Michael Dominguez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore how the hospitality industry can move beyond discomfort to become a powerful force in preventing human trafficking through intentional cultural change and staff empowerment.

Michael Dominguez is the President and CEO of Associated Luxury Hotels International (ALHI), where he leads a global sales organization of nearly 80 professionals across 26 offices worldwide, serving as a trusted partner for meeting and event professionals seeking the best independent luxury properties and experiences. With over 30 years of experience in luxury meetings and events, Michael holds the Certified Hospitality Sales Executive (CHSE) credential and has earned multiple accolades for his leadership. He is an active and influential member of several industry associations, including serving as Past Chairman of Meeting Professionals International’s (MPI) International Board and co-chairing Meetings Mean Business. Michael has been recognized among the “Top 25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry” and “50 Most Influential Hispanics in the U.S.” In 2025, he received the ASAE Global Association Visionary Award. Under his leadership, ALHI has become a leader in anti-trafficking efforts within the hospitality industry, earning the Freedom Award for their commitment to this cause.

[00:00:00] Michael Dominguez: One thing I promised is, I promise you I’m gonna make people uncomfortable, at least for 10 minutes at every opportunity I can.

[00:00:06] Delaney Mininger: Every hotel is either part of the prevention network or a gap that traffickers exploit. And the signs are there, multiple room keys, extra towels, privacy signs that are up for days. And when COVID removed their front desk check-in, they lost their most important checkpoint.

[00:00:22] Leaders like Michael are showing us how to rebuild it and make it stronger. Hi, I’m Delaney Mininger, a student here at Vanguard University and I help produce the show. Our guest today is Michael Dominguez and he will be speaking with Sandra Morgan. Michael is the president and CEO of Associated Luxury Hotels International, the Freedom Award recipient, and he’s leading his industry’s fight against trafficking with intentional cultural change, and now here’s their conversation.

[00:00:56] Sandie Morgan: I am here with Michael Dominguez, president and CEO of Associated Luxury Hotels International. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast.

[00:01:09] Michael Dominguez: Thank you so much, and thank you for the invite. It’s excited to be here.

[00:01:13] Sandie Morgan: Well, and people usually expect my experts to be from law enforcement, aftercare, prevention, but you are very unique. And the first time I met you, was on Zoom. We haven’t met in person, but we’re looking forward to making that happen. I saw the Spurs jersey in the background in your office, and can you tell me why that’s there? Cause it made so much sense to so much of what we’re doing.

[00:01:50] Michael Dominguez: Without a doubt. And, I’ve mentioned that, you know, first and foremost I was born and raised in San Antonio. So there’s the connection to the Spurs. But, the Spurs have been an organization that has been literally featured and studied around their culture. And the reason that matters is it’s, yeah, the basketball and what they’ve done on the court and their wins and their championships and the most winning franchise over a 30 year window.

[00:02:15] Yeah, all that matters. But the important part is their culture and their culture and how it’s built and how it’s maintained. You know, it’s amazing that they’ve been in the league over 50 years and they’ve only missed the playoffs nine times. Ever.

[00:02:30] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:02:31] Michael Dominguez: And it’s that kind of measure of success that they’ll tell you the culture is special. They’re a small market team. You know, they’re not LA, they’re not New York, it’s San Antonio. And, and yet they’re so successful and their culture is all built around respect and people. You know, there’s a book that everybody that comes into our organization gets a book called, Culture Code by Daniel Coyle.

[00:02:55] And it’s in a, it’s a study of organizations that do culture really well and that are really unique and, you know, Navy Seal Team Six is in there, as well as about 30 pages dedicated to the San Antonio Spurs. And, and it talks about their culture and how it’s put together and how thoughtful everything is.

[00:03:15] Everybody who comes into our organization, they actually get a rock. And this rock has a story on it and it’s kind of our mantra and very much Sandie kind of applies to the work that is being done around trafficking. And the mantra is very simple and, I had the privilege of being able to go see their locker room.

[00:03:33] It’s the only thing in the Spurs locker room. The mantra is a story by a 1920s immigrant rights activist named Jacob Reese. The story simply says, when all hope fails, I think of a stone cutter hammering away at a stone more than a hundred times with no success. And on the hundred first strike, the stone splits, and I know it’s a hundred strikes before that split the stone.

[00:03:55] and the mantra of the Spurs is we’re just pounding the rock. The rock is our mantra here at ALHI and pounding the rock is a very simple way to live. Where are we better today than we are yesterday? And if we are, we hit another, we’ve hit the rock one more time. And when I say that’s perfect for the work we’re doing around trafficking, all we can do is continue to hit the rock.

[00:04:20] If we continue to hit the rock together, eventually that rock will split.

[00:04:24] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Well, this may be the shortest podcast ever. That was Drop the mic. That’s what will do. But seriously, after our last conversation, I got the book. I read the book and became your fan too. And so, I had never real, I think I’d heard the team name Spurs,

[00:04:46] Michael Dominguez: Yeah.

[00:04:47] Sandie Morgan: Then, Coach Popovich, his influence that inspires you, really I believe is something very transferable to our mission and our work to do prevention as well as identification and intervention. So.

[00:05:08] Michael Dominguez: I could not agree with you more, and you know, just as if you’re gonna build a great culture, it has to be intentional around your leadership. I believe the work around here has to be intentional. It has to be pervasive. It has to be intentional, it has to be every day. And that’s something that, you know, we’ve really grown as an organization.

[00:05:27] And you know, what I was proud of, you know, proud of is that this was the piece I wanted to focus on as an organization. ’cause I was very passionate around it, where I was excited as it started with a team of six. That was our committee to kind of figure out how we’re gonna drive this initiative through our organization and how we’re gonna start to live and breathe awareness around human trafficking and what we can do.

[00:05:51] And then where I’m most proud is the entire organization has embraced it. And what I think is really interesting as a sales organization, they’ve embraced it even further because they figure, they know how much it resonates with our client base. Now that’s not why we do it. But for our clients to understand, you know, Sandie, I just came back from our largest show in our industry.

[00:06:11] It’s called IMEX America. We had 12,000 people in Las Vegas.

[00:06:15] It’s an intense appointment based show. We had a thousand appointments in our booth over a three day window, all about business and future conferences. But we have, they’re hosted buyers and we had a large hosted buyer group and we have a hosted buyer breakfast, and at our breakfast,

[00:06:32] You know, and it, even pre-breakfast, we sent ’em a note, but at the breakfast I made an announcement. I said, look, if you’re in this room, you’re doing okay. And if you’re in this room, we’ve decided instead of giving you a bunch of gifts that you probably don’t need, we’re gonna

[00:06:46] Sandie Morgan: With our brand on the side.

[00:06:48] Michael Dominguez: Exactly. We are, we are gonna make a large contribution in lieu of those gifts to our efforts around human trafficking impact.

[00:06:56] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:06:57] Michael Dominguez: And there is unsolicited applause from the group to say, you know, instead of you getting a gift, you’re contributing to something that’s a really great cause. That’s where this starts to pick up steam, because who is not gonna be in favor of us working towards, you know, what I call modern day slavery and helping, you know, this main issue.

[00:07:18] And there’s nobody. But for some reason, as I say, we’re the hospitality industry and because it’s uncomfortable, we don’t like talking about things that are uncomfortable. When we won the Freedom Award, a few years back in, in my acceptance speech, the one thing I promised is, I promise you I’m gonna make people uncomfortable, at least for 10 minutes at every opportunity I can.

[00:07:40] And that’s what I mean by being intentional.

[00:07:42] Sandie Morgan: Wow, and, and that’s almost sounds like an oxymoron coming from you. We were just talking about the book, Unreasonable Hospitality. We had tech challenges yesterday because it was raining here in Orange County and you were gracious and kind and hospitable to the nth degree. So making people uncomfortable has a purpose here, and you know how to do this because your expertise in the hospitality industry, your advocacy, your innovative approach combined with your influence is

[00:08:25] Obviously moving the needle, and so I wanna jump right into the big question I sent to you ahead of time. In episode 352, we spoke with attorney Pat McDonough about his groundbreaking $40 million jury verdict against a hotel for enabling child sex trafficking. You can go back to that episode, listeners

[00:08:58] and hear about the 16-year-old client that was trafficked in just 40 days while hotel staff sold her condoms and ignored obvious signs.

[00:09:13] Sandie Morgan: So give us your reaction and how hotels can do so much better.

[00:09:20] Michael Dominguez: Yeah. You know, I, I put that as an outlier, Sandie, in being that latent in ignoring the situation of what it is. And I say it’s an outlier because over the last five years, I don’t wanna discredit the tremendous work that has been done by the American Hotel Lodging Association by my industry organizations, which are MPI and PCMA, and this is in the forefront and AHLA taking a huge lead, you know, on this, which was, you know, most hotels are part of the American Hotel Lodging Association.

[00:09:57] So by being part of the largest association that now has an accredited program to train around human trafficking and what the signs are and what that looks like. I think the work being done is really positive. Where we lost a lot of ground, and I feel we’ve made it up over the last 18 months, was during the pandemic.

[00:10:18] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:10:19] Michael Dominguez: The pandemic was a very odd time. And what we talk about in the hotel industry, and it’s not an excuse, it just means we have a lot of other focuses going on at the same time, and you can kind of miss it. You didn’t have the same level of staff that we have during normal times. So you know that those are things you have to consider in the environment, but in normal environments, this is very, very, very much on focus.

[00:10:44] Something that people would look at, you would not see, and where I think you almost have to separate it. Our industry, when I present about the industry, I talk about us being bifurcated and we are bifurcated as well, in that I have my main brand hotels and mainstream hotels. Then you have some hotels that are just kind of outliers.

[00:11:04] The outliers are the harder ones because the mainstream hotels, they’re all part of programming today. They’re training housekeepers, they’re training front desk staff.

[00:11:13] Sandie Morgan: So one response I’ve received when I’ve reached out to executives at certain hotels. They explained to me the difference between a hotel owner and a franchise owner,

[00:11:32] And so when I talked to a franchise owner, and I’m not going to use the brand, I was discouraged and insulted because

[00:11:44] Sandie Morgan: he said I didn’t sign that code of conduct. That’s, yeah. And I’m here for blah, blah, blah. And so there was no training going on there,

[00:11:56] And there was no culture of human dignity that was being promoted. So how do I deal with understanding the difference between a hotel brand and a franchise?

[00:12:11] Michael Dominguez: Well, a couple of things is, the brands today, you can name any of ’em, any of the large brands. They don’t own any of their hotels, Sandie, they’re management companies. Where it’s gotten further than that is, you know, even some of the largest brands in the world. IE someone like Marriott.

[00:12:30] They only manage a small portion of all of those hotels. Of those almost 10,000 hotels around the world, the rest of it are licensed and franchised. And where it gets bifurcated once again, is that the owners of these hotels, it’s not the owners by the way. The owners do not run the hotels.

[00:12:50] The owners own the asset and it’s a real estate asset. So the owners traditionally hire a management company. Those management companies, there’s hundreds of ’em today will be hired because an owner says, I’m gonna, I’m gonna license a Marriott franchise, I’m gonna hire a management company to manage it.

[00:13:12] ’cause Marriott’s not managing it for me. I’m just part of the marketing system. So where it’s bifurcated is these professional management companies, they’re doing a really good job around this effort as well. There’s lots of ’em. The Ambridge of the world, the pyramids of the world. They’re doing a good job.

[00:13:28] And they’re involved in it just like any major brand would be. But they’re not a brand. They’re actually supporting a brand from the franchise. So it’s a very convoluted world today in the hotel world and how it’s owned and managed. But my point to all that is any of your top management companies, any of your top brands, they’re all focused on this and they are doing their due diligence to make sure that people are educated and aware

[00:13:56] Of the issue and really pushing it forward. And then there’s many on the client side, you know, we’re partners with Maritz, which is a large intermediary company that does everything from full planning to, you know, program work for their group of customers. And they’re one of the largest in our industry.

[00:14:15] And they have been part of the code for over a decade, and they have been promoting this for over a decade. And you know, David Peckinpaugh, their CEO just won the Freedom Award this year and was recognized for their work. So my thing is, it’s getting broader and broader in our industry. And this is something that many people are involved in.

[00:14:34] You’re always gonna have these outliers, and that’s incumbent upon all of us to make the bad actors, not be bad actors. And, you know, I’m encouraged that, you know. Understand there is a, there’s legal and ethical, not even a liability involved, but there’s an ethical responsibility, but there’s also a responsibility in running your business because there is liability involved in that.

[00:14:59] And that’s what the case showed. But I, I don’t want to, wouldn’t want to paint it that there’s not a lot of good work done. And I think everything in life is Pareto, you know, it’s 80 20, it’s the 80 20 rule.

[00:15:12] Sandie Morgan: Yeah. Okay.

[00:15:14] Michael Dominguez: We’re, I would think we’re probably 70 30 in that ball. We’re not quite at Pareto yet, but you’ve got a lot of people that are focused and pointed in the right direction and movin in the right direction where I’m encouraged that we’re gonna continue to make a dent.

[00:15:28] Sandie Morgan: Well walk us through what training looks like for you. For staff and who, who’s included in staff. Because I had one conversation where the security people did not respond when we asked them to report what we were observing.

[00:15:48] And, and so we went to and asked to speak to the night manager and they said, oh, that’s a third party contract. So we don’t have any control. So who gets the training?

[00:16:00] Michael Dominguez: Well that, and that’s my point about the bifurcation. You, you’re not gonna find anything universal, but you’re gonna find many, again, of the main brands, you don’t have a lot of contract security. They’re gonna be hotel security, they’re gonna be employees, and that’s all, that’s all training. You bring up a good point though, that is to make sure all our contractors.

[00:16:19] Are we requiring all our contractors to go through the same training that we’re requiring

[00:16:22] Sandie Morgan: Yes.

[00:16:23] Michael Dominguez: Our team to go through? That, that’s probably a great opportunity for us to kind of close the gap just a little bit. But the training is intense and it’s deep. And, you know, the biggest points of influence are gonna be around housekeeping, front desk.

[00:16:38] And then of course the management that would have to deal with it. And that would be, it’s not that much training on what to do when you come across it because it’s, please call law enforcement. And don’t try to be in the middle of this because all that happens is you put somebody else in danger, you put the literally trafficked individual in danger and you put yourself in danger.

[00:17:01] So that’s not the hard training. The hard training is dial 9 1 1. That is not hard to train on. It is being able to identify and understand how things look and what that looks like. And Sandie, I mentioned the pandemic. We kind of went backwards during the pandemic because one of our greatest points of of identification were at the front desk, it had always been at the front desk.

[00:17:23] Well, during the pandemic, what we got really good at because of the pandemic, was bypassing the front desk and getting into mobile check-in and

[00:17:31] Sandie Morgan: Oh, Oh,

[00:17:34] Michael Dominguez: Which means one of our anchors on training now has less relevance. I don’t wanna say no, but less relevance than it did in the past. So we have to rethink that, revamp it.

[00:17:46] So now your responsibility falls more on back of the house, it’s making sure the housekeepers, when they’re in a room, what are they identifying? And somebody that has a privacy, you know, a privacy sign on their door, it’s not gonna stay on for three days without us going to check a room. And that’s where hotels are getting better, that there will be a wellness check in a 24 hour window, even with a privacy sign if it’s been more than 24 hours, that type of thing.

[00:18:12] But you know, there, there are easy signs there, there’s always a request for more towels, more amenities, those type of things for the rooms. More extra linens. Those are things that are now identifiers. And, and this is where I have hope, Sandie, that you know, where we’re going with AI and the ability to identify things is like, you know, I’m sure we can create a system where AI is looking at the identifier quickly and bringing up alerts of requests that are happening and, and how frequent they are.

[00:18:43] Because looking at a large hotel, these requests sometimes can be under the radar. Because those requests can be common with normal guests. You know, why would normal guests need extra sheets? They have kids. Somebody wet the bed, they’re trying to make sure they’re prepared. It’s all of those things, that do happen and some of that is normal.

[00:19:02] But then you get the abnormal

[00:19:04] Sandie Morgan: Alright, so those trainings and policies, that’s moving us, I like the having, a metric to follow the trend. So that 70 30 is your estimation of where we are. Hotel awareness and training, understanding and identifying and oh my goodness, the examples that you used for what people ask of, of housekeeping are not on my signs list

[00:19:39] when I’m training, in general communities. So the expertise in the hospitality industry is really helpful for those, particularly our community motels that may not be associated with a bigger group and, and to really think about outliers. Are they outliers because of some, nefarious agenda, or are they just not big enough to be included in some of the greater, agendas and strategies?

[00:20:22] Michael Dominguez: Yeah, I, I think it’s a little bit of both. And, and I think there’s, you know, that some of the things when you talk about what to look for. I’ve only had one hotel manager that did this, but I was so impressed with what he did in regards to the fact that you only had one key per ID that would be issued.

[00:20:49] You know how you go to hotels and they ask you, how many keys do you want? He’s like, no. Single key, single ID. You want two keys? Gimme another ID. And it, the reason that matters is because, again, another sign to look for, at the front desk, is multiple keys. Because today the elevators, many of the elevators are keyed off by floor, which means you need multiple keys if you’re trying to send people up the room or get ’em up to the floor of those type of things.

[00:21:15] So multiple keys is another, another one of those signs that we look for. But I think it’s just important in that when you ask about the training, that’s the kind of training that we’ve continued to see, you know,

[00:21:27] Sandie Morgan: And a lot of our hotel staff, especially in housekeeping, are not first language English speakers. So how do we accommodate for training in multiple languages?

[00:21:47] Michael Dominguez: Well, the funny thing is, if you think about it, we have to train them in multiple languages on everything else we do in the hotel, so that’s not the issue. There’s no way to train ’em how to do the room without training ’em in multiple languages. And there’s no way to train ’em on all the other policies we have at a hotel without training ’em in different languages.

[00:22:06] So that’s really not a holdup as much as making sure that the human trafficking and the signs we’re looking for are part of the training. That’s the important part of it, because we have to train ’em on everything else, you know?

[00:22:19] Sandie Morgan: That, that is in so many sectors, that I work with in the nonprofit world. Translating materials into other languages is a barrier and, but obviously your guests come from around the world and I do have to do a shout out to Surf and Sand here in Orange County. And Amy McLimore, she’s the one that really helped me begin to understand this, and she told me she’d already gone through training and we got connected because of her passion

[00:22:59] for pursuing this. And that kind of brings us back to the culture that is a top down leadership agenda item. So I have a couple more questions. The first one is, how do leaders effectively integrate this human rights issue, human dignity, into the culture of their hospitality?

