On February 2, 2023, Ambassador (ret.) Luis C.deBaca spoke with PICS students on topics surrounding the fight against human trafficking around the world. C.deBaca coordinated U.S. government activities in the global fight against contemporary forms of slavery as head of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons during the Obama Administration. Previously, as one of the United States' most decorated federal prosecutors, Ambassador C.deBaca investigated and prosecuted crimes of human trafficking, immigration, hate crimes, money laundering, and official misconduct. A 1993 graduate of Michigan Law School, he has returned to Ann Arbor as Professor from Practice at the Law School, having spent several years as a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, where he taught as Yale Law School and the Yale School of Architecture. Ambassador C.deBaca is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and recipient of the Secretary of State's Distinguished Honor Award.
In his lecture, Ambassador C.deBaca emphasized that “human trafficking can be deceptive in the way it looks,” but is mostly defined as the inability of workers to leave their employer services, the use of force or coercion, and false or inflated promises of salary or working conditions.
The United States has demonstrated its commitment to the fight against human trafficking, so much so that President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. commented that “human trafficking – whether in the form of force, or other offenses – is an abhorrent abuse of power and a profoundly immoral crime that strikes at the safety, health, and dignity of millions of people worldwide… My Administration is committed to stopping human trafficking wherever it occurs.”
The severity of this issue is demonstrated through the creation of different tactics, frameworks, and task forces to fight trafficking including the 3P Approach and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. The 3P Paradigm of Prevention, Protection and Prosecution is a fundamental framework created in an effort to combat human trafficking so that the state response for prosecution was no longer the only way to combat different forms of human trafficking.
In addition, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was created to provide tools and resources to the U.S. government in an effort to further protect trafficking victims domestically and internationally. As Ambassador C.deBaca shared during the lecture, “It gave us a way to let people stay in the US even if they came in illegally, gave us a structure we could start to use, gave us a whole ability to arrange ourselves around these new ideas.” Along with both of these frameworks, other tactics have been implemented to combat this form of slavery, including diplomatic engagement and negotiations with the U.N. Protocol.
Ambassador C.deBaca concluded the lecture by sharing different challenges and successes related to human trafficking. Challenges present include hidden and/or unreported crimes, and imbalanced efforts, while successes have been found in multi-disciplinary task forces, growing enterprises, fighting for justice, providing survivor care and family unification.
