During his first term, President Donald Trump signed an updated version of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the key law that guides federal efforts to combat human trafficking in the United States and abroad. The revised version specified that not only criminal groups but also governments should be held accountable for any “policy or pattern of … trafficking in government-funded programs.”
At the Oval Office signing ceremony, the president spoke about the country’s obligation to fight the growing global problem. “You would think that was an ancient form of criminality,” Trump told reporters in early 2019. “It’s not. It’s a very modern-day form.”
So it was all the more surprising for Chris Gooding on March 16 of this year, the day he saw the news that the administration had deported more than 200 Venezuelan men to El Salvador and was paying the country to house them at a maximum-security superprison.
Gooding, an assistant professor of theology at Marquette University, had studied trafficking in India—first as an intern with International Justice Mission in the early 2000s and years later as part of his doctoral dissertation. He had written a book about modern slavery and theology. He thought he knew trafficking when he saw it.
In the deportations to El Salvador, Gooding spotted red flags everywhere. Both governments seemed to be taking advantage of the men’s lack of legal status, depriving at least some of them of the opportunity to contest their removal, a constitutional right that US courts have since reaffirmed.
While the US government temporarily detains immigrants every day, this case was different: The government seemed to be imprisoning Venezuelans indefinitely without convicting or sentencing them for any crime. It instead repeated the blanket assertion that they are members of the transnational Tren de Aragua gang—despite mounting evidence that many or even most may not be.
Beyond that, the government of El Salvador seemed to be profiting from taking possession of the men. In addition to billing an estimated $20,000 per imprisoned migrant, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele insinuated that the country might force the men to work in its prison labor program, a statement that alarmed watchdog groups.
To Gooding, all of it felt characteristic of state-sponsored human trafficking. The story dominated headlines—in particular when the administration admitted that among a group of Salvadorans also deported to the prison was a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been deported by mistake. (The government now says Abrego Garcia himself was suspected of human trafficking during a traffic stop in 2022, though police did not arrest him and never brought charges.)
Yet Gooding heard only silence from advocates for victims of trafficking.
“Ten, twenty years ago, if such a thing was done by the Chinese government, we would call it out as a form of human trafficking,” Gooding told CT. “I haven’t heard anything from the general anti-trafficking community.”
Combatting human trafficking is a favorite evangelical cause, and those abolitionist convictions have often spilled over into politics. Recently, several ministries openly opposed Trump’s nomination of former representative Matt Gaetz for US attorney general. The Department of Justice had investigated him for sex trafficking without bringing any charges. Gaetz eventually withdrew.
If anyone should be speaking up about the El Salvador arrangement, Gooding thought, it’s anti-trafficking Christians—a group guided not only by biblical mandates to welcome the stranger but also by passion for helping victims who have been deprived of their legal rights. So he wrote an op-ed and braced for blowback. But none came.
“I haven’t received any pushback,” he said. “I actually kind of thought it would be more controversial.”
Gooding isn’t alone in making the case that the deportations to El Salvador equate to human trafficking. Human rights groups have raised similar concerns, especially in mid-April, when Bukele spoke of the deportees as if they were chattel, offering to exchange them for political prisoners in Venezuela.
But legal experts say it’s one thing to believe a situation is trafficking, and it’s another to prove it to a court. Persuading a judge or the International Criminal Court that Trump and Bukele are engaging in state-sponsored trafficking could be an uphill battle.
Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to exploit others, said Nate Knapper, president of The Joseph Project, a ministry that connects trafficking survivors with pro bono legal representation. No one denies that the government used force to arrest Venezuelan migrants and move them across international boundaries. But to elevate that to a trafficking crime under US law, a prosecutor would have to show that Bukele or Trump intended to exploit the migrants—the legal concept known as mens rea.
“It is not clear to me that there is an intent to exploit on behalf of either government,” Knapper said. “You would have to have very strong evidence. I think the burden of proof would be very high here.”
If migrants were improperly detained and spirited off to a third country but there was no intent to benefit from their labor, “it falls more closely in line with an abduction or hostage situation,” said Meg Kelsey, director of the Center for Global Justice at Regent University’s law school.