[00:23:29] Michael Dominguez: I think one, you have to learn how to be a good storyteller and when I’m learning, when I tell you that this is uncomfortable for the hospitality industry at times, because we don’t talk about, we’re warm and fuzzy people, so we don’t like to dwell too long on this. And I also have always have to think like when I’m at a live event, where do I place this and how do I emphasize it?

[00:23:52] And what I don’t do is overemphasize it for a three day window, but make sure I’m taking 10 minutes to be very impactful. Make sure they understand that. And the fact that we run an auction at every one of our events and there’s these auctions running and we’re reminding ’em, the auction is running, it’s reminding them about human trafficking over a three day window without it, after

[00:24:13] I’ve already teed it up on why we’re doing this and why it matters. And you know what the difference is. And one of the things I do, Sandie now, is I have an image and it’s from the Freedom Award. When I won the award and I took a picture with Faith Ramos. The reason I do this is Faith Ramos is part of the survivor’s council.

[00:24:33] She’s been on our podcast. She was trafficked from 14 to 17 years old. And when I tell Faith’s story high level, like, why am I so passionate? Because it becomes personal when you put a human being into it. And I think sometimes we story tell, and I haven’t quite hit the connection because they can’t see a face and a person and a human being.

[00:24:58] And by me showing that it’s made a difference because it’s impactful. I can say, I know Faith. I’ve gotten to know Faith, and she is a woman. I think she was named appropriately because she has a great deal of faith. But you look at what she’s done. I said it’s very personal with me because I’ve met not only Faith, I’ve met others on the Survivor Council.

[00:25:21] When you realize how prevalent it is, and that we can make a difference. I was like, I have no other choice than to accept that responsibility. And that’s storytelling. And when you can grab somebody in storytelling, that’s when you can make an impact. And I don’t think enough leaders that they talk about the what,

[00:25:39] they don’t understand the why, and they don’t explain the why enough. So I’m always explaining the why and that is the one that can kind of hit you in the face, shake you up. And, and again, I go back to Pareto, not everybody in the room is gonna resonate with it. Not everybody’s going to jump on the bandwagon, but you’ll probably get 80% of the people saying, what else can I do?

[00:26:02] How? How else can I learn? And that’s what you’re trying to do. And I always say one person at a time is how we can make a difference.

[00:26:09] Sandie Morgan: That’s so good and I follow Faith as well, and I need to reach out and invite her to do an interview here too. Yeah. So,

[00:26:17] Michael Dominguez: She’s a wonderful human being.

[00:26:18] Sandie Morgan: So talking about the Pareto, we’re at 70 30, we wanna be at 80 20. Actually, I’m an overachiever, so I’m going for 90 10. Yeah, join me. So tell me, looking ahead, you are using your influence, your leadership as a force for good.

[00:26:44] What gives you hope that we will make it to the 80 20 this decade?

[00:26:50] Michael Dominguez: The fact that everywhere I go and we have a conversation, that I have another company coming up and saying, you know what? I got an idea. This is how we could help. I had a client that is one of the largest, literally electrical associations, in the country. So all the electrical companies, you know, basically are part of his association.

[00:27:14] He goes, Mike, how do we put trafficking information on the side of every truck they’re in, every neighborhood they’re in,

[00:27:21] Sandie Morgan: Oh yeah.

[00:27:22] Michael Dominguez: Every city. The fact that people, you start triggering ideas to say, how can I help with messaging? How can I help with awareness? How can we do that? That gives me a lot of hope and what I’ve learned, Sandie, and the fact that we’re having this conversation is a great example.

[00:27:38] The more I am engaged and explain our commitment to trafficking, the more I continue to get introduced to a large group of people

[00:27:45] Sandie Morgan: Mm.

[00:27:46] Michael Dominguez: that are doing a lot of good work in different cities and we have a magazine called Beyond the Meeting Room, and we always feature a different organization that’s doing some really great work in human trafficking awareness and they’ve all been brought to us by clients or members or somebody else.

[00:28:02] And yeah, you know, the same thing. Our dear friend at the Surf and Sand is why you and I are connected.

[00:28:08] She knows I have a passion about this and that’s why we’re connected. And the more that you’re putting it out there, the more I continue to get introduced to

[00:28:21] a bunch of people and organizations that are doing good work. And the reason that matters is the more that we know we’re doing good work and the more that we can help each other, the bigger the cause that means we just have greater momentum.

[00:28:31] I got introduced to the Aruna project in, you know, in Atlanta. And, you know, we do a lot of gifting in our industry, especially on the sales side of it.

[00:28:40] Well, the Aruna project is literally some great gifting items and bags and gift bags and leather goods. But every single person employed with the Aruna project is a survivor from trafficking, and it’s letting people know you’re going to buy these products anyway, but by buying these products, you’re supporting an organization that is helping women that have been trafficked and getting them into stable jobs, stable housing, and getting their lives back on track.

[00:29:06] Those are the opportunities

[00:29:07] Sandie Morgan: See. That’s teamwork. Or in my world, we talk about collaboration and every time you add a new thread to the connections, that means when we have a denser safety net victims won’t fall through unidentified, unseen. And I love that we started this conversation about basketball. It was the only sport in high school that I actually shined in because I was a guard.

[00:29:44] And I think, ’cause I’m vertically challenged, people actually tripped over me. But I learned a really important lesson playing basketball. My gym teacher, Ms. Marston, made sure we left that season understanding everybody plays their position. If you try to play somebody else’s position, the team will not thrive.

[00:30:14] And I love that your training says, call the hotline, call the police, do your part and then pass the ball. And that’s so significant.

[00:30:28] Michael Dominguez: You just, Sandie, since you played, I will send you a clip later, but it is, it is a video that was done in 2014. It’s called A Beautiful Game, it was all done around the San Antonio Spurs and it was, it’s narrated by Magic Johnson to start.

[00:30:44] Sandie Morgan: Oh, wow

[00:30:44] Michael Dominguez: But what he’s talking about is this unique culture and as Pop likes to say, he goes, you know, we deal with a bunch of people that got over themselves long ago, and it’s a very low ego team.

[00:30:59] And the reason the Spurs won’t have a leading scorer or necessarily a leading rebound, or they’ll have a bunch of people in the top 10, but they’re not gonna be the leading because every night somebody else is gonna be the leading scorer because who has the best matchup? Who has the best open shot? And that’s how the team looks at it, even with this group of superstars.

[00:31:18] And that’s a different mentality, but it’s exactly what you said. And they were the first team to bring in a bunch of Europeans because Pop always said, you know, they still know how to pass the ball.

[00:31:28] Sandie Morgan: Mm. Oh.

[00:31:30] Michael Dominguez: Europeans are great passers and they’re not they’re not big dribblers on one-on-one isolation. They literally move the ball around and that’s what the Spurs are known for. And you’ll hear ’em say, we have a shot. I’ve got a shot, but you’ve got a better shot. And, and to know, here’s my excitement. They’re now into their next generation and about to run with Wemby being their superstar, who came from France and is one of the most humble individuals you’ll ever meet.

[00:31:57] He’s seven five, but moves like a guard. The guy is so nimble, but the other day asking him about a shot he gave up to one of his teammates and he said, I could have made that shot, with my eyes closed. And he says, but my teammate could have made that shot in his sleep

[00:32:16] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:32:18] Michael Dominguez: And that’s why I passed it up. But he is their star, but willing to always say, I’ve got a teammate that is wide open and can make that every day.

[00:32:30] Sandie Morgan: Passing the ball. Passing the ball. That’s right.

[00:32:33] Michael Dominguez: And it’s never about me. It’s about us. And what makes us most effective. And one of the things I did not share with you is, in front of me, which you can’t see, is another jersey and it’s Manu Ginobili.

[00:32:46] Ginobili was with the Spurs through that entire run with Duncan behind me. And Ginobili was the most decorated international basketball player of all time. Came from Argentina. He’s won Olympic gold with Argentina. He literally is already in the Hall of Fame here in the US. Yeah, but here’s the thing.

[00:33:06] Ginobili for his entire career came off the bench for the Spurs, did not start when he would’ve started with any other team in the NBA, only because it made the Spurs better. And the interesting thing is he was willing to sacrifice that. But if you ever look at the Spurs, when none of them cared about their ego,

[00:33:26] None of them cared about individual awards. What they cared about was winning championships. And the reason they were so deadly for all that time is who else has a future hall of Famer running their second unit? The Spurs never went down with the second unit in. And if you look at the Spurs stats, everybody plays about the same amount of minutes whether you start or whether you come off the bench.

[00:33:48] And that’s what’s unique with their organization, they believe in their system, they believe in a team system. So it’s not about some player always playing 35 minutes a game for them to win. But that unselfishness around Ginobili is what I think permeated through the Spurs. And you heard it often, you know their starting point guard, Tony Parker, who’s another hall of Famer.

[00:34:12] His entire career in the middle of the season, they had drafted a young point guard and during a shoot around Pop puts his arm around Tony and says, it’s time. And what he meant was, you’re gonna come off the bench, the young kid’s gonna start, and your job now is to teach ’em everything you know. And the interesting was, Sandie, there was no press conference.

[00:34:32] No big to-do. Tony said, how could I ever complain when Manu came off the bench his entire career? Like how can, that’s not the Spurs way is you’re gonna do what you’re asked to do to make the team better.

[00:34:46] And that’s what I think we should be doing as a society here.

[00:34:48] Sandie Morgan: That’s exactly what our movement needs to hear right now. And I’m kind of in that space where trying to learn how to pass the ball to the up and coming voices and leaders in this movement and my friends who have been with me for decades, this is something we have to grab a hold of.

[00:35:13] Mike, I appreciate your time. This won’t be our last conversation and hopefully our next one will be in person.

[00:35:21] Michael Dominguez: Absolutely. We’re looking to January.

[00:35:24] Sandie Morgan: Yes, January. Yes. We’ll reach out to Surf and Sand. We’ve got plans. If you’re listening and you’re in Orange County, let me know and we’ll definitely make sure you get invited.

[00:35:39] So thank you so much for being here, Mike. I appreciate you.

[00:35:43] Michael Dominguez: Thank you for the invite, Sandie, and thank you for all the good work you’re doing.

[00:35:46] Sandie Morgan: Alright, take care.

[00:35:48] Michael Dominguez: You too.

[00:35:49] Delaney Mininger: Thank you to Michael Dominguez for showing us how one industry leader can spark a movement. From training housekeepers on new signs to adding hotline numbers on electrical trucks, Michael shows us that every sector has a role to play.

[00:36:03] Listeners, if you loved this episode, make sure to check out the website endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:36:11] If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with somebody you know, connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. As always, thanks for listening.

Clayton Cranford joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discuss how children need trusted adults who explicitly tell them that if something goes wrong online, it’s going to be okay—because what predators exploit most is a child’s fear of reaching out for help.

Clayton Cranford is a former Orange County Sheriff’s Department Sergeant, school resource officer, and juvenile investigator with specialized expertise in behavioral threat assessment and online safety. He is the founder of Cyber Safety Cop, a program dedicated to educating parents, schools, and communities about how digital platforms can expose children to exploitation, grooming, and trafficking risks. With over 20 years in law enforcement and years working directly with youth and families, Cranford has trained tens of thousands of parents and educators nationwide on digital parenting strategies, social media risks, and emerging threats such as sextortion, encrypted apps, and AI-generated content. He is the author of Parenting in a Digital World and a recognized speaker at major school safety and cybersecurity conferences. His work aligns closely with prevention-first strategies and community collaboration, making him a valuable voice in the intersection of technology, youth safety, and anti-trafficking efforts.

[00:00:00] Clayton Cranford: parents had no idea what they were, what they were kind of getting themselves into when they handed their kid a phone.

[00:00:06] Sandie Morgan: She calls her tattoo sleeves “armor,” covering years of scars from predators who convinced her they were her friends, when what she really needed was one trusted adult. And that’s what your kids need too. Someone who says explicitly, if this happens, it’s going to be okay.

[00:00:31] I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan with Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice. And my guest today is Clayton Cranford. He’s a former school resource officer, juvenile investigator, father of two, and founder of Cyber Safety Cop teaching parents and students how to stay safe online. Now here’s our conversation.

[00:01:05] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, Clay. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you. I still remember when your mother introduced me to you.

[00:01:17] Clayton Cranford: That must have been a while. Yeah, that was a while ago.

[00:01:19] Sandie Morgan: at that point, I, I just promoted out of, I was a school resource officer, just promoted to the school threat assessment team.

[00:01:27] Clayton Cranford: and a lot is, you know, a lot’s happened since then.

[00:01:29] Sandie Morgan: Well, and your book is like the fourth edition now.

[00:01:34] Clayton Cranford: Yeah, I just updated the, this summer and it was actually a complete rewrite. It was, I, I really considered just calling it a new book, but I’m like, you know what? I like, I like the name of my book. And it is, parenting in the digital world, and I’ve read a lot. I mean, I collect all the books that people are writing on this, on this topic, helping parents, parent their child to digital world. and I just felt like, I think parents need a little deeper insight of what, what actually is going on. Talking about things like ai, some new emerging things, and, more importantly, you know, parents, if they want to dig in really deep, I, I really kind of.

[00:02:14] Get way under, like what’s actually happening. Like what is the, the title forces, behind this technology and, and, and how it’s changing our kids, but also then making it very simple and saying, Hey, these are the, these are the conversations you need to have, and these are the things you should start doing.

[00:02:31] And so before we started the show, we were reminiscing. And you mentioned you started off when we were at the iPhone four.

[00:02:45] Sandie Morgan: So do a a capsule time capsule for us. How old were your kids? What have you experienced as a parent going from a flip phone to where we are today?

[00:03:00] Clayton Cranford: Yeah. So, original iPhone comes out in 2007, the iPhone four in 2010, which had the first forward facing camera on an iPhone. And at that time, less than 20% of teens had smartphones. They all had the flip phone, they had like the razor phone, stuff like that. and then over the course of like two or three years, and this is when I was working as a school resource officer in retro center Margarita, I had 14,000 students, nine schools in that city.

[00:03:28] We went from less than 20% having smartphones. In about three years, we had more than 80%. So it was this huge uptake. And parents had no idea what they were, what they were kind of getting themselves into when they handed their kid a phone. Dealing with all the issues and everything from, you know, just being hurtful things happening, which, is to be expected, I guess, when kids are on these screens.

[00:03:51] But a lot of other things like sexting, sextortion, sexual exploitation, threats. When I was on the threat assessment team, most of our, most of our threats at schools were happening online. and it’s, figuring out, so we, I talked to BMI instructors. We talked to students K through 12 at schools all over the United States, but mostly here in Southern California.

[00:04:12] Although kids know like what is safe and not safe, but then at the same time to make bad choices online, really kind of understanding why this, why this is happening. Took me a while to figure out, but that’s kind of what we do now. We go to schools and we help kids kind of understand the digital world a bit better, then supporting parents so that they can mentor support their kids in the digital world as well.

[00:04:41] Sandie Morgan: All right, so you used a term from your past school resource officer. Do you wanna tell us what that role is? I think school resource officers are key in this battle.

[00:04:58] Clayton Cranford: They are, and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and I, I, frankly, all the police departments here in Southern California, do a really good job of handpicking people. That are the right fit. ’cause you, ’cause you’re basically kind of embedded in the schools. And my office was at the an RSM Intermediate had, you know, I was their first school resource officer.

[00:05:19] And so, no, like, they were just happy that I was there. ’cause they’re like, we’re not sure what you’re gonna do, but we’re just happy you’re here. and so it was kind of, it was kind of to some degree up to me. To help fill that role and kind of figure it out. And that’s actually where the, a lot of the cyber safety came from, just based with the things were happening.

[00:05:38] But it was really being at that school every day, interfacing with the kids every day, being a positive influence. Men, I was a mentor. I wasn’t, I really wasn’t there to get, you know, to enforce things necessarily, but I was there if, if that needed to happen. And, and, and actually the three years as a school resource officer, I never arrested child.

[00:06:01] it was everything that I did there by and large was about supporting the kids, supporting the parents, supporting the administrators, and, and obviously, you know, safety on campuses is, you know, paramount obviously. So one of the, the other things I was involved with was, you know, being, going around to the schools in our city and making sure that they were secure and we would do assessments and, you know, we’d kinda shore up, you know, security issues, but.

[00:06:31] Most of the time me walking around talking to kids. And, and a lot of times I’d have, excuse me, I’d have a kid, you know, come up to me and say, you know, I was. I was on Skype last night with my friend, and she was talking about wanting to hurt herself and I wasn’t sure what to do, you know? So like I’d, I would have that kind of relationship with the students where they shared with me.

[00:06:53] And, and, and that’s really the, the power of, of, of having a school resource officer is, it’s not enforcement, it’s not necessarily a can be, but really it’s about, intervention and, and being proactive.

[00:07:10] Clayton Cranford: the best job I ever had. I loved it.

[00:07:12] Sandie Morgan: Oh, I, I can imagine that I would love that job too. And what you just said about that girl that asked you for a resource, what should I do? I do believe that equipping the students themselves to keep their community safe is key because they see things before it gets to the point

[00:07:38] where we have to intervene in an urgent or emergency situation. So, alright, let’s look at a few things about where we are now in digital spaces. What kind of online grooming are traffickers using as, tactics in, approaching our youth?

[00:08:05] Clayton Cranford: So there’s kind of two tracks. There’s, it’s the, we have, we have, people extorting our children for either child sex abuse material. So basically getting ’em in a situation, trapping them, threatening them, and then coercing them into creating more child sex abuse material for them, it’s for, for, for, monetary gain.

[00:08:29] It’s, it’s extorting them for money. So. It, it kind of happens in two very different ways. Our boys are, if you look at just the numbers of children who are, who are being extorted exploited online, boys are outstripping girls, by a mile for financial, extortion. So what happens is, They’ll, some, somebody will impersonate a young girl online, befriend, a young, a young boy, middle school, high school, college actually.

[00:09:01] quickly establish relationship like, and what that means is maybe sending them an unsolicited nude image and then asking that boy to reciprocate. With, with the promise that if he does, there’ll be more images coming his way or videos,

[00:09:19] Sandie Morgan: you immediately get a message from this person saying, if you don’t want everybody to see this, send me like, you know, a thousand dollars or $4,000. and, we have 10 tens of thousands of young men, being victimized every year.

