York City, then to Atlantic City, and finally to Las Vegas, where she was then introduced to a new man. A private investigator discovered that this individual, twice convicted of assault, had been offering Jessie for sale through escort ads in Las Vegas. He was the last person to see her alive.
Since the day Jessie went missing, her mother has been doing everything in her power to locate her daughter. She has launched a public website (
www.jessiefoster.ca
), raised fifty thousand dollars as a reward for information, hired a private investigator, written letters to countless officials, and participated in dozens of media interviews in the United States and Canada. Jessie's case has been profiled on
America's Most Wanted,
along with those of other women who have vanished in Las Vegas's seedy underworld.
Glendene wrote a letter to her missing daughter and those responsible for her disappearance and asked that it be distributed as widely as possible in the hope that someone may have information that could help locate the young woman. The letter is a loving mother's cry from the heart:
My sweet, dear, wonderful Jessie â¦
Hi baby, this is Mom. I just wanted to let you know how much I miss you and how hard we are working to find you and bring you home. I know how scared you must be and how worried you are about us worrying about you. With all my heart and soul I feel you are alive and out there, somewhere, needing to be found and rescued. We will do that.
Jessie, I also want you to know that we know what you have been through. We know what was happening in Vegas. Do NOT blame yourself or think that you need to be forgiven for ANYTHING. You are a VICTIM, even if you think you could have left, you were not able toâyour being a victim of human trafficking is proof of that. You were trying to come home to Canada and someone stopped you.
Jessie, I have missed two of your birthdays and a lot of other special occasions and holidays, plus all the things that have happened in the 16 months since you have been missing.
Your dad is having such a hard time with all of this. He just does not know what to do or what to think. He is doing better now, but I have been worried about him. After all, he only has you and Crystal ⦠of course he has step daughters and he knows you have your other sisters, but you guys are his and he misses you so much. Tracy is taking care of things of course. Being the mom and grandma to all the kids ⦠she is a strong woman.
You have such a strong, huge support system, Jess. Your friends all miss you and are so worried and supportive to us.
Jessie, remember ⦠we will find you, love Mom.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
I have one more thing to say, but this is not to Jessie ⦠this is to whoever took her, or has her, or knows where she is. PLEASE, you have to understand that Jessie is loved, wanted, missed and needed back by her family and friends. We NEED her. She is part of us and without her there is a huge, huge hole. It is unbelievable
how big of a hole such a tiny girl can make when she is not there. When she is missing from her family, from her place in our lives where she belongs. GIVE HER BACK TO US. Give her back to me. I am her mommy and I need my baby back, PLEASE. Jessie is a wonderful person with a huge heart and you do not need her like we do. We promise that if someone contacts us with information about Jessie's whereabouts we will keep it confidential and you will not be involved if you choose not to be. Contact us from our website:
www.jessiefoster.ca
or call Crime Stoppers or the North Las Vegas Police or even call your local police agency and they can get the information to us.
Sincerely,
Glendene Grant ⦠mother of endangered missing
JESSIE FOSTER
5
BUYING LOCALâCANADIAN VICTIMS