Much of the argument for classifying the deportations as trafficking hinges on whether the government denied migrants their legal due process. Even for individuals who are part of a gang, if they never get a chance to dispute the allegation or to appeal their removal, that would be a constitutional violation on its own: In early April, the Supreme Court underscored that migrants have the right to contest their deportation.
What concerns human rights advocates even more is the prospect that some wrongfully deported migrants might be working in a prison labor system.
In March, when Bukele announced that the first planes carrying US detainees had landed in El Salvador, he also promoted his prison labor program called “Zero Idleness,” leaving the impression that deportees may be made to work sewing uniforms, growing crops, or building roads. It’s unclear how many, if any, of the deported immigrants are part of the program. Bukele said more than 40,000 people are participating, or about 40 percent of El Salvador’s prison population.
In the United States, the 13th Amendment allows prison labor as the only legal form of involuntary servitude, provided it’s performed as punishment for a crime after a court conviction. If indeed some of the deported Venezuelans were denied due process and found to be working in prison, “anything that you use normally to distinguish between incarceration and enslavement is pulled completely out of the picture,” Gooding said. “It collapses into a situation of human trafficking.”
Several attorneys told CT they thought it would be difficult to prove in court that the two countries are exploiting the Venezuelans specifically for work. “The governments are going to be smart enough not to have a traceable policy saying that we know this is for the purpose of labor,” Kelsey said.
Still, Gooding doesn’t think that disqualifies the deportations as trafficking or modern slavery. He cites the research of Orlando Patterson, a historian and sociologist at Harvard University who has produced some of the most influential scholarship in modern abolitionism. Patterson documented enslaved people around the world who did not work for their masters—who may have even been a financial burden—but who served as trophies to boost their masters’ prestige.
“I think it’s important to ask the question ‘What does Trump get out of this?’ He’s clearly using the public, violent degradation of these people to increase his power,” Gooding said. “And that’s what slavery is about.”
A prosecutor would have to demonstrate that any benefit to either Bukele or Trump was measurable, Knapper said. The benefit to Bukele’s government is obvious: The Salvadoran president said the US is paying $6 million in the first year of what could become an ongoing arrangement of indefinite incarceration at a massive prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
How the Trump administration benefits is less clear. Using prisons in El Salvador potentially means building fewer prisons in the US. Perhaps most importantly, the administration has leveraged CECOT as a high-value publicity prop: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood there before cameras and warned immigrants that they could become the scared, silent men crowded in a cell behind her. Trump has shared Salvadoran promotional videos of the prison on his personal social media accounts.
“There’s a celebratory aspect of it that is just bananas,” Gooding said.
Trafficking or not, the situation raises a long list of other concerns, lawyers said. Other countries have faced recent criticism for outsourcing immigration detention, though none has directly contracted with a foreign government to incarcerate deportees. Italy this month deported its first wave of migrants to Italian-run detention centers in Albania. Migrant lawyers have sued the nations of Costa Rica and Panama for their role in detaining deportees from the US.
In El Salvador, rights groups say CECOT subjects prisoners to inhumane conditions, including torture. They say presumably innocent individuals, possibly including US deportees, are housed with convicted violent offenders. If true, that would violate several United Nations standards.
“This is obviously a horrendous mash-up of all different stages of innocence in this population. So there are certainly issues with that and potentially due process,” Kelsey said.
“Any Christian who follows the messiah who proclaimed release to the captives should be appalled by this,” Gooding said. “There’s a core conflict in the Gospels between the kind of power the Messiah wields and the kind of power Caesar wields. The former liberates and serves; the latter dominates and enslaves.”
For now, determining whether the arrangement amounts to trafficking may be impossible simply because the administration has released so few details. Lawmakers have unsuccessfully ordered the State Department to provide them with a copy of the agreement, arguing the administration is violating multiple laws by keeping it secret.
“That doesn’t deny that there could be civil remedies for those who have been wronged,” Kelsey said. “This is just the beginning of the question and pushback to what’s happened in the past couple of weeks.”
Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.
Related
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