[00:09:33] Clayton Cranford: It’s super under-reported. I have a parent calling me every other week, I think, messaging me, saying This happened to my kid, and they’re looking for advice or guidance. And sadly, we’ve had, I think last year more than 50 young men take their own lives they were so afraid, that that information would get out and ruin their life.

[00:09:58] And, I just, I talked to, two parents this year. Who both lost their, their children, their boys high school, and I think post high school, I think he was, maybe in college like, but still like maybe 19 or 20. And it only took a handful of hours between the threat and them taking their own lives.

[00:10:20] So, and then on the, on the, and then on the female side. on our girls side. that usually happens over weeks and months. It’s, it’s not something that happens quite as fast. usually, you know, your, your daughter, will be on a, will be on like a, a mainstream, social media site. And, she’ll get propositioned by someone who she thinks is a, who’s somebody her age and then invite her to, into a private chat, maybe on Discord or some other place.

[00:10:51] then. usually joined by other people who often are in on it. They’re, they’re also, adult men pretending to be high school or middle schoolers. then befriending them over weeks and months until finally they break down their inhibitions and their, and basically get them to maybe flash the camera.

[00:11:10] and both threats actually, I, I don’t think parents really understand like, what that threat is for a kid. Because what they’re hearing, from that person is that if you don’t do what I want you to do, whether it’s making images or videos, or giving this money, I’m gonna share this, this image with everyone you see.

[00:11:27] And just imagine you’re just some, you know, 12-year-old girl or something, and this person saying, I’m going to show this to all your friends. And they’re gonna see how dirty a horrible person you are, and they’re gonna leave you. You, no one will love you. Your parents will see this and they’re gonna throw you out.

[00:11:43] You’ll have nobody. So if you don’t do this, I will ruin your life and you’re gonna continue making images and videos for me for as long as I say. And, and, and that’s why we have kids, you know, taking their own lives, hurting themselves. I interviewed, recently a survivor interviewed her.

[00:12:07] She’s, we have a video that on our website. Her and her mom actually, this happened to her when she was 12 years old, and had her, they trafficked her online for four years and they were able to do that through the threat. She wanted to keep it a secret. She didn’t tell anyone and. They had this really diabolical plan where person, so they, they, enticed her to flash the camera and then a, who she thinks is a third party, comes in through Skype, actually not through this chat room that she was in, and they say, I hacked the website or something, and I have this video of you.

[00:12:46] So she goes back to the group. Who are responsible for all this, but she thinks are her friends, and she

[00:12:53] Sandie Morgan: Oh.

[00:12:53] Clayton Cranford: this just happened to me. they’re like, oh my gosh, we’re so sorry. And you just, you know, we’re gonna figure out, we’re gonna try to stop this. We’re gonna figure out who this person is, but just do whatever they were telling you to do we’re, and we’re gonna help you.

[00:13:06] We’re gonna try to protect you. So she keeps going back to the, to her, her tormentors, thinking they’re her friends. along while she’s being extorted by this other person who’s, who’s, who’s in this group. So they, they kept her on the hook for four years and, and, it was a, it was a living hell for her.

[00:13:28] She, started cutting herself, to deal with her anxiety and, and depression because of this happening to her.

[00:13:35] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.

[00:13:35] Clayton Cranford: And actually one of the guys who’s extorting her found that exciting. And, he actually extorted her to cut herself more on camera part of a kind of a fetish he had. And, she recently came out to Los Angeles to speak at a conference with me.

[00:13:55] I invited her she lives out in New Orleans, came out and what a powerful, young woman she is. And she’s willing, you know, to talk about this, but you know, she has, all sleeved up on her arm and she calls it her armor to cover up the scars.

[00:14:14] Sandie Morgan: Oh wow.

[00:14:16] Clayton Cranford: I, I guess when I talk to parents and I, and I, and I tell them that story about Kaylee, what I tell parents is you love your kid and you think your kid knows.

[00:14:29] That no matter what, you would be there for them that no matter what, if they had, if they needed help, you would give it to them. But we really explicitly need to tell our kids, well, one, that this kind of thing is happening. Like we need to just be upfront about like, these are the issues. And a lot of parents just don’t know to have that conversation.

[00:14:45] But more importantly, if you get into trouble, no matter how embarrassed you are or how horrible you think it is, nothing gonna stop me from loving you and.

[00:14:58] Sandie Morgan: Yeah.

[00:14:59] Clayton Cranford: It’s maybe, what I’ve discovered after talking to, to, to kids for the last 15 years, hundreds of thousands of them, is that it’s not really about what they know.

[00:15:10] ’cause they kind of know these things happen to some degree. But what they, but what they understand is that there is a reality beyond that screen. And what they’re doing on that screen is not really lining up with what they know to be true and safe. They’re doing things based on how it feels. And so you need to understand that even if you talk to your kid and they say, oh, mom and dad, I would never do that.

[00:15:32] You, you also need a plan that if they do it, they know what what they need to do, right? They need to, they need to know how to get outta that situation or know who to talk to. Or, I told my boys if, wasn’t me, if you couldn’t tell me because you’re embarrassed, of course I told him, you can tell me anything.

[00:15:50] But is there like an adult at the school that you trust

[00:15:53] Sandie Morgan: So you gotta have a plan.

I, I think one of the things you just hit on, that really connects to my background in pediatrics and working with young people is the sense of teen invincibility is a well-researched element in this prevention strategy because when we talk to our kids and we tell them who’s behind this screen,

[00:16:28] they sometimes kinda like roll their eyes. So I like this idea that they have a trusted adult besides a parent, but, parents are right there when some

[00:16:43] creep is online upstairs in their bedroom. What can parents do? What kinds of signs should they be looking for that might indicate they should intervene?

[00:16:58] Clayton Cranford: Well, so with boys, what’s scary about the boys is that they go from zero to a hundred very fast. And, and when I talk to that parent who lost her son within eight hours of the threat. You know, here’s a parent who loved their, loved their son. She said, we have a great relationship. Could tell me anything.

[00:17:16] And it still happened. So, I I, I, when I was talking to her, I was like, so what are we missing here? Like, are you telling me that there’s, there’s nothing? And she goes, well, she goes, I, you know, I never, I never had that conversation with him. I like explicitly said, if this happens, it’s gonna be okay. Your life’s not over.

[00:17:32] And in fact, when we go talk to students. with our, we talk to students K through 12, but when we, we kind of start talking about this like around fourth grade actually, we don’t get explicit, but we just say, Hey, if you make a mistake and if somebody’s scaring you, then you need to tell someone we, we start there.

[00:17:49] Then we get into middle school and high school. We get explicit. But you need to have that, you need to be look your kid in the eye and say, I don’t expect you to always make the right choice, but if you, but if you run into a problem like this, it’s gonna be okay. You can still talk to me. If you have a younger child, I think you should have, maybe you should install something on their device, like, like an app that would run in the background, maybe alert you if there’s a problem.

[00:18:18] there’s many out there like Bark or OurPact or something like that. There’s, there’s apps out there that will help you, but nothing’s really gonna replace that conversation with your kid. As far as behaviors go, I, I would say you, you kind of know what your child’s baseline behavior is, right?

[00:18:36] you, we immediately see a lot of withdrawal when, when a kid is in that situation and it, and, and withdrawal, is, is often the first sign that there’s something wrong. It could be various things. It, it, it just, they could be upset about something, but it, but it could also indicate something a little more serious and I think.

[00:18:52] You know, opening up that line of conversation with your kid and saying, Hey, what’s going on? Like, you’re, you’re hiding out in your room. like that’s something that we should start kind of digging into. I also think parents need to have a good understanding of how these apps are working and understand what, what, what’s involved.

[00:19:12] So, and, and like when I do my parent workshop, I, I go through the apps. I kind of give them my high level take. But if, if a parent wants to really get the nuts and bolts of like, you know, how does Snapchat work? What are the little things and all, you know, what does it all do? How does Discord work?

[00:19:29] Which, which is a very, very important social media app kind of community forum that parents have really no grip on, and it’s incredibly impactful and you need to understand the influences that are available to your child on that. Application and the, and the community groups that they can, join.

[00:19:52] And many of those are not healthy for your kid. There’s, there’s a lot in there that is not appropriate for them. And so if you want it, like I, I would say to a parent, if you want to understand it, I have videos on my website that walk you through it. I, I demonstrate the video, the, the, the, the apps. So you should kind of understand what those apps are, how do they work?

[00:20:13] And when I was an investigator and I would investigate, investigate crimes and write search warrants, you know, Snapchat was probably the one that I was most interacting with because of the, you know, the, the availability to talk to strangers on it, the disappearing messaging that can occur there. But discord, I think we’re gonna be hearing a lot more about it,

[00:20:39] Sandie Morgan: So tell us the how to find your website so we can see that video.

[00:20:41] Clayton Cranford: So go to cybersafetycop.com. And I have, these, I have webinars, that I do and, and you can see them there. So, they are, they are part of my membership. I do have a free trial for 30 days

[00:20:59] Sandie Morgan: Oh, okay.

[00:21:00] Clayton Cranford: That anybody can do free, no risk. Do it for 30 days, check out the videos.

[00:21:04] But there’s always something new. There’s always a new app, AI, AI companions, like there’s, there’s.

[00:21:11] Sandie Morgan: And we started talking a little bit about AI at the top of this conversation. So let’s go that direction and think about the emerging threats. And it feels to me as a healthcare professional that the idea of prevention is going to be critical here because by the time it’s fully unleashed on, on a kid

[00:21:42] it’s, it’s like trying to rescue someone from, from a, a river. And so what are your recommendations with the emerging technologies?

[00:21:56] Clayton Cranford: I would make sure that, you have a, you have your child’s app store set up so that you get notified for permission to download apps onto your child’s device. a lot of these AI companion apps, which by the way are, it’s different than like chat GPT. So basically, it’s a AI personality, I guess is the best way to describe it.

[00:22:21] It’s like an avatar. You can choose

[00:22:23] Sandie Morgan: Okay.

[00:22:23] Clayton Cranford: what the imagery, what the person looks like, usually sexually explicit is, is kind of the what’s happening right now. and then, and then you can kind of choose the personality of the ai and it just interacts with you and kind of learns about you and is, it is created to be very engaging in, in, in, in, app development

[00:22:47] they call it sticky. It, it makes you want to stay on that app, and they do that by manipulating your emotions. So if you’re a kid, especially who’s, you know, struggling with an, you know, with, with friendships or anxiety or, know, or, or just sexually kind of, kind of curious, and maybe you’re like, I just want to kind of talk to this.

[00:23:11] You know, maybe you have a boy who wants to talk to a female, but is like, but I’ll, I’m gonna try out talking to an app first. So it’s a, it’s a safe

[00:23:20] Sandie Morgan: Oh my goodness.

[00:23:21] Clayton Cranford: kind of entryway into these,

[00:23:23] Sandie Morgan: Safe with air quotes.

[00:23:25] Clayton Cranford: Yeah. Safe

[00:23:26] Sandie Morgan: From their perspective.

[00:23:28] Clayton Cranford: Yeah you don’t have, to worry about that person reacting in a way.

[00:23:31] Sandie Morgan: hmm.

[00:23:32] Clayton Cranford: And in fact it’s programmed to say great to whatever you say. So it, it’s, it’s kind of a false sense of connectedness. The, real problem here is that, number one, these things tend to get romantic and a little bit spicy, which obviously is wildly inappropriate for teens. And you could have a kid who becomes emotionally attached to, to this, to this app because it does mimic, you know, a, a person and, and

[00:24:04] there’s been, there’s been a couple, but there’s been a very few, but a few, children who were struggling with some of their, with their mental health and turned to an AI app like this for, for advice or connectedness. And, in fact, just recently in, in my city here in Rancho, we had a, we had a child who took their own life, last year

[00:24:27] Sandie Morgan: Mm.

[00:24:27] Clayton Cranford: And, and it was. and they were talking to this app, about doing that and the app kind of affirmed thoughts about, about taking their own life. So and I believe that family’s suing that company.

[00:24:42] Sandie Morgan: In light of that, what kind of policy changes should we be looking for? What can the community do to make it safer for our young people?

[00:24:55] Clayton Cranford: the these companies have zero regulation about how they do this. There’s no transparency about what’s going into these apps, they shove the technology down our throats. Parents don’t know enough to say, wait a minute. I don’t, know if this is okay for my kid.

[00:25:11] The kids adopt it without really a lot of discussion. And then later we discover this was not good, right? Like there are, there are downstream problems or like social media, like all the mental health issues we’re having with kids and the addictiveness. It’s now after, you know, 15 years that we’re now like, Hmm, maybe that wasn’t a good idea.

[00:25:30] So here comes, here comes AI coming like a freight train. And this particular. Kind of genre or, or aspect of AI is so captivating that, it’s, it’s, I I think it’s gonna be super addictive and so impactful and unfortunately there’s no discussion going on right now, whether this is okay for our kids.

[00:25:55] Very little. Common Sense Media just did a survey this year on this particular thing, AI companion or AI chat app, bots, almo. Nearly three quarters of teens said they’ve tried it ’cause they’re curious, but half of them say they use it regularly.

[00:26:10] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:26:11] Clayton Cranford: a third say they use it for having quote unquote important conversations.

[00:26:16] So it’s not fringe. There’s not a few kids trying it. A lot of kids are using it and it’s kind of flying under the radar. Parents need to understand that this is not healthy for their kid. We really should be pressuring our legislature to pass laws to say there needs to be age verification on this. You should be, I think, an adult.

[00:26:37] I think you should be at least 18. To use these apps, where you’re mimicking a kind of a parasocial kind of relationship with this app. And at the very least there should be some transparency about what are the, what are the safeguards. If you’re talking about self-harm, like what does the app do with that?

[00:26:56] where’s kind of the emergency breaks on, on this technology? and right now there are none.

[00:27:00] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:27:01] Clayton Cranford: So it’s really up to parents to understand what’s going on and make a decision and change in your own home about what your child is using. Unfortunately, parents just don’t know what’s going on and. You know, I, I was at a a a A rather large school, a high school last night up in Los Angeles speaking to parents. I think there’s like 2200 students at this school. And they opened it up not just to the high school, but to their feeder K through eight school. I had like 10 parents show up.

[00:27:35] Sandie Morgan: Oh wow. See, that makes me crazy. And that’s another episode. We’re gonna have to have that conversation where. Where are the parents when we offer the training? and Ensure Justice is coming up March 6th, 2026. You’ve been an Ensure Justice speaker. Our safe community, safe kids, peer educators are going into the high schools and the middle schools, and when we host opportunities for parents, we have the same thing.

[00:28:11] 10. 12 people show up, so that’s

[00:28:14] Clayton Cranford: And it’s the same 10 or 12 that go to everything.

[00:28:16] Sandie Morgan: Yeah, that’s

[00:28:17] right. They’re not, yeah.

[00:28:18] Clayton Cranford: that are the most engaged.

[00:28:19] Sandie Morgan: Yeah, it’s the president of the PTA. No.

[00:28:23] Oh, Clay, we could talk for hours. We agree on how significant this moment is for our schools, for our parents, for our community to intervene because our kids, their brains are developing and they need help.

[00:28:43] They cannot manage this on their own.

[00:28:48] So what I’d like to do right now is for you to tell us how to access your book and your website as we sign off.

[00:28:59] Clayton Cranford: Yeah, so, you can find my book actually I have two books. I have Parenting The Digital World and its fourth edition just published. And I have another book called Screen Time Standoff.:Negotiation Skills to Unplug your Kid. ’cause one of the other things I did for the sheriff’s department, I was a crisis negotiator.

[00:29:15] Sandie Morgan: Oh,

[00:29:16] Clayton Cranford: turns out that the same, the same communication negotiation skills that we use to get somebody that’s barricaded inside of a building to come out and surrender to the police. Not too different than getting your kid to put down their phone. So, I

[00:29:31] Sandie Morgan: oh, we have to have that conversation.

[00:29:33] Yeah, we’ll do that another time.

[00:29:35] Clayton Cranford: it’s, it’s, a, it’s techniques that are not intuitive and, when I learned to be a negotiator, it changed actually everything for me.

[00:29:44] How I talk to my kids, how I talk to my wife. Everybody. and I share those techniques with you in that book so that you can have a really productive conversation with your child about their healthy screen time or unhealthy screen time parenting, digital, all these are available on my website at cybersafetycop.com.

[00:30:01] Well, We will put links to those resources, and we are grateful that you’re right here in our backyard in Orange County, and we’ll be calling you again because I wanna have a conversation about negotiation. Thank you so much, clay, for joining us today.

[00:30:21] Thank you, Sandie.

[00:30:23] Sandie Morgan: Thanks Clayton, for that powerful reminder. Our kids need to hear us say directly, if this happens, it’s going to be okay, and they need a plan for who to tell and how to get help. Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org.

[00:30:48] You’ll find tons of in-depth show notes and more resources. If you’d like to help us grow the podcast, start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook. Instagram or LinkedIn. And as always, thank you for listening.

Dr. Douglas Gilmer joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore how 30 years of carrying the memory of arresting a child who needed help, not handcuffs, drove his commitment to building true collaboration in anti-trafficking work.

Dr. Douglas Gilmer is a 35-year law enforcement veteran and proud military veteran who retired from the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations in August 2024 after 25 years of federal service. In his final role, he served as Senior Law Enforcement Advisor at the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking in Washington, DC. His journey in this field began in 1993 when, as a Charlotte police officer, he encountered a 14-year-old girl being sold for sex. Throughout his federal career, Doug worked and supervised numerous human trafficking cases involving both sex and labor trafficking, domestic and international victims, and adults and minors. He also served as Chief of the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center. After retiring, Doug founded Resolved Strategies LLC, a global justice solutions group dedicated to building collaborations and developing solutions to counter human trafficking. He holds a PhD in Organizational Leadership, with research focused on multidisciplinary collaboration in anti-trafficking work. In January 2025, Doug received the William Wilberforce Lifetime Achievement Award.

[00:00:00] Douglas Gilmer: I can remember handcuffing her, putting her in the back of my patrol car, thinking to myself, if this is the best we can do, why are we doing this?

[00:00:15] Sandie Morgan: Our guest today was driven by 30 years of carrying the memory of arresting a child who needed help, not handcuffs. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan with Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice, and our guest today is Dr. Doug Gilmer. He’s a 35 year law enforcement veteran, recently retired from Homeland Security Investigations and now leads Resolved Strategies.

[00:00:51] His focus is on building true collaboration in anti-trafficking work. Now, here’s our conversation.

[00:01:06] Alright, Dr. Doug Gilmer, thank you so much for joining us on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast.

[00:01:15] Douglas Gilmer: Thank you so much.

[00:01:17] Sandie Morgan: I’m excited because when I first met you, you were in HSI, but you wanted to have side conversations, and we started talking about the research you wanted to do as you were pursuing your PhD. And so let’s start there. Why did you wanna interview me?

[00:01:41] Douglas Gilmer: Well, I had, I had long been a fan

[00:01:47] Sandie Morgan: Okay. I can have fans.

[00:01:50] Douglas Gilmer: of Dr. Morgan and was very aware of the work that you had done, and I knew that collaboration was very important to you. It was, it was evident in your work and it was evident in the work that the task force did, you know, that you helped to lead. And so you were, you were really kind of a natural fit for this project. I figured if, considering your experience and really your tenure in this field, I just knew that you would be a great, a great resource and really an expert.

[00:02:25] Sandie Morgan: I’m gonna borrow that language instead of presenting myself as old an old timer in this field. I now have tenure in this field. That’s much better. So just really quickly, the highlights of your findings in that research. Can you give us a synopsis?

[00:02:47] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, so really the research focused, it was qualitative research, focused on the outcomes of multidisciplinary collaboration between law enforcement and service providers encountering human trafficking. What we learned through the research is that the multidisciplinary team construct, the MDT construct, works, that people were adopting the MDT construct because the old way of doing things didn’t work, and it was proving to be more effective. We learned that contrary to what we sometimes hear, law enforcement generally has a very positive attitude towards service providers, and that service providers actually have a positive attitude or a positive opinion of law enforcement.

[00:03:42] Sandie Morgan: Well hold up there because I wanna know why the myths still exists, that they’re opposing forces sometimes.

[00:03:53] Douglas Gilmer: Well, I think law enforcement comes from a slightly different mindset. We’re very skeptical

[00:04:02] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:02] Douglas Gilmer: early on until we get to know somebody, until we learn to trust people. And then there was a theme that developed when talking to service providers, especially those who had degrees in social work that were, you know, licensed clinical social work workers, LMSW, that kind of thing. And what they shared was that they were really kind of taught from the beginning not to trust law enforcement when they were in school. They were told, don’t trust law enforcement. You can’t trust law enforcement. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your clients. All they care about is making a case. And then when they got out and they went to work and they were being trained, the veterans were telling them, you can’t trust law enforcement. Don’t trust law enforcement. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your clients. They only care about making a case. So they said, we went into this with perceptions based upon what we had been taught and what we had been told we couldn’t trust law enforcement. And they said, but you know, once we, so we were very skeptical when we became part of this MDT or this collaboration. But what we actually found was that law enforcement really did care

[00:05:27] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.

[00:05:27] Douglas Gilmer: that they wouldn’t be there doing this work if they didn’t care. You typically don’t choose this line of work. This line of work sometimes I think chooses you. It’s a passion, it’s a calling

[00:05:38] Sandie Morgan: Yeah.

[00:05:39] Douglas Gilmer: right? And so the people that are there and the people that stick with it, I think are truly committed.

[00:05:47] Sandie Morgan: That really reflects my experience because when I first started working with law enforcement at the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, my boss was Derek Marsh. And as the law enforcement co-chair of our task force, he trained me. And the words you used, from the get go trust was a big part of how he trained me. He made sure that I understood his job was to make sure everybody at the scene was safe. And I knew it was dangerous. I knew the traffickers had guns. I knew that I did not have the situational awareness to manage that. Now, I was a nurse. I still am a nurse, and I knew how to provide victim care, and he trusted my expertise. And so we developed a very strong collaboration. So I think trust is definitely part of that, and we are erasing that myth and finding out that we have common goals that are survivor-centered and justice focused. So let’s talk a little bit more about how your career was shaped by encountering human trafficking. I always remember my first case, we didn’t even have the language of human trafficking. I admitted a 14-year-old boy at two o’clock in the morning and his family members had been selling him. My brain could not wrap itself around that. What was your moment of clarity? And maybe we can use your word calling.

[00:07:54] Douglas Gilmer: I think for me it began there, there were a couple of events. The first one was in 1993. And so this was before we had the TVPA, before we had really modern human trafficking legislation. This was before really we had CACs across the country.

[00:08:19] Sandie Morgan: Define C. A. C for my listeners.

[00:08:22] Douglas Gilmer: Child advocacy center.

[00:08:24] Sandie Morgan: Okay.

[00:08:24] Douglas Gilmer: And I encountered a 14-year-old girl on a street in Charlotte, North Carolina who had propositioned an undercover vice detective

[00:08:41] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.

[00:08:42] Douglas Gilmer: and I was there to support their operation. And this is actually a very difficult story for me to tell. I had to arrest that 14-year-old girl and charge her with prostitution, and I can remember handcuffing her, putting her in the back of my patrol car, thinking to myself, if this is the best we can do, why are we doing this? And to be honest, Dr. Morgan, I have dealt with so much guilt and shame since 1993 over that incident. But you know, I did what I was told to do. I did what the law told me to do. I did what I knew to do in 1993. And actually it wasn’t until just recently, a few months ago, I actually, I had to tell this story in front of a room of a couple of hundred survivors and it was very, very difficult for me to tell this story. And I had no idea what the reaction was gonna be. But afterwards, someone came up to me and gave me a hug and said, it’s okay. You have to learn to forgive yourself for the things you did before you knew better. And that was a, that was kind of like a big closing chapter for me in that story. But then even more recently, you know, back, I guess about eight years ago now, there was another girl who was 16, who had been trafficked. Just a horrible, a horrible story. The things that had happened to her. And I just remember at the end of that, end of that evening, you know, getting her to a safe space, really looking out for her needs. And as I was getting ready to leave, she turned to me and she said, Mr. Doug. And I said yes, and she said, I want you to know that this has been happening to me since I was 13 years old, and this is the first time law enforcement has ever tried to help me.

[00:11:44] Sandie Morgan: It’s a new day and what that survivor advocate said to you. Until you knew better. I think that until you knew better is now in the field of law enforcement. And that’s a great segue for us to talk about your new organization. What’s the name of it?

[00:12:12] Douglas Gilmer: Resolved Strategies

[00:12:13] Sandie Morgan: Oh, it’s, it’s on your shirt. I love that we’re doing this video, Resolved Strategies. So tell us how that is going to change the landscape.

[00:12:25] Douglas Gilmer: So, you know, the term, I think we all pretty much know what strategies are, but the term resolved according to the dictionary means to be firmly determined to do something.

[00:12:36] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.

[00:12:37] Douglas Gilmer: That’s the tech, that’s,

[00:12:38] Sandie Morgan: My mother said that was stubborn.

[00:12:41] Douglas Gilmer: It could be that too. And but what I have found now over 30 years in this field is that there are a lot of people, there are a lot of organizations, there are a lot of agencies that all say, we are firmly determined to do something about this issue, but they don’t know what they’re doing. And when I talk to some of these organizations, sometimes they can’t even tell you why. They can, they can tell you big picture. They can say, well, we are, we are determined to end the scourge of human trafficking globally. And my answer is generally great. So is everybody,

[00:13:34] Sandie Morgan: Me too.

[00:13:35] Douglas Gilmer: Why are you doing this?

[00:13:36] Yeah, right. Why are, but why are you doing this? And they can’t identify a mission. They can’t identify their purpose. They can’t identify their core values as an organization. And a lot of them don’t understand how to truly collaborate. And if you can’t do those things, if you can’t, if you can’t identify who you are, why you’re doing what you’re doing, what those things are that mean most to you and you can’t effectively work with other people, collaborate, not cooperate, collaborate with other people. The best you’re going to do is move in circles. You’re never gonna, you’re never gonna move forward. You’re gonna be like a ship without a rudder, or a rudder stuck in one direction, and you’re just gonna keep going around and around. And I don’t, I don’t want that, I want organizations to succeed in what they’re doing.

[00:14:27] Sandie Morgan: Help us understand why you’re delineating between cooperation and collaboration.

[00:14:36] Douglas Gilmer: So cooperation at its core has a selfish motivation, not necessarily selfish in a negative term, right? The example I often use, if my cows get out of my fence on my farm and I call down the road to my neighbor who doesn’t own my cows, but I say, Hey, can you come down here and help me get my cows back in the fence? That’s cooperation. He’s coming to help me achieve my goal or my purpose, which is getting my cows in the fence. Right? He doesn’t have a stake in my cows, but I do. And so there’s kind of a selfish motivation that goes along with cooperation. When I ask, when we talk about cooperation, we’re really talking about I or me. Collaboration on the other hand is about we. It’s about working with others to achieve a shared goal or shared purpose where your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals, or working together in shared purpose.

[00:15:48] Sandie Morgan: I like that. Okay, so resolved strategies, we’re determined and collaboration is a key piece of the strategy. What kind of reach do you have with Resolved Strategies?

[00:16:08] Douglas Gilmer: Well, define reach.

[00:16:10] Sandie Morgan: Well, I just, I’m like kind of inching towards the international aspect of your approach because one of the problems that I’ve identified is when, for instance, I think in one report early on when I was task force administrator, we identified victims from 29 countries in one county. So having cultural knowledge, cultural humility, linguistic resources, that international component, we have jurisdictional boundaries. The traffickers do not.

[00:16:56] Douglas Gilmer: Correct.

[00:16:57] Sandie Morgan: So how are we building international collaboration?

[00:17:04] Douglas Gilmer: So I think well, and that’s, that’s an important aspect of working collaboratively and working in an MDT environment because you bring that cultural relevancy, you know, into that environment, hopefully, you’re, you know, you’re doing that. Granted most of my work, not all of it, but most of my work is domestic, you know, working, you know, working here in the United States. But I know we are, you know, just putting my DHS hat back on my HSI hat and having retired out of the center for countering human trafficking in DC, I know that we have been pushing collaboration at the international level as well, and doing vast amounts of training overseas to train our foreign partners. And also working, you know, because HSI has 80 plus international offices around the world, and so, you know, trying to get, you know, those offices on board with their foreign partners as well, you know, to work collaboratively on these cases that might involve, you know, international, you know, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and that kind of thing. And really continuing to push, you know, being victim centered and trauma informed, which is a policy of HSI.

[00:18:42] Sandie Morgan: Well, and it’s, that policy comes with language that helps us understand, that helps us understand our common goals. And in my experience with law enforcement training overseas, I think we need to figure out how to adjust how we label it, because we don’t want to come across as, oh, we know how to do this, and we’re gonna teach you

[00:19:12] What I’ve discovered in my international work with law enforcement that if we want to be better collaborators, we have to figure out how to have common language. So that takes a two-way street.

[00:19:31] So they’re training us on their language, they may, they won’t call it necessarily human trafficking. They may call it THB, trafficking of a human being. Depends on what country you’re in. And when we’re talking about victim centered, it may sound differently in a different context. So our collaboration in convening a training may actually be a cultural exchange of one agency with another, so that we can communicate well and understand each other for better collaboration.

[00:20:19] Douglas Gilmer: Absolutely, and I think that would benefit everybody if we did maybe more cultural exchange. So for instance, I always thought it would’ve been really cool to go spend a month over in the UK for instance, working with the Met Police in London or, you know, Scotland or somewhere working with authorities there investigating human trafficking because not only their laws are different, but their authorities are also different. So there are things that we are allowed to do in the United States that they’re not allowed to do there, vice versa. And I think that, I think that you can learn something, you know, by working in different cultures and different areas where they have different laws. Because I think it really kind of forces you to come back and think outside the box.

[00:21:27] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. Oh, that’s helpful. So when I was prepping for this interview, I looked at the title of your workshop that you did at the Attorney General’s Conference in Arlington, Virginia recently, and the title of the workshop really inspired my conversation with you today, and I’m gonna read it here. Your workshop was titled Shared Mission,

[00:21:58] Shared Measures, Collaborating for Survivor Stability, Accountability, and Dignity. So the part that caught my attention was shared measures. One of the things people have said to me with my fascination with collaboration is how do you measure collaboration? And I’ve probably done a podcast on that, so I’m not gonna use your time, but I want to know how you see shared measures and their role in the trust building we started off this conversation with.

[00:22:40] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, I think it goes back to, you know, when you’re truly collaborating, your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals. We may have different objectives. We may have different, different roles within that environment, within that MDT, that task force. But we’re all working toward the same, the same end goal. It was interesting in my research that when I asked about how, how do you measure success? How do you measure outcomes, law enforcement overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly said, success is measured by victim stability, which I thought, wow, that’s interesting. ‘Cause I would’ve

[00:23:39] Sandie Morgan: That sounds like the social worker.

[00:23:42] Douglas Gilmer: The social workers, although their number one answer was still victim stability. A very close second was the number of cases and prosecutions, far outseeding, exceeding the law enforcement response. So, which I thought was interesting, but it also goes back to if you’re truly collaborative and you truly have shared purpose as an organization, as a task force, then your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals. And I think we recognize that if we’re doing our job effectively as law enforcement, then we’re going to, we’re gonna help provide victim stability. If the victim services folks, the advocates, the social workers, whomever, if they’re doing their job right, and we’re truly collaborative, then it’s gonna help us ultimately make, you know, better prosecutions.

[00:24:49] Sandie Morgan: So I’m gonna kind of play devil’s advocate here. I, under the Enhanced Collaborative Model here in the US, did evaluation for three different task forces all in California. I regularly interviewed law enforcement and as I did, I tried to find the ways where our goals overlapped, and they did, and there were those

[00:25:23] who made a way forward that didn’t necessarily fit their paradigm for reporting, because if you are in the police department and you go out and you spend all these hours and then you don’t have any charges, you don’t have anything that will stick, your paperwork doesn’t support a more law enforcement heavy criminal justice

[00:25:53] output, which outputs and outcomes are different. So our outcomes can be shared. But promotions and rotations, all of this, is often based on outputs for a particular officer and I think one of the areas of weakness from a collaborative perspective is when the rest of the team doesn’t understand the requirements of being a

[00:26:29] police officer. You have to track if you’re gonna give tickets for people running stop signs or red lights. How many did you cite? And if you are picking up people who are breaking the law, and now we’re talking a lot about forced criminality in human trafficking, but now you don’t charge them.

[00:26:55] Now you get victim services. How are we going to change the way that we measure an officer’s success through output? I think that’s the next big question.

[00:27:11] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, so I think that, I think that there is a growing shift. So for instance, within, within HSI, an agent gets essentially the same credit or the same recognition for identifying and recovering a victim and getting that victim into services as they do if they make an arrest.

[00:27:40] Sandie Morgan: Okay.

[00:27:41] Douglas Gilmer: So, and that’s part, that’s part of being of that victim-centered, trauma-informed approach. You’re not always going to make a human trafficking case. And there’s been a shift in some of the more progressive agencies around the country where they’re also starting to recognize that success just isn’t on charging human trafficking, right, or Mann Act or whatever.

[00:28:13] We’re not doing ourselves any good if we’re, if we’re disregarding the needs of the victim or the survivor and forsaking, forsaking them for the case or for the purpose of making a case. And so I think that there’s a little bit of a, there’s a little bit of a growing shift. It’s also why I’ve always been very passionate about teaching law enforcement around the country that human trafficking is a crime of crimes. It’s, it could be in theory, it’s possible, it could be a single scheme crime, but it never is. Right. If,

[00:28:52] Sandie Morgan: Yeah.

[00:28:53] Douglas Gilmer: if typically there are going to be, there’s gonna be drugs involved, there may be guns involved, there may be child sexual abuse material involved, especially if we’re talking about minor victims. There could be money laundering charges. There could be tax charges. Inevitably, if it’s a commercial enterprise, they’re not paying, they’re not paying taxes.

[00:29:20] Douglas Gilmer: And so there are, and then of course, then there are things like the, you know, the Mann Act and use of a communication device in interstate commerce.

[00:29:30] There are all of these different ways that we can potentially prosecute a case, and still get, still get an outcome, in which we, maybe we don’t have to put that victim on the stand. That survivor maybe, maybe they’re just not healthy enough yet. Maybe they’re not in the right place and we don’t want to, we don’t want to put them up there and risk retraumatization.

[00:29:58] Sandie Morgan: Yeah, that’s right.

[00:30:00] Douglas Gilmer: But we can make a money laundering case. We can make a CSAM case. Because, you know, it’s a, it’s a minor victim and he had, you know, 30 images and, you know, 10 videos that he was using to post on sites. And now suddenly just based on that, we have a, we have a life sentence.

[00:30:20] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:30:21] Douglas Gilmer: I think that there are, there are other ways that we can, we can show outcomes, you

[00:30:31] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:31] Douglas Gilmer: you know, for these cases.

[00:30:33] Sandie Morgan: Doug, 30 years. Wow. So what gives you hope for the next 10?

[00:30:41] Douglas Gilmer: I think the fact that there is, there is growing interest. I mean, there was a, there was a time where law enforcement didn’t want to do this work. We just didn’t, or we did it poorly. We weren’t working human trafficking. We were just working prostitution. And I think that there’s a, there’s a growing movement nationwide. I think when you look at law enforcement agencies, especially larger departments nationwide, medium sized departments that have the resources, they’re dedicating, you know, human trafficking units or they’re dedicating folks to task forces. So I think, I think that’s good. I think that there, there’s a growing amount of training across sectors, to include, you know, victim advocates, and especially healthcare, right? I mean, that’s a, there’s a huge need in healthcare for, you know, for better training and recognition, and we’re starting to see that. So I think the fact that we’re seeing a growing, a growing interest gives me hope. What gives me pause is the fact that there are so many people out there trying to do this work, they’re not working with one another, they’re not, they’re not truly collaborating and, you know, one of the, one of the biggest conflicts or challenges

[00:32:58] that was identified, there were two big ones that were identified in the research. One was the application of roles. So people knowing their job, you know, law enforcement doing what they do and service providers doing what they do and service providers not encroaching into the lane of law enforcement and vice versa. But the other big challenge was funding.

[00:32:58] Sandie Morgan: Yeah.

[00:32:59] Douglas Gilmer: It wasn’t, it, it wasn’t so much that we don’t have funding. People said, we’re, we’re gonna find a way. I mean, even if our bank balance is zero, we’re gonna call around, we’re gonna dip into our personal saving, we’re gonna do what we have to do to help a victim. But it’s, it’s the grant process. It’s the funding process itself. We, we have created an environment in which we’re not fostering collaboration between organizations. We’re fostering competition. And that is driving a wedge, I think, in this field because it’s become so competitive to get funding that people are working against each other instead of working for each other.

[00:33:48] Sandie Morgan: Well, now you’ve moved into a new topic that is going to have to be a follow up episode, but, wow. Yes. Collaboration gives you hope. Competition is something to pause and consider.

[00:34:08] Doug, thank you so much for being with us today.

[00:34:11] Douglas Gilmer: Oh, thank you, Dr. Morgan. It was, it’s, it’s an honor. It truly is.

[00:34:16] Sandie Morgan: All right.

[00:34:17] Thank you, Dr. Doug Gilmer.

[00:34:20] This conversation about collaboration really emphasizes our shared goals where your mission becomes mine, and mine becomes yours. It changes everything about how we work together.

[00:34:36] Listeners, if this conversation was meaningful for you, please check out our website, endinghhumantrafficking.org. There are tons of resources there. You can look at old episodes. You can share the episode with someone else. Help us grow our community. Connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

[00:35:03] Thanks for listening.

Carissa Phelps joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discuss an unprecedented opportunity for trafficking survivors to access $215 million in remission funds from the Backpage settlement, with a critical February 2026 deadline that could finally put survivors ahead of their traffickers for the first time in movement history.

Carissa Phelps is a licensed attorney, author, and survivor advocate who founded Runaway Girl, Inc., a social purpose corporation providing survivor-led experiential trainings nationwide. She earned both a Juris Doctor and MBA from UCLA in 2007 and holds a B.A. in Mathematics from California State University, Fresno. As a pioneer in survivor-led advocacy, Carissa has spent nearly two decades empowering communities and amplifying survivor voices through innovative strategies. She is the author of the acclaimed memoir “Runaway Girl: Escaping Life on the Streets, One Helping Hand at a Time” and co-producer of the award-winning documentary “Carissa,” both powerful tools used worldwide for education and training on child exploitation and trafficking.

[00:00:00] Carissa Phelps: For the first time, for the first time in the history of this movement, we have an opportunity to get ahead of traffickers.

[00:00:08] Sandie Morgan: Right now, $215 million is waiting for trafficking survivors. This is money that most survivors don’t even know exists. The deadline is February 2nd, 2026. The legal system is finally learned from mistakes. There’s no court required here. Victims don’t have to face their traffickers to apply for this funding. It’s a pathway to justice.

[00:00:45] I am Dr. Sandie Morgan from the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University. And my guest is Carissa Phelps.

[00:00:57] She’s an attorney, a survivor advocate, founder of Runaway Girl Inc. And she is leading the charge to connect survivors with the Backpage remission fund. Let’s join our conversation.

[00:01:16]

[00:01:22] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so Carissa Phelps, welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. I have looked back at our history, and the last time you were here was 14 years ago.

[00:01:37] Carissa Phelps: Oh my goodness.

[00:01:38] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Listeners, if you wanna hear that interview, it’s number 19. So welcome Carissa.

[00:01:46] Carissa Phelps: Thank you. Thank you, Sandie. Thanks for

[00:01:48] Sandie Morgan: having me on.

[00:01:49] So what have you been doing since we talked last?

[00:01:53] Carissa Phelps: So, catching up, I guess. I mean that’s over a decade of work, but we built Runaway Girl as a flexible purpose corporation, so a social purpose corporation. We went out with full force. We had. Prop 35 in that timeframe to come out with a historic support for, more penalties for trafficking that saw increased prosecutions for sex trafficking, especially of minors.

[00:02:18] And we’ve been in a uphill battle in terms of getting survivors into leadership positions. But that’s happening now more and more. It’s expected for survivors to not just be at the table or in the room or subject of the conversation, but to be part of the conversation in developing services and reaching victims where they’re at, and survivors where they’re at.

[00:02:43] And so this has been, it’s been an exciting decade and a half.

[00:02:47] Sandie Morgan: Wow. And I just am happy to report to you that the very first human trafficking victim rescued in Orange County, Shyima Hall, who was an Egyptian child, made in an upscale neighborhood, is now serving on the Global Center for Women in Justice Advisory Board.

[00:03:11] Yeah, so we’re trying to practice what you are teaching us as a leading survivor advocate. So I got really excited a couple weeks ago when I saw your post about NCMEC remission, and when we’re talking about survivor-centered justice, why is that important? And for listeners just joining this conversation, NCMEC is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

[00:03:45] Carissa Phelps: So I did, I posted, my friends at NCMEC National Center for Missing Exploited Children are doing something similar to what we’ll talk about with survivors first, but we are all trying to respond to this Backpage remission, which is an historic amount of funds

[00:04:01] available for survivors of trafficking that were trafficked over 20 years ago, some of them, from 2004 when Backpage was prominent, to 2018, 2004 to 2018, when backpage.com existed and served traffickers really and served buyers and.

[00:04:22] Was a means of exploiting victims, rampantly all over our country, all over the world, really all over the globe. And so there were so many victims out of that website. It was finally shut down, with the help of Maggie Krell, who was at the Attorney General’s office in California and others in US Attorney in Arizona, Kevin Rapp, and like there, there were so many people that stepped up to the plate to say this was wrong.

[00:04:46] this went even beyond maybe what Craigslist was doing in terms of, just, uh, catering to traffickers in, in what they were posting. So they were, assets were seized in that effort and those assets are now available to victims of trafficking. There was a settlement reached in 2024 with the company, and so some of the funds did go back to the company owners and so that that can be resolved in civil suits and other ways.

[00:05:15] But this 215 million has been made available in a victim restitution fund. For victims to come forward to show that they have losses, economic losses, so lost wages, lost time that they could have been working or doing something else when they were being trafficked. And also medical costs and other costs that they would’ve incurred while being trafficked.

[00:05:37] Sandie Morgan: So, Carissa, one of the things that was so inspiring when I first met you is you did a double grad program so that you have an MBA and you’re an attorney. So break this down for us. What are you talking about with remission and, asset forfeiture? Tell me about that.

[00:06:01] Carissa Phelps: So anytime somebody uses their assets to commit a crime or takes or steals things from people fraudulently, their money or their assets, that those assets could be seized and forfeited to the government.

[00:06:19] And if they’re prosecuted, criminally prosecuted, they first be seized and then they would be forfeited. So that happened. It happened with City X Guide in 2021. There was actually a restitution process for victims in 2021 and a $15 million fund, and nobody really learned about it. It was not as well advertised potentially, or people didn’t get the word out, and maybe because it wasn’t as large of a fund, but that $15 million, if it’s not accessed by victims, it doesn’t it, it didn’t disappear.

[00:06:55] Fortunately, it’s coming into this fund. But it’s now a remission process, which is different than a restitution process. A victim restitution process is sort of during the criminal trial and before sentencing, somebody could come in and put in a restitution form and say, I’m due this money because I was a victim of this crime.

[00:07:14] And the Texas, the US attorney in Texas did make that process available with the City X Guide person being prosecuted. Martono was his name. He was prosecuted. He ended up being sentenced and victims had a chance to go and to give a victim impact statement and to also apply for these funds as a restitution.

[00:07:35] But what happened is that the word probably didn’t get out wide enough. There weren’t enough. There wasn’t enough support maybe for victims to get this fund in. It’s a scary thing to go to court. And ask for anything, especially if you’ve been victimized more recently. Mm-hmm. And the victimization with that was between 2018 and 2020.

[00:07:54] And so you’re asking in 2021 really early stage people who are coming out of victimization to come and try to get funds. It wasn’t happening and it didn’t happen. So now when the back page settlement was reached in 2024 after a criminal conviction of one of the, one of the founders, one of the CEOs of, of that organization, there was this $215 million settlement.

[00:08:20] And so these funds have now been combined by the DOJ and their money laundering department to create a process that looks similar to the one in 2021. But is run by a program, called Epic. They’re epic global, so they’re the administrator. And so now we’re not going to court to get this money. We’re basically going to a middle person between the victim and survivor and the DOJ and submitting documentation that would be proof of the trafficking, that it happened during the time period, that there’s a remission time period of 2004 to 2018.

[00:08:59] 2008 for back page 2018 to 2020 for City X Guide. And so you’d have to show some sort of proof that there was some trafficking that happened during that period with those websites, sex trafficking particularly, and then also claim lost the lost wages for that time. Much like the Cal, the California has a crime victims’ compensation fund.

[00:09:25] Yeah. Claim lost wages. And it would be calculated at minimum wage, federal minimum wage at that time, unless there could be a way of showing that there was a different wage amount, unless there could be a way of showing that there were different hours worked. It would be 40 hour work week. One of the things that we’re doing, we could talk about, you know, whether there’s really truly a work week when somebody’s being trafficked, right?

[00:09:47] Yeah, yeah. Um,

[00:09:49] Sandie Morgan: over time. But

[00:09:50] Carissa Phelps: there’s, there’s this process now set up that we don’t have to go to court. We’re going to a third party administrator with documentation proving the trafficking and a lawyer doing that with a, with a survivor, with a, with a victim of, of this, which we’ll call a claimant. Now, a claimant on this form is important.

[00:10:12] I think it really is important. it’s not a complicated process where you have to peer in front of court, but it’s still a lengthy application and it requires some proof,

[00:10:21] Sandie Morgan: So, when we talk about being survivor centered justice, the first time there was restitution funding available, not many applied, and it’s a scary process.

[00:10:38] So this particular model now. Means that the survivor doesn’t have to go back to court. That’s a big deal that recognizes it’s more trauma informed. So as I look at the information on this, the deadline is coming up February, 2026. Yeah. So what are the practical steps that survivors and our communities need to take?

[00:11:08] So this doesn’t get left on the table.

[00:11:11] Carissa Phelps: Thank you so much for asking that. And February 2nd, 2026. So I’m only thinking, oh my goodness. Deadline as January. January,

[00:11:18] Sandie Morgan: okay. January is our

[00:11:19] Carissa Phelps: deadline if you really think about it. And then you have the holidays in between. So it is a very tight deadline. it’s one of my first requests.

[00:11:26] As soon as I get a meeting with the DOJ, which I anticipate we will, survivors first will be meeting with them. Is, can we get some equitable relief, some fairness here about, you know, we were looking at populations that are inaccessible. They’re in jail, they’re in hospitals, potentially they’re not, they’re incapacitated.

[00:11:43] We have deceased survivors and victims. Their families have to get a state set up to make the claim. So we do have some, some fairness here about getting an extension. We don’t anticipate it. We’re not going to plan for it. We’re gonna plan for no extension and do the best we can with every application that.

[00:12:02] In my case, I’m trying to do about 500 applications myself. I know other lawyers who have hundreds or thousands of them, so we’re anticipating, you know, tens of thousands potentially applications going in. this means that the funds that will be received per person may be pro rata down from what they’re requesting.

[00:12:25] So we’re really encouraging everybody to request the full amount that they can legitimately request because we do anticipate if we exhaust the fund, it will be, it will be pro rata down. so yes, it, it is a lot to set up, the groups that we really need to have at the table, like you mentioned, NCMEC, NCMECS, backpage remission network.org got launched.

[00:12:48] Yoda Sous, who’s over there, has been in this fight for a very long time, and I’m very happy that she’s at the table doing this. I hope you have her on a, as a guest as well, because

[00:12:57] Sandie Morgan: I’ll make a note for sure. About

[00:12:58] Carissa Phelps: enough, right? Mm-hmm. Um, me and Melissa Snow and others at at NCMEC are making this a priority.

[00:13:04] They already work with law firms, so they have a, you know, over a dozen law firms who have committed pro bono to assist in this application process. To assist survivors and just very, very narrowly assist with the application process. And then also they have connection and relationship with people they trust in the therapy field, in the medical field.

[00:13:29] And so they’re, they’re connecting those two groups up to help streamline the process of getting the applications done. Survivors First is doing it a little bit differently. And we’re doing it differently because we wanna see when survivors come in the door that they have the option to maybe even start their services.

[00:13:47] Sandie Morgan: Let’s stop for a second here. Yeah. And tell me what is Survivors first and what is the agenda there?

[00:13:56] Carissa Phelps: Yeah. So Survivors First is it. It is a working group that was formed other, it’s under Love Never Fails us. Love Never Fails Us, is a nonprofit. That helps to empower survivor voice.

[00:14:10] So Vanessa Russell, who founded Love Never Fails us reached out to me when she heard of the deadline. I was actually on an international flight when it came out on July 31st. And she reached out to me and I just immediately went into action. I had a, me a meeting with 25 of very close friends, allies in the survivor space, um, attorneys, doctors, people who would talk to me right away. Um, from Spain

[00:14:34] I had this meeting. I said, let’s, we have, we have to get this done. And so we began meeting, we planned a weekly webinar where every week, Wednesday at 1:00 PM PST, we’re getting people on air talking about. what’s going on with the application process? What’s going on with the remission process, how we can give, um, sort of step-by-step guide to victims and survivors and those who are supporting them, because not every claimant is gonna have an attorney.

[00:15:02] So we know that human trafficking advocates are also gonna be helping walk survivors through this form, that some people will not have legal assistance, even though there is the pro bono legal assistance through NCMEC. We hope that everyone has legal assistance, but we don’t think everyone will end up with legal assistance.

[00:15:20] So to give people sort of a guide of what to expect, even what if, what to expect even before they go and see a lawyer, if they’d like to think it through. Some people are not sure if they want to do this right? They want more information first. So we’re speaking to survivors, we’re speaking to experts.

[00:15:35] We’re speaking to the providers to try to get together and share resources. And as quickly as possible, cut through the red tape and really empower all the allies and attorneys and medical providers who are out there so that we have strong claims built for this, for the claimants, for those survivors.

[00:15:56] Sandie Morgan: So time is of the essence. Time, right? Time is of the essence. So if you’re listening to this conversation with Carissa, you need to share this podcast with your survivor network. Even with your anti-trafficking network and engage more survivors, because there are people that we haven’t been able to reach with this message.

[00:16:23] And the internet is a common denominator for many of us. Let’s use it for good here.

[00:16:31] Carissa Phelps: Yes. And that is one of our key reasons for forming, was just raising the awareness, raising the awareness. Hosting these weekly talks with survivors and then also with the providers, all about getting the information out there, lowering the barriers that exist.

[00:16:46] Because some people don’t have computers. They don’t have the ability even to apply. It’s a difficult application. You can’t do it on your phone in one sitting. I’m not saying don’t do that. If that’s your only way to do it and get it done, then get it done, get it done by the deadline for certain. but I just, I really, I believe that there’s, there’s this

[00:17:05] gap in understanding that this is for you. A lot of victims will think, well, I didn’t have a prosecution. I didn’t testify against the trafficker When the prosecutor asked me to, maybe I don’t have a claim. No, you still have a claim. It doesn’t mean you don’t have a claim. You can still have a claim, a valid claim if you were trafficked on this site, didn’t have to be proven in court.

[00:17:27] It didn’t have to be something that you had to cooperate with law enforcement. This is not court. You’re not going to court. I do suggest trying to get attorney and attorney representation. There are some attorneys that are signing up cases for a contingency fee and even those attorneys we’re working with them.

[00:17:43] I understand that model. I work under that model. So we’re working with them to help try to lower the costs that would go to survivors. It would come out of their portion. So we wanna make sure providers are available for those survivors through grant funds, through other means to come up with help for those applications to make them the strongest that they can be without incurring costs to a survivor.

[00:18:06] Sandie Morgan: So how do people contact Survivors First?

[00:18:11] Carissa Phelps: So SurvivorsFirst.community is our website. We’re also on Love Never fails.com. Love never fails us.com. Under their events tab, we have a webinar link there. at Survivors First dot Community, you’ll find information about the remission process, our webinar links and our resource form so that providers can sign up and share their information, tell us how they wanna be involved, tell us where they wanna be involved.

[00:18:40] Tell us their background and experience. We are asking that people have at least one year, 12 months of experience when they sign up. if they’re a provider with something that is trafficking directly related to trafficking, human trafficking and training in that area. We do have some time to train people and some experts who are out there will support.

[00:19:00] Specialists because we do need some specialists at times that maybe don’t have training in trafficking might be a dental issue, it might be an, an ocular or ophthalmology issue, could be a skin or dermatology issue. And we, and we, we need those experts too. Those people. To help with treatment plans, but we’d want them working alongside of somebody who has that experience.

[00:19:21] Sandie Morgan: So getting this message out is important not just to the survivors, but also to our legal community. Yes. And I started thinking when you first started talking about all the survivors in my world. And how I’m going to share this with them. And now where I am starting to make my next list is all the attorneys and judges and, advocates in the legal system that will be critical for us to meet that 2nd of February deadline.

[00:19:56] I’m with you. I’m gonna just say January 31st. Yeah,

[00:20:00] Carissa Phelps: yeah,

[00:20:00] We will also have a toolkit we’re building for survivors. So I’m working alongside Felicia Rosario, and maybe you have us both on it sometime, but, or she’s. She’s a medically trained, doctor, so she’s medically trained.

[00:20:12] She has a md, she’s Dr. Rosario. She’s amazing, and she’s not able to issue the treatment plans necessarily, but she’ll work right alongside of doctors and helping them understand medical codes and right alongside survivors to help them understand how to care for themselves, what to ask for, how to advocate to get their treatment that they need, and they deserve.

[00:20:33] A lot of survivors don’t, don’t necessarily understand the connection between something like an autoimmune disorder later in life and the stress that they, that they had, strangulation has come up. Things that dental issues have come up that could have been caused by trafficking or excessive drug use that was, that was forced upon them during the trafficking.

[00:20:53] So all these things are things that we can address. tattoo removal, those types of. Scars, tattoos, skin infections, things like that, that would require dermatology. There’s, a

[00:21:04] wonderful app that I’ll share with you as one of the links that, Dr. Shadi Kourosh has come up with that links providers who have training and trafficking and also skin related trafficking issues that are available because of her work at Harvard.

[00:21:19] So there’s there. These resources are out there. That’s the exciting thing, Sandy, I don’t think 14 years ago we could have said this. No, we would’ve been scrambling in the dark for something, and I know these resources are out there. I hope that these listeners, the listeners that you have that are so faithful, the listeners that you have.

[00:21:34] Will sign up on the form both on Backpage, remission network.org, and then also with Survivors First Community. This is a global message, but we really are trying to activate people locally because we know survivors if they hear this message in their own community. That it’ll be more real. We want this to be real.

[00:21:54] We want it not just this to be a headline in the news they see, but something that is real and actionable.

[00:21:59] Sandie Morgan: I am so excited that as the ending human trafficking podcast community, we get to be front and center to watch. As you lead this survivor-centered initiative, um, what I’d really also like to ask, just because I know we’re gonna have more conversations, but as we lead up to that after February 2nd, what are you looking for in initiatives like Survivor First and shaping the future of our anti-trafficking efforts?

[00:22:39] Carissa Phelps: Well, you can, I mean, you can just give me chills right now because I mean the work that we need to do to get ahead of traffickers, like for the first time, for the first time in the history of this movement, we have an opportunity to get ahead of traffickers. If we don’t take it, it is on us. So Web3 is here, Web3 is coming.

[00:23:00] It’s here. Blockchain. All this new technology is available, and it is a new frontier, a new world that if we don’t learn and become a part of, then we will have handed it over to traffickers. Once again, like we did with Web 2.0, we will have handed it over and we cannot do that. We can’t stand by while it’s done.

[00:23:21] We cannot allow it to happen. We need to get educated and out in front of it. That doesn’t mean by shutting down innovation, that means by being the greatest innovators. That means by being the best innovators, let’s not wait. For people to harm our children before we create tools like Bark or tools that help to regulate their use online, their usage online, and who accesses them, right?

[00:23:42] Let’s do this ahead of time. So that’s what I’m calling out to everybody, and that will be my sort of battle cry as I go forward after February 2nd.

[00:23:51] Sandie Morgan: Oh my goodness. I am so inspired. I can’t wait to join your team. Before I sign off, I want you to tell me about the books in the background of your screen.

[00:24:02] Carissa Phelps: Okay. So, um, in human trafficking, so I worked some of that time during our, during from 2019, I filed my first case against, 15 defendants, a whole host of hotels, motels, and then also, Craigslist. So my client was this amazing, very brave client who had been trafficked as a minor, and she stood up and to, to those individuals, to those hotels, and to the.

[00:24:30] One of them being Motel six, G six, one of them being, Craigslist. And she, we fought, we fought all the way to the Ninth Circuit. And unfortunately, I’ll tell you my new book that I’m working on that’s gonna take up the next base over here is gonna be called Bad Law because I don’t think that the ninth Circuit got it right when they reviewed our case.

[00:24:49] Um, there are other cases who were argued alongside of me that continue to fight. My client was, was sort of done and reached a, a resolution, that was agreeable for both parties and so I was just so proud of her for fighting. I worked for, um. Mike Papantonio and Levin Papantonio Rafferty when I was doing that, and he was writing his book in human trafficking at that time and became a huge ally and friend to the world of, of anti-trafficking.

[00:25:15] He supported my work in filing multiple lawsuits, creating a whole department at Levin Papantonio Rafferty, and at his conference or their conference, really Mass Torts Made Perfect. That is in Las Vegas that reaches so many attorneys, thousands of attorneys around the world. Really. And so this has been, a fight that Levin Papantonio has been in, and I’m in their studio and this is his book.

[00:25:38] Oh. So that’s what’s, what’s Behind Me. Oh, I love that. And then Michael Book, runaway Girl. And, one of my colleagues from here, from the office had a copy and brought it in. So my book that, I am so proud of, but came out in 2012, so not, not long after we had met, it was coming out. it’s due for not just an update, but also, like I said, I have a whole nother book, not just another chapter that I’ve lived in the last decade and a half.

[00:26:02] So that will be the next book that will be, that’ll be the next book that I come out with, and I’m excited about.

[00:26:08] Sandie Morgan: Carissa, you are an inspiring survivor leader, and I wanna be an ally and bring a community of allies to sign on. Go to your website. We’ll put all the links in our show notes for everybody.

[00:26:27] Thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you.

[00:26:30] Carissa Phelps: Thank you. Thank you.

[00:26:32] Speaker 6: Thank you to Carissa Phelps. This episode, this conversation really showed survivor-centered justice and it’s happening right now. We can’t let that $215 million sit there unclaimed share this episode, the deadline. February 2nd, 2026. This is a wake up call for a movement beyond the deadline. How are we going to promote survivor centered justice?

[00:27:07] If this is your first episode of the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, go to our website, endinghumantrafficking.org. You’ll find show notes, tons of resources

[00:27:22] and of course you can listen to past episodes, for instance, Carissa Phelps was on the podcast in our first year, episode number 19, and if you’d like to help us grow the podcast, please connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

[00:27:44] Thank you for listening.

[00:27:46]

Erin West joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they uncover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation targeting vulnerable people through sophisticated romance and investment scams known as pig butchering.

Erin West is a globally recognized expert in transnational organized crime and the founder and president of Operation Shamrock, a nonprofit uniting law enforcement, industry, and everyday citizens to disrupt pig butchering scams—the world’s fastest-growing form of transnational organized crime. After 26 years as a prosecutor, including eight years on the REACT High-Tech Task Force where she became known for her relentless pursuit of cryptocurrency-enabled criminals, Erin retired to launch this cross-border fight to expose the scam economy and protect both victims and the trafficked workers forced to run these schemes. She is also the host of “Stolen,” a podcast that takes listeners inside the darkest corners of the scamdemic, where love is weaponized and billions are laundered. As a sought-after international speaker and educator, Erin continues to equip audiences worldwide to use their skills and platforms to fight back against these sophisticated criminal enterprises.

[00:00:00] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issue, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:00:23] Today, we’ll discover why that random text asking “Can you come for ribs?” might be the opening move in a $5 billion crime operation

[00:00:36] I’m joined today by Erin West, founder and president of Operation Shamrock, and former prosecutor who spent 26 and a half years. Fighting high tech crimes. And now here’s our interview.

[00:00:53]

[00:00:54] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the podcast Erin West. I am so delighted to meet you.

[00:01:02] Erin West: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I’m delighted to be here.

[00:01:05] Sandie Morgan: It was really interesting.

[00:01:07] Debbie Deem, who was on episode 351, mentioned you and she mentioned you in her context talking about pig butchering, and she had my full attention right away. And then she talked about your nonprofit. So, at the top of this interview, I wanna frame everything with what you are doing with Operation Shamrock.

[00:01:37] Somehow my imagination took me to Ireland, so, tell us what that is.

[00:01:44] Erin West: Sure. So I was a prosecutor for 26 and a half years, and the last three years of my career I was deluged with victims of a certain type of crime known as pig butchering. It’s a long con, it is a romance slash investment scam. And what I was seeing was that we had never seen anything like this before, we’d never seen a scale like this, and ultimately, my passion for trying to do something about it made me realize that I needed to leave my career, retire from being a prosecutor and open a nonprofit.

[00:02:26] At Operation Shamrock, our mission is to educate about, mobilize against and disrupt transnational organized crime. The, the Chinese organized criminals that are, that are running this horrible crime. And so that’s what we do.

[00:02:41] Sandie Morgan: So what is a long con?

[00:02:44] Erin West: Yeah. You know, I think that, and a good example of a short con would be those calls that you get where you are led to believe that, your, your grandchild is in custody somewhere and you need to go put money in an ATM real quick. That’s a, that’s a deceptive trick.

[00:03:01] Sandie Morgan: oh, I got a text, I got a text yesterday that said, mom, I lost my phone. Text me at this number.

[00:03:12] Erin West: Yeah,

[00:03:13] Sandie Morgan: like, ah,

[00:03:15] Erin West: Ugh. That’s, and the fact that that happened to you yesterday shows how ubiquitous these crimes are. So, so when you ask about a long con, a long con is something where, oh my gosh. And I just got a text right now. That says hello. I’m Sophia from the Indeed Human Resources Team. We recently came across your outstanding resume.

[00:03:39] That’s a job scam and it’s happening. That’s, that’s how frequently this is happening. So the long con is, is when you get one of those texts that says, Hey, I’m making ribs tonight. Can you come over and you say, oh, I think you have the wrong number. And then you start a, what can be up to four months of a relationship with someone that you met in a very random way on the internet.

[00:04:03] These bad actors have tried and true techniques that they use to lure you into believing that you are in a legitimate relationship and it’s the kind of relationship that you’ve always wanted.

[00:04:16] Sandie Morgan: Hmm. So I’ve done so much work in the youth prevention field, and we always call that like the Romeo Pimp, the Romance Con, those kinds of things.

[00:04:31] And so those kids don’t have any big money. So why is this happening?

[00:04:37] Erin West: I’ll say that the enemy is so sophisticated that they are attacking every, every demographic. And so they have, we’ve recently found out that sextortion is coming out of the very same compounds that are doing these long cons, and the enemy is willing to do anything to make, to make money. So the short amount of time it takes to get some money out of, out of younger victims, they’ll do that, but they’ll invest a longer amount of time when they know that you have a retirement account or you have funded college accounts for your kids, they will know that it’s worth the amount of time to do that

[00:05:23] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so how long would a long con go? Like weeks, four months. Okay. So we’re talking regular communication.

[00:05:33] Erin West: We’re talking four hours a day of texting. We are talking, we are talking that they become the relationship that that victim has always wanted. That they are the, the happy, the happily ever after. They’re selling a dream, and it takes a minute to sell a dream like that.

[00:05:50] Sandie Morgan: Mm. So Debbie first mentioned pig butchering in our episode 351 when we were talking about online scams, particularly targeting senior citizens. And I think the stat she shared with us was $4.9 billion in 2024. Can you really break down what a pig butchering scam looks like, the steps, how do I begin to recognize when that’s what’s happening?

[00:06:27] And how did it get a name like that?

[00:06:29] Erin West: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so you’re asking all the right questions. So let, let’s start with that part first. So, I’m gonna take you back to what was happening in Southeast Asia. That’s where this is coming from, in, in COVID Times and Chinese organized criminals. And when I say that, I mean legitimate Chinese organized criminals.

[00:06:48] Members of the triad, thought it would be great to build a bunch of casinos in Cambodia and lure Chinese gamblers down there and make money from gambling. And when, COVID hit and people weren’t moving, they said, well, let’s figure out another way to fill these large buildings that we have and let’s figure out another way to make money.

[00:07:09] So they thought, Sha Zhu Pan, that is the Chinese term for it. It literally translates to pig butchering. And the idea is, let’s fill those towers with, with workers and have them fatten up the pig, build these love bomb relationships with victims, and then once the victims are in, let’s cut their throats and let’s take everything they have.

[00:07:35] Sandie Morgan: Oh my gosh. That’s brutal.

[00:07:37] Erin West: And so that’s what pig butchering really means. And it is, it is vile in so many ways. For a long time, there was a whole movement to not call it pig butchering because that was, that was cruel to victims.

[00:07:50] But I think that the reason why we need to call it pig butchering is that’s what they call it, and it gets attention and it gets attention to what is a crime, the unknown crime that is killing a whole strata of our society.

[00:08:07] And these people aren’t talking about it because they feel shame and embarrassment. So when we think about how a pig butchering scam works, it begins with an initial reach out. It could be one of those texts we’ve talked about, or it could be someone friending you on LinkedIn connecting with you and saying, I see that you’ve recently moved to Southern California.

[00:08:30] My niece is thinking of moving there. Can you tell me what a good neighborhood is for a young woman? or something like that, that gets your attention and, and feels not at all nefarious. And you, you might think, oh, I’d like to be helpful. It could be someone befriending you in your over fifties women’s travel group on Facebook, which happened to me.

[00:08:52] It could be someone on a dating app. And so what it is, is there’s this initial reach out. There’s an initial. Connection. And from there they move that connection to wherever it started, to WhatsApp or to Signal or to Telegram. Somewhere that’s end to end encrypted and over time they

[00:09:11] Sandie Morgan: Wait stop that for just a second

[00:09:12] Erin West: You stop me whenever you want.

[00:09:14] Sandie Morgan: Okay. Because I’m like listening to this as a first timer and I’m thinking, oh, wait a minute my tech guy told me, end-to-end encryption will protect me. And now you are telling me they choose end-to-end encryption. Go back.

[00:09:31] Erin West: I am so glad that you stopped me because this is important to me. I think a lot of people in this industry use a lot of buzzwords terms. They talk through stuff and, and it makes it difficult to say, wait, wait, wait. Stop. Let me, let me make sure I understand that piece. So I’m glad you stopped me. So let’s talk about end-to-end encryption.

[00:09:49] End-to-end encryption is great, if you want to keep a secret. It is great if you want to send information to someone else that you don’t want anyone looking at, and that’s what these bad guys want. They want to be able to communicate you with you in a space where there’s no one looking. So, I just saw an example on Airbnb this morning where somebody was talking on Airbnb.

[00:10:16] The guy wanted them to, to speak in WhatsApp. They went to WhatsApp and he started suggesting that they go on a date. So the, the point is WhatsApp is where things happen that people want to conceal. So it can be good for you. If you want to talk to your son and have him send you his checking account number in a, in a concealed way, it can be not good for you when you are getting lured into a fictitious relationship over a four month period.

[00:10:48] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So pick up again from the encrypted.

[00:10:54] Erin West: So then, uh, these texts come in and these texts are, always good morning. How are you? Good. Uh, have a good night. Sleep well, always, and just absolutely checking in on every aspect of your day with a genuine interest. I spoke with a victim last week who said, you know, I, lost $75,000, but I, would almost pay that for the relationship that I had.

[00:11:19] We are, yeah, I see you reacting to that because it’s, it’s a lot right.

[00:11:23] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:25] Erin West: We are living in a society where people are so desperate for a human connection, that they’re, they’re willing to trade quite a bit for that human connection. What I’ve heard other victims say is, I never felt so heard, understood, listened to.

[00:11:41] The enemy is masterful in creating a very human connection that feels very, very real.

[00:11:50] Sandie Morgan: So, one of the things that, in my conversation with Debbie Deem and with others is the link to human trafficking is really nebulous sometimes with this, because we’re, we’re talking about some of the same fraud techniques, but then they’re not selling the person, they’re scamming the person or fraud. Ah, wait a minute, Debbie told me not to use the word scam because it’s shame-based. Yeah, right. So I’m still

[00:12:24] Erin West: We’re we’re learning

[00:12:25] We’re all learning,

[00:12:26] Sandie Morgan: but the idea of those casinos that were built also created a venue where forced criminality became an issue, and what I understand is luring. So it’s like this is a multi-level crime where they’re luring workers to come to a job where then it isn’t what they thought it would be, which is very typical in trafficking, and now they are forced to do the scams. And what does that forced criminality look like?

[00:13:10] Erin West: It is horrifying and the worst part of this entire business in that if I take you back to Chinese organized crime building, these casino towers in Cambodia COVID hits, people aren’t moving. They decide to go to pig butchering. Well, that requires a lot of human workers. And so to do that, they started flooding Meta, with advertisements for, for jobs.

[00:13:39] And at that period of time, and still today, there’s a large unemployment rate in Southeast Asia. Particularly in Africa, and we’ll get to that in a minute. But what’s happening is, they are luring people with the idea of getting a real job. And so the advertisements are very official looking.

[00:14:00] They are interviewing people, they’re making them take a typing test. They have every reason to believe that they are coming to Bangkok to have a legitimate job in a live work environment where they will be able to send money home, and the level of deception is outrageous. When you think of luring a human being to leave their home and come to

[00:14:24] a country that is foreign to them. When they arrive at the airport, they’re met, their passports are taken, their phones are taken, and they are driven hours on end. Some are put in boats and moved across rivers. They’re, they’re moved against their will and then they are put into a facility where they go through a guard gate with guards with AK 40 sevens, and now they’re told, no, you’re not here to do data entry

[00:14:49] You are here to scam your fellow humans. You are here to make people fall in love with you and then steal all of their money and you’ll be doing this 16 hours a day and if you don’t do it, we’ll beat you and we’ll make you beat your peers and we will. I mean, the level of the level of criminality involved in making people do such a horrific task is war crimes level.

[00:15:15] It’s, it’s beyond. It’s hard to stomach what I’ve heard about how they motivate people to do this to their fellow humans. It’s horrific, and the scale of it is. Unbelievable. We have never seen this level of forced criminality. And if I could go to Africa for a second, that’s where they’re really recruiting hard right now because Africans speak English.

[00:15:42] They’re recruiting hard in Kenya, in Uganda, and they, and now we’ve got a whole sociological issue when you traffic hundreds of thousands of people to a different area of the globe and, and keep them in custody and make them do this work.

[00:15:58] Sandie Morgan: So are they moving them from Africa to like Cambodia?

[00:16:02] Erin West: That’s exactly what’s happening. And so what we know is I’m in contact with a Ugandan who’s inside a, uh, in Cambodia, and he tells me the nationalities of the people around him and their Kenyans, Ugandans, their Bangladeshi, they’re Pakistanis, they’re coming from, from countries where that country is not going to stand up and fight for them.

[00:16:24] Those countries have enough on their plate without fighting to get to repatriate, people that have been stolen from them. And so it’s very intentional. It’s very, it’s very well thought out. It’s sophisticated and it’s, and most importantly it’s working and it’s working at a scale that we could not even contemplate.

[00:16:44] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Wow. Okay. So the forced criminality part, when we’re talking about human trafficking, we’ve covered that in this podcast when, particularly juveniles have been engaged in delivering drugs or recruiting for the gang that’s controlling them. And now when someone is found in a facility that is doing the the scamming.

[00:17:24] And creating this pig butchering scenario, instead of being rescued, they have been reportedly arrested. Talk about that.

[00:17:37] Erin West: So what happens is, is these victims are lured recruited into doing this dirty business. They don’t know this. They, my Ugandan colleague said that he was working for a hundred dollars a month in an internet cafe in Uganda.

[00:17:54] A fellow Ugandan came in and said, would you like to make $1,000 a month? And he his 23 years old and he thought, yeah, I think I could go abroad for six months and make more money than I’ve ever thought about. Yes, I think I would like to do that. And now he is in a compound in Cambodia, unable to get out.

[00:18:13] There’s, I’ve been trying for six weeks to figure out a way to get him out of there, and I’ve, I’ve pulled every thread I can think of, and I do not have a way to get him out of there. But when we think about what happens to them in the rare occasions that they do get released. They are treated as criminals in that country because you don’t have a visa to be in this country.

[00:18:39] You came in here illegally and through no fault of their own, right. So, so they came to, they came to Thailand legally because they thought they were getting a job. They get moved to other countries. the best example of this is, is the Philippines. So the Philippines is one of the few countries to actually disrupt some of these scam compounds.

[00:19:03] And when they do that, now they’re left with, okay, we’ve disrupted this compound. We have 650 people. That, when you think of, when you think of like, technically about how this is gonna work, okay, so now we’ve, we’ve got 650 people, where are we gonna put them? What are we going to feed them? How are we gonna make sure they have medicine and whatever they need?

[00:19:24] And then how are we gonna, how are we gonna sort out who’s a bad guy and who is a human trafficked victim? And then how are we gonna repatriate them? And it’s a massive, massive problem. And so what happens is everyone gets held as though they are a criminal until we, until they can sort stuff out. So another example is in Thailand where there was a crackdown in February of 2025 where, 5,000 people were released from Myanmar compounds.

[00:19:55] I think it was 7,000. And immediately China came and got their 5,000 people. They ran seven 30 sevens down to China and down from China into Thailand and picked up their people. Brazil came and got their people other countries came and got their people and they were left with 137 Ethiopians and Ethiopia said, we are not coming to get these people.

[00:20:20] We don’t have the money and we’re not doing it. So then you have 137 people who are being held. They, they, they can’t, they’re not legally allowed anywhere right now. Thailand doesn’t want them in their country. Ethiopia won’t come get them. And so what do we do? No matter how we look at this, no matter what happens in the next five years, we’re going to have a huge repatriation problem, and we are going to really see the effects of what happens when you move hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world into Southeast Asia and abuse them for five years or six years or seven.

[00:20:55] Like, we don’t know how this ends. We are in the middle of it, but it, it’s not going to be good.

[00:21:00] Sandie Morgan: So what is it going to take, and I know you are like, I am a huge proponent of collaboration, but what kind of cross-sector collaboration will it take to address this?

[00:21:18] Erin West: Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about this and I, I know that this doesn’t end until the world stands up against this, and this doesn’t end until we bring together banking, law enforcement, crypto diplomacy, victim assistance, and NGOs. And I think what we keep seeing is different parts of those connecting and siloing the information.

[00:21:44] This is not a who done it. We know who’s responsible. We know who’s behind all these, and we know that they are for the most part named, named Chinese organized criminals that we’re already familiar with. So in order to do something about that, we need to work together using every tool in our arsenal. So we need American law enforcement to indict these people and work with Interpol to get them extradited into the United States.

[00:22:14] We need diplomacy, we need American diplomats on the ground in Southeast Asia really forcing their hand and limiting access to American funds — Cambodia if you continue to allow this dirty business, if you continue to allow your country to be the scam economy that is stealing a generation’s worth of wealth from the United States, we are going to make your life very difficult.

[00:22:40] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so, you also mentioned banks and crypto.

[00:22:45] And these are not cross sector collaborators that I’ve worked with. Uh, law enforcement, victim services, State Department, all of that. This is the bread and butter of collaboration and anti-trafficking. How do we engage with banks? And I don’t even know where to begin with crypto.

[00:23:09] Erin West: So what I will say is that, banks have been coming to the table with regard to this because banks are the ones who are regulated of this whole industry. And so when I think of where the, where the issues are coming from, to me they are, are social media is, is enabling this.

[00:23:30] Our banks need education to help them stop the movement of money and crypto. I think, I think crypto has visibility into where this money is going. Everybody has a piece of this. So with banks, I think it’s super important and I’ve been working to educate credit unions, banking about the gravity of the problem.

[00:23:53] I think in a, in banking, everyone from, the person emptying the trash at night to the person in, in the CEO’s office needs to understand the gravity of how big this problem is. And so, it’s important to help educate them because what’s happening with banks and why banks are relevant is that our victims have to, they have to move the money and to move the money.

[00:24:17] It’s been the bank’s interest generally in helping you move your money as smoothly and as quickly as you’d like it to be. And we need to help them understand that adding friction to that makes sense and that adding friction to that when we are in a scamdemic makes sense. And so that’s, that’s how our banking fits in.

[00:24:40] Sandie Morgan: Okay. And we did a couple of podcasts and, listeners, I’ll find those links and put them in the show notes.

[00:24:49] And we interviewed folks from Validate where they do that kind of forensic accounting to find the bad actors when we hosted a round table on the financial implications of human trafficking. Erin, this has been such a challenging conversation. There is so much more we need to learn. How do we follow you?

[00:25:16] Erin West: Thank you for asking. So I, I have a website. It’s operationshamrock.org. And because it is such a challenging thing to learn, I started my own podcast and my podcast is called Stolen. It’s on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. Anywhere you get your podcasts go to Stolen with Erin West. And what it does is it breaks this down in a way that

[00:25:40] it is understandable to my Aunt Terry. Everybody needs to understand what is happening out there. And so I talk to survivors of this. I talk to, police officers who engage in, in trying to fix it, and I talk to banking, so it’s a great way to stay up to date with what is happening out there.

[00:25:58] Sandie Morgan: All right. What a delight to meet you now I understand Debbie Deem’s fascination with what you’re doing and commitment to partner.

[00:26:10] And we will too. Thank you so much for coming today.

[00:26:13] Erin West: Thank you for having me.

[00:26:15] Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Erin. You opened our eyes to pig butchering scams. You made us aware that end-to-end encryption can be weaponized by criminals, not just protective for users. That changes how we think about digital safety completely. Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our [email protected] for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

[00:27:02] And as always, thanks for listening.

Dr. Beth Lorance joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they discover how a high school coach gave one of his players expensive gifts, things her mother had refused to buy, with the mom posting online asking what to do, not realizing she was witnessing grooming behavior that creates the same vulnerabilities traffickers exploit in trusted spaces throughout our communities.

Dr. Beth Lorance is an adjunct professor at Vanguard University, where she teaches Family Violence and has also taught Introduction to Psychology and Psychology of the Family. She earned her PsyD in Clinical Psychology and previously served as the director of Vanguard’s counseling center. In addition to her academic background, Beth is a licensed minister with the Assemblies of God, which allows her to bring both psychological expertise and theological insight into conversations about abuse, trauma, and healing. Her passion is deeply personal, rooted in her own family history of child sexual abuse, and she is committed to equipping others to use their voices to prevent abuse, protect the vulnerable, and walk alongside survivors. Beth also works to bring awareness into the church, encouraging faith communities to reflect Jesus’ response to victims and to take seriously the call to protect those who are most vulnerable.

[00:00:00] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today I’m joined by Dr.

[00:00:22] Beth Lorance. She’s an adjunct professor at Vanguard and former director of Vanguard’s Counseling Center. Beth earned her PsyD in clinical psychology and is also a licensed minister. Today we’ll discover how a high school coach gave one of his players expensive gifts, things her mother had refused to buy.

[00:00:49] The mom posted online asking what to do, not realizing she was witnessing grooming behavior. This same pattern creates vulnerabilities that traffickers exploit, and it’s happening in trusted spaces throughout your community. Now here’s our interview.

[00:01:11] Well, Dr. Beth Lorance, I am so excited to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking podcast today.

[00:01:20] Beth Lorance: I am excited to be here.

[00:01:21] Sandie Morgan: We were just chatting before I hit the record button, and we have known each other for two decades.

[00:01:28] Beth Lorance: It’s been a long time.

[00:01:30] Sandie Morgan: and what a deep friendship and collegiality, as I was pursuing my PhD and you were pursuing your PsyD and clinical psychology

[00:01:44] and, changing off, I taught family violence. Now you teach family violence and I’m a guest in your class, and

[00:01:54] Beth Lorance: I know. It’s wonderful.

[00:01:56] Sandie Morgan: love it, the collegiality and just tossing things back and forth as we work together to make things better for our kids.

[00:02:07] So we’re gonna talk today about the link between family violence and human trafficking.

[00:02:14] And I know in my world that many of the victims of human trafficking that we’ve served right here in Orange County, California started with some kind of childhood trauma,

[00:02:31] and that often happened in a family context,

[00:02:35] so I would like to start with talking about how you help your students unpack the complex dynamics of abuse and how that might contribute to fostering vulnerabilities that then traffickers exploit.

[00:02:59] Beth Lorance: Yeah. really when we look at family violence, what we see is that it creates all of these vulnerabilities in a person’s life. And if they don’t find healing from those vulnerabilities, if they don’t come to recognize them, if they don’t come to get over them, get over is not the right terminology, but to, um, move beyond them,

[00:03:21] then they can be exploited later on in life. And we do that in my class as we talk about what family violence does for an individual. And we look at things like, the lessons that abuse teaches a person. And when a person faces trauma or abuse at a young age, they learn these lessons that they’re not enough,

[00:03:42] that love is transactional, that there’s something wrong with them that they can’t overcome. And, no matter what the type of abuse is, if it’s sexual abuse or emotional abuse, neglect or physical abuse, they begin to learn these lessons. And it’s more than just a, like a lesson you would learn in school.

[00:04:03] If the trauma happens at a young age, it begins to rewire your brain chemistry and it really becomes embedded in how you see the world and how you, interact with people around you. How you experience, love. You begin to confuse danger with love or attention. it will impair a person’s decision making.

[00:04:25] It will increase their fear response. And all of that is because of this trauma that they experienced in their family at a young age or even at a middle age, like a adolescent, that kind of thing. And so that’s what we do in my classes. We unpack that and we look at how, that impacts a person and how we can prevent and intervene and bring healing to people that have experienced that in their lives.

[00:04:52] Sandie Morgan: So let’s go and look at this from the perspective of a victim of human trafficking.

[00:05:00] We often credit the traffickers at being master manipulators. They start grooming someone and three weeks later they are turning them out in a prostituted situation,

[00:05:14] but that grooming seems to have started at a much younger age. Can you connect the dots for me?

[00:05:24] Beth Lorance: Yeah. So there’s a couple of ways to look at that. The first is, if we look at example of a person that maybe was neglected at a young age, and so they have, they weren’t given their basic needs of life. And so they, come to see themselves as an invisible and unwanted, they don’t have their, any affection that they, needs being met.

[00:05:48] those kinds of things. And they begin, they, that they begin to believe that they are not, they do not deserve to be cared for at all. and that leaves them vulnerable. So a trafficker can step right into that vulnerability and say, I can provide these unmet needs for you, but this is just what you need to do for me so that I can provide those unmet needs for you.

[00:06:13] Or somebody that has experienced sexual abuse, they are taught and they learn lessons about and lies really about intimacy and relationships, and they come to believe that love is tied to exploitation. They, learn that their value is only what they can give someone else.

[00:06:32] And these are wounds that are deep that a trafficker can just step right into and exploit for their own purposes. And so, when we talk about grooming, we’re not talking about a trafficker coming in and grooming somebody that comes from a family where they’ve learned they have value or they learned that they can be,

[00:06:54] stand up for themselves, or they’ve learned that they have a voice. They already have these deep wounds and these lessons that they’ve learned that allow the trafficker to exploit those things.

[00:07:06] Sandie Morgan: So when I am looking at this grooming process. That starts from a base of lessons learned and. Honestly, when you first started talking about lessons learned, I’m an educator and I love learning, and so hearing lessons learned in a negative context is like fingernails on a chalkboard

[00:07:34] for me. Why? Our students, why are my kiddos learning lessons that are wrong? And those lessons are then deeply ingrained from the time they’re a child.

[00:07:48] Whether it’s the, the violence is the first response, whether it’s the neglect. And one thing I used to teach the family violence class. I wanted to see my students’ faces when they began to understand that neglect is often the number one

[00:08:12] prevalent form of abuse.

[00:08:15] There are no marks. It’s all internal, but it creates a very fertile field for the kind of manipulation and coercion that traffickers use. So.

[00:08:30] Thinking about, how they introduce coercion into that grooming process. What does that look like?

[00:08:41] Beth Lorance: So, when we talk about grooming, we have to really, for some people, we have to define what do we mean by grooming? And it’s this idea that, um, it’s a really a process of control and manipulation that. Begins to build trust in a person. it chips away their boundaries.

[00:09:00] It creates dependency so that when the line is crossed to inappropriate behavior or wanting the person to do something that’s, that’s inappropriate to trafficking somebody, They are already well willing to do that because they trust this person, they love this person, this person is meeting their needs. And they, it may confuse them, like, why is this person that loves me or that I trust wants me to do these things? But they’ve been normalized into how this person behaves. So I think of a person who, a, a groomer who is very charismatic, very gregarious, very friendly, very loving, and starts to show affection to somebody, puts their arm around them, gives them a hug, and wears down this idea that physical touch is inappropriate with a, with somebody of this age, and when they then cross the line into something.

[00:09:58] inappropriate, the victim is like, oh, this is normal. This person loves me. This person is just this way with me. And because of that, they’re able to, they’re able to do what they need, what they want to do with the, with the victim.

[00:10:14] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So what you’re describing feels natural

[00:10:20] for, for this child or this, young person and just in the last week, we both live here in Orange County, a high school coach and a church staff member were arrested for child abuse.

[00:10:36] They were entrusted communities where giving a kiddo a hug or something is, it feels okay. Right?

[00:10:46] So talk to me about our fixation on Stranger Danger and not understanding how we protect our kids in, in our trusted communities.

[00:11:01] And I’m using air quotes.

[00:11:03] Beth Lorance: Yeah. Well, Perpetrators of abuse can be anywhere. they, they can be coaches, like you mentioned. They can be teachers, they can be, people in your church, your pastors, your lay leaders. They can be a close family friend. Really what we’re finding now, statistics show the CDC has come out with statistics that

[00:11:23] say the 90% of abusers are known to their victims, and only 10% are actually strangers. and then when we look at trafficking specifically, the US State Department came out with a statistic that said 31% of tracker traffickers are actually family members of the victim. And when we, when we look at that, we’re looking at people that you are in your everyday life, that know your family, that know your parents, and we’re not warning our children how, or teaching our children how to stay safe from them.

[00:12:00] And we’re not. being vigilant when we look at interactions between these quote unquote trusted individuals versus strangers out there, and I like to say, you know, when I was a kid, we were taught stranger danger in school, you see a stranger and you run away, you yell, you do all these things. What I teach my kids is we need to be worried about tricky people.

[00:12:26] And tricky people are people that try to trick you into doing something that is wrong or that you don’t wanna do. And, it can look like a variety of things. It can look like saying, let’s keep this a secret from your mom. You know, we’re gonna have this special moment that we keep a secret from her.

[00:12:45] Here’s, here’s a lot of gifts, giving gifts to the child or the young adult and saying, oh, but don’t tell anybody about that I’m giving you this gift. They won’t understand or saying to a child, your, or a teenager, your mom doesn’t understand you, your dad doesn’t understand you, but I understand you. So you can tell me your secrets and I will understand what you’re going through and be here for you. And when we’re more vigilant about adults in our children’s lives that are doing those kinds of things, we can begin to protect them from groomers and things like this.

[00:13:20] Sandie Morgan: So when I was teaching that class, you were my guest

[00:13:26] and, I remember talking to you about one of my students who wasn’t able to rejoin her family for Christmas because her abuser was a relative who would be at the holiday table. Talk about what happens when this strikes a family unit.

[00:13:53] Beth Lorance: Well, this really,

[00:13:54] Hits into my personal story and I come from a family that has a history of family violence. This is why I am passionate about this topic and I so enjoy teaching the class family violence that I teach. And I came from a family that, from the outside it looked very perfect.

[00:14:15] It looked like, you know, it’s the kind of family you wanna be a part of. We were large. We got along well from the outside. We were very close. We spent a lot of time together. I was raised in the church. My parents were missionaries. So my dad was a minister. All of my growing up years. My grandparents were very faithful church attenders.

[00:14:37] They were, they taught Sunday school, they were on the board. They did everything you can to volunteer at a church. But what nobody knew was that my family had a very dark secret, and that was that my grandfather was a child molester.

[00:14:55] And he, had been molesting children in our family, children outside of our family, people that saw him as a trusted adult, people that saw him as their church leader, as their educator.

[00:15:10] and, for many years, and this did not come out until I was an adult, until I was in college. And while I was never a direct victim of my. Grandfather. Many of the people in my family, many of my siblings and my cousins, and my aunts and uncles were victims of my grandfather. And so when we talk about how do you then live with an abuser, it becomes very difficult because especially when you’re disclosing for the first time and you’re having to work through all of your feelings about that.

[00:15:48] And when that. That abuser is protected by other family members and you’re not allowed to talk about it or you’re not believed, that this could be happening. And I was very lucky in my family. We were very lucky that the victims were believed from the beginning, and that when my grandfather was finally confronted, he confessed and he ended up going to prison.

[00:16:12] where he has since passed away in prison and that was, he passed away about 15 years ago. but my story is unusual in that most victims are not believed by their families. And so then to go and be a part of that family unit is a very difficult thing and it takes a lot of, um, strength of mind and of.

[00:16:32] Of will to say this isn’t right and I’m gonna stand up against what happened to me. And so there’s really no good answer except for having somebody that can walk alongside the victim and say, until you have the strength to stand up for yourself, I will stand up for you. And I will be your voice and I will listen to the ways in which your family hurt you.

[00:16:56] And I believe you. And if you need a new family, we will, we will be family so that you don’t have to subject yourself to that. And, it’s a long process to get to a point where, they feel that they can stand up for themselves, then

[00:17:14] Sandie Morgan: So breaking that silence

[00:17:17] and then being believed, and particularly thinking through how a community can be more trauma informed,

[00:17:27] that’s going to support the, the healing process.

[00:17:31] So.

[00:17:32] Beth Lorance: Yes.

[00:17:33] Sandie Morgan: What does trauma informed look like? Okay, so your family situation

[00:17:38] was in the church and Oh my gosh. In the church there is so much shame.

[00:17:43] some families just quit going to church. What do you say to church leaders to make sure their team is trauma informed?

[00:17:57] Beth Lorance: We need to stop asking the question, What’s wrong with you? You know, I think that’s so much what people do is they’re saying, what’s, what’s wrong? why are you acting this way? Why are you, why is that happening to you? And just listening and listening and being supportive and being nonjudgmental.

[00:18:19] And so for me, it’s, when I talk, speak to church leaders, I talk about how, Jesus calls us to get down in the broken places with broken people and listen to them. and not to try to change them, not to be judgmental, not to try to tell them how they’re supposed to be responding, but to just be with them.

[00:18:43] and that’s, that’s really what I encourage is in part of being trauma informed, is just listening and, sitting with people. And not judging them for their, for what they do and what they say.

[00:18:57] Sandie Morgan: And. For me personally, in my experience, that not judging piece is the hardest thing for those who want to come alongside. They want to see progress and they might say things like, well, I’ve been praying for you, so you should

[00:19:16] feel better. You should be coming to, this extra opportunity for a Bible study or a women’s group, or a youth group. How do we in a trauma informed perspective, adjust people’s expectations of the healing process?

[00:19:37] Beth Lorance: Yeah. Part of it is realizing that sometimes it’s really hard to share your story, and it’s really hard to be seen by people ,to truly be seen. And if we require a person to, if we require an understanding of somebody’s story to be able to love them, then we’re not really loving them. We’re doing exactly what the people that abuse them to do.

[00:20:03] We say our love is transactional. You have to tell me your story. You have to behave the way that I behave, that I want you to behave in order to receive the care and the love that, I wanna, I wanna give you. And, if people begin to realize that their actions are not that much different than that of the abuser, if we make.

[00:20:27] If we prescribe to a victim how they should act, then maybe they, we would start to see a change and maybe we would start to see people be less judgmental. But just to reframe, when I say to somebody, I’m praying for you, why aren’t you getting better? Or, why aren’t you coming to church? Or, why don’t I see you at Bible study?

[00:20:48] What I’m saying is, I’m only praying for you so that I’ll see a change in your life. And if I don’t see what I deem quote unquote as change, then maybe I’m not gonna pray for you anymore, or maybe I’m not gonna support you anymore, or maybe I’m not gonna listen. And that does a disservice.

[00:21:06] And that’s not what we’re called to do. We’re called to listen to people and sit with people in, in spite of how they act, even because of how they act. And maybe the fact that they can’t come to the Bible study or they can’t come to the prayer meeting, that’s really a sign of them saying, this is where I’m hurting.

[00:21:25] That’s a symptom of their healing process and we need to respect that.

[00:21:32] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:21:32] Beth Lorance: it is hard. It’s hard to be non-judgmental. I have to say to myself all the time, we listen and we don’t judge, and I mean it’s hard, but that’s what, that’s what we’re called to do.

[00:21:44] Sandie Morgan: wow. I’m gonna write that one down because Yeah, that’s good. Okay, so we understand. The process for trauma informed and we’ll put links to some previous episodes where we’ve spent some time drilling down on trauma informed. But I wanna go

[00:22:03] back to grooming because I’d like to make sure that those of us who are in communities where. It’s a community of trust, a school, a faith organization. How can we protect and recognize grooming behaviors early before they can be, weaponized?

[00:22:28] Beth Lorance: This is really important and really, it’s about training leaders, staff members, pastors, volunteers, teachers, what the signs of grooming are, And so that they know when they see it, they can recognize it and they can respond to it. I was watching a video just this week of a woman telling a story about how her daughter came home with a really expensive gift from her coach, and the woman was like, I don’t know what to do about this.

[00:23:01] I it was a really expensive gift. I don’t think my daughter should accept it, but what should I do? And then the next day she had posted another video saying My daughter came home with another really expensive gift. And this gift I had actually told my daughter I wasn’t going to buy for her. And the woman was like, I don’t know what’s going on.

[00:23:23] And that is a basic sign of grooming. The fact that this coach is giving expensive gifts to one girl on the team and their, their gifts that the mother would not buy for the girl on her own. And if people don’t realize that, that’s a sign of grooming, they don’t know what’s going on and they. They think it’s innocent.

[00:23:45] They think it’s no big deal, and they just allow it to happen. So we need to train clearly our, and equip our educators, our pastors, our volunteers, parents with what it looks like, what grooming looks like, and then once they see grooming and do they respond to it? What do they do? I think the second thing we need is clear boundaries.

[00:24:08] We need to create policies that limit the ability for an adult to groom a child. So this might mean that there’s no, your policy says there’s no one-on-one supervision between adults and children. And, youth pastors always get upset about that ’cause they’re, they say things like, well, how can I mentor, this youth member, how can I help them know they’re cared about?

[00:24:36] And I always say, well do it with two. You know, like it, the more the merrier. You don’t need to individually mentor somebody for them to be changed by a relationship with you. You can do that in a way that keeps the child safe and keeps you safe. And so you have to have clear boundaries, very specific boundaries, and people that, respond and follow policy correctly.

[00:25:07] And that when policy isn’t followed, that those people receive the consequence of that very swiftly. You have to be very clear on those things. And then the other thing I think is so important in preventing grooming is we have to empower our kids. We have to teach our kids about tricky people. We have to explain to them what unsafe behavior it looks like, and we have to give them the ability to say no even to trusted adults.

[00:25:39] You know, I, it’s so often you go and somebody wants to hug my daughter. I have a, a very cute daughter. She’s very lovable and people want to hug her all the time. And sometimes she doesn’t want to hug them, and I have to give her the right to say no to that. And that when the adult insists on the hug, I have to stand up for her and say, she said no, so you don’t need to hug her.

[00:26:08] and that’s something that’s important that we empower our kids to say no, and we respect it when they say no. So that they learn that their, that their boundaries matter and their words matter.

[00:26:21] Sandie Morgan: So if a child comes from a situation where there is family violence, so we know there’re going to be more vulnerable to grooming and

[00:26:32] to just plain inappropriate adult, uh, tension. how do we teach that child about tricky people? because in many situations we have as leaders deferred to, oh, it’s a parental supervision issue, I’ll tell the parents. But, if the parents aren’t listening, if the parents have not been involved in this particular aspect, how does like a youth leader or a coach begin to integrate that kind of resilience in their. Their leadership with kids so that those kids know they can say no.

[00:27:23] Beth Lorance: I think it’s respecting the words a kid says. So when a kid speaks, it’s really listening to them and believing them and encouraging them to talk about how they feel about things. So I think that’s something a leader could do, a teacher could do. Also I think it’s important to remember that grooming happens to, to the victims but

[00:27:46] often parents are groomed also and somebody that wants to, hurt a child, victimize a child. They will often also groom the parents and they will ingratiate themselves with the parents and, Make it so that the parents have no qualms when the child wants to go off with that adult, have no concerns when the child is spending a lot of time with that adult.

[00:28:13] And so for me, I like to tell parents that you need to know what your child is doing with a

[00:28:21] adult, even if it’s an adult you trust, as much as possible. So I want parents to just be aware of the adults in their kids’ lives and know them, but know them, know what the interactions with that, that adult and their child are like also.

[00:28:40] And so that when their kid comes and says things about that adult, you understand what is going on in that relationship. I’m very careful that, in my own family life that I watch, the inner action that my child has with these adults so that my child doesn’t spend time alone with any adults that I haven’t watched how they interact with each other.

[00:29:02] for a significant amount of time with that adult until, so I can see how that adult responds to my children. And if I don’t like how they respond to my children, I don’t allow my child to be alone with that adult. And it might not just be a fear of them being groomed or sexually abused, but maybe I fear of them not being treated nicely or being talked down to because.

[00:29:23] or being made jokes about that kind of thing. I also am really big on if my, if a, if an adult wants to be friends with one of my child, they need to be friends with me first. And, don’t come into a space where I’m with one of my children and talk only to my children without talking to me. Oftentimes, especially, with younger children, you’ll have other adults that wanted to interact with them. And I’m like, that’s fine. As long as I know you and you’re friends with me, then you can talk with my child. But otherwise. You know, greet me first. Talk to me first. This is the relationship you should be worried about.

[00:30:05] Not a relationship with my five-year-old. So that’s another thing. I think we need to teach leaders that, they can help impact families. ’cause they can pass that information onto to parents as the, and they can pass that information on to kids and so that would be something else that I think would be important.

[00:30:23] Sandie Morgan: Wow. This gives us some deeper concerns about understanding grooming, and I encourage listeners to go back and review some of our past episodes as well. So, Dr. Beth Lorenz, what gives you hope for the next generation of leaders and advocates to prevent family violence and possible grooming for human trafficking?

[00:30:57] Beth Lorance: Really, there’s two things that give me hope, and one of them is my students. And when I, we just started this semester and I’ve taught one class, and, I am so excited about the students that are in my class this semester. They’re engaged with the topic. They wanna learn, they wanna understand. They wanna say, you know, violence is not, should not be in our homes, violence should not be in our churches.

[00:31:23] It should not be in our schools. And they’re excited about learning to use their voice to stand up for those that don’t have a voice. And that’s often what violence does. Abuse does. Trauma does, is it steals a person’s voice. And, um, so that, that gives me hope that there’s young people that care about this, that wanna use their voice, that wanna learn how they can impact

[00:31:52] the vulnerable, how they can sit with a broken, and that’s always exciting for me. I also get excited when churches, I work a lot with churches and training pastors and I get really excited when churches get it. They begin to understand what Jesus’ view on victimhood is. And they understand what they need to do to help a person find healing.

[00:32:19] And it’s always exciting to me when I talk to a church leader and they’re able to. Express something to me that I’ve always known, you know, or that’s part of what I teach, and they’re able to, and they agree, they agree with what the current research is saying, or they agree with how we need to be responding to victims, or they agree with, um,

[00:32:43] what it looks like to walk with a person that’s a victim.

[00:32:48] They agree with this idea that it’s our job to protect the vulnerable, and that always makes me excited and gives me hope for the future.

[00:32:58] Sandie Morgan: I love it. I love it. And what a great opportunity to take this podcast back to your community and find out if they agree and you can be a voice and make a difference in reducing vulnerability for kids that may be more

[00:33:21] susceptible to grooming. Thank you for listening.

[00:33:25] Thank you Dr. Beth for being with us today. It’s been great.

[00:33:30] Beth Lorance: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[00:33:33] Thank you, Dr. Beth Lorance for sharing your expertise and personal story with us today. Your insight about teaching children to watch for tricky people rather than just strangers, completely reframes how we protect kids in trusted environments.

[00:33:52] Sandie Morgan: Listeners, if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our [email protected] for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:34:05] If you’d love to help us grow the podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And as always, thanks for listening.

Patrick McDonough joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss his groundbreaking $40 million jury verdict against a hotel for enabling child sex trafficking and how this landmark case is changing accountability standards across the hospitality industry.

Patrick J. McDonough is a nationally recognized attorney and advocate who leads the Sex Trafficking Division at Andersen, Tate & Carr. With a legal career marked by justice-driven leadership and deep community engagement, Pat has dedicated his life to representing survivors of sex trafficking and fighting systemic injustice. Before joining Andersen, Tate & Carr, Pat made history as the youngest District Attorney in the state of Georgia, where he pioneered the development of child advocacy centers, providing trauma-informed care and legal support to child victims of sexual abuse. In his legal practice, Pat has built a comprehensive, survivor-centered approach to litigation, assembling a national network of professionals to support clients from first contact through final judgment. His efforts have earned widespread recognition, being featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Outside the courtroom, Pat has raised over $1 million to support unhoused individuals and founded HomeFirst Gwinnett and the Gwinnett Reentry Intervention Program (GRIP).

[00:00:00] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today I’m joined by attorney Patrick McDonough, partner at Anderson, Tate and Carr, and he leads their sex trafficking division.

[00:00:35] Pat just won a $40 million jury verdict that sending shockwaves through the hotel industry. His 16-year-old client had been trafficked over 200 times in just 40 days while staff sold her condoms and ignored obvious signs. This case changes the rules for every hotel in America and reveals red flags that could be happening in your own community. And now here’s our interview.

[00:01:13] Sandie Morgan: Patrick McDonough, I am thrilled to have you on the ending Human Trafficking Podcast. Welcome.

[00:01:20] Patrick McDonough: Thank you so much. I’m, I’m thrilled to be here.

[00:01:23] Sandie Morgan: I was so excited when I saw the headline that there was a $40 million judgment in a trafficking case. Tell me how you ended up in the courtroom where you were able to achieve that kind of result for a victim of human trafficking.

[00:01:50] Patrick McDonough: Well, I met our survivor, probably five years ago, so it’s been a long journey, on a road to getting into trial, and I’ve probably settled a little north of 80 cases, and typically when you get really close to trial, that’s when they finally decide that they’re going to provide some type of compensation and you often are able to, to resolve the case.

[00:02:13] But for whatever reason, this, hotel and kind of insurance company decided that they wanted to take us to task and, and, and really never offered anything that we would’ve even considered. So it gave us a great opportunity. There wasn’t a hard decision to make, like, you know, should we take the money or should we go to trial?

[00:02:30] So we were able to just really go forward and try the case. And really, the most profound thing for me, I’ve been doing these cases now for six years, is, you know, we believe how to prove these cases and we believe our survivors and, and we believe we know how to prove the case. And, and obviously we’ve convinced a number of people to settle, but it, it’s really meaningful when we were able to talk to the jurors after the case, and like all the things that we had kind of believed over these years, they, they validated, and in fact, the defense attorneys would ask questions and things I think that they might’ve even believed.

[00:03:04] They, you know, they, they did not believe, the jury didn’t believe. So it was very, very validating.

[00:03:09] Sandie Morgan: Give me a couple of examples of, of what the jurors believed.

[00:03:15] Patrick McDonough: So one of the big, kind of themes on the defense approach is they try to make it like a legal class, and they try to argue that one of the elements in this federal lawsuit is what they call participation in a venture. And so they would try to explain that as well to have. The trafficker participate in a venture with the hotel.

[00:03:33] They almost make it sound like it has to be a party to a crime. Like the trafficker walks into the front of the hotel and like says, Hey, I’m gonna be in this back room trafficking somebody. And that’s not really what the law says. The law really says if the hotel knows this is going on or should know this is going on then and they’re taking money on it, they should be held liable or, or responsible.

[00:03:54] But it’s been a constant fight with multiple defense attorneys really throughout the country. And it was just very nice when they, the defense attorney asked the jurors like, you know, what was it that proved participation in a venture? And all the jurors said, you know, it wasn’t one thing, it, it was the whole case.

[00:04:09] It was the three different victims that we put up. It was the two police officers that said they had a bad reputation. It was the expert in how she explained it. So it, it was just one of those things that was very heart heartwarming that the case we put together, you know, the jury really understood it and, and validated it.

[00:04:26] Sandie Morgan: And how many attorneys were on the team with you?

[00:04:31] Patrick McDonough: So three of us tried the case. I had co-counsel, really good co-counsel in this case, uh,David Bouchard and Otto Echo. the three of us tried the case, but there’s other people on my team, John Toge and Rory and, and Jennifer Webster that have, helped throughout different parts of the process. But it was three of us that tried it.

[00:04:52] Sandie Morgan: And in the news article that I read, it talked about one victim who was identified with initials who had been trafficked there at age 16, but you just mentioned three victims that testified.

[00:05:09] Patrick McDonough: That’s right. And so this case was about one victim and she, it was one victim against the hotel. But one of the most powerful things that we have been able to do successfully is we have other victims that maybe they had different cases. So these two other people that tell, well, lemme take that back. One person had a different case ’cause her trafficking was worse at a different hotel.

[00:05:31] But she still was willing to come testify because she had been at this hotel. So even though she didn’t sue it, she’s a witness, she was another victim. There was another victim that you might not consider classically trafficking, and I’m not sure we would’ve been able to get it across the finish line by herself, but she, she was trafficked.

[00:05:49] In fact, had to, had to see, basically a trafficker made her have a date in a car so they would get the room. She didn’t see anybody else after that. But it, it tied into our theme because J.G our victim had to also see multiple or dates in the cars and not just in the rooms, which again, is a bigger indicator that hotels should have known what was going on and it corroborated what they said.

[00:06:11] So having multiple victims testify, even if they’re not plaintiffs, can really support your case. And, and that’s been kind of a, something we’ve done from the beginning. I tried a case last year in federal court for three weeks and we had 11 victims in that case, against Red Roof in it settled the day before it went to the jury, so we didn’t get it all the way to verdict, but it’s a very powerful tool when you’re trying cases.

[00:06:35] Sandie Morgan: So you, won 10 million in damages, compensatory damages, and 30 million in punitive damages. Will you break that down for our listeners to understand why it’s broken up like that?

[00:06:52] Patrick McDonough: Sure. The first part is really the entire case is all about compensating the victim. So what is the value of someone who’s been essentially statutory, raped and sold 200 times at a hotel? Because a hotel is, profiting off that and what, what would make her whole, like what are things that they can do financially to compensate her for all the trauma that she has experienced and will experience for a lifetime?

[00:07:17] And so that was the $10 million verdict, if you get a compensatory verdict at that point, you go to a second phase. And the second phase is a punitive damages phase. And punitive damages are more about punishing the hotel. And one of the things that’s so powerful about punitive damages and really

[00:07:37] kind of means so much to us in the trenches is it’s not just punishing this hotel. It’s not just saying you’re getting punished because of what you did, but it is saying we’re sending a message to the industry. So if you’re in the hospitality industry, be aware that if you turn a blind eye to this type of conduct, you could be punished and that, and it ratchets up the money.

[00:07:58] So it’s a second. It’s a second type of damage.

[00:08:01] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so over 200 times in a 40 day period at the same property. Is that correct?

[00:08:23]Patrick McDonough: That’s right.

[00:08:24] Sandie Morgan: Okay. So you presented testimony that the motel staff ignored clear red flags.

[00:08:25] Patrick McDonough: Well, let, let me answer this in, in two parts because a lot of times people think, oh, I need to take this class in sex trafficking and I need to really understand this to ever be able to spot it. And like the hotels will often say things like, well, I might’ve seen adult prostitution, but you know, I’ve never, I would never put up with or see sex trafficking.

[00:08:43] And so one of the things I tell people, and what we hope people learn or even take through your podcasts and that are trained is. If you’re a business at this, in this case a hotel, but any business and you see what you think might be prostitution, ’cause most people say they can identify that fairly easily.

[00:09:02] High foot traffic man going in and out of a room every 20, 30 minutes, right? Maybe a, a young woman or, or an older woman that is scantily clad. Like those two signs alone is enough. We believe for you to call law enforcement and then let them do the investigation, you don’t have to do anymore. Now in hotels, they have kind of an additional thing when they send cleaning people in and there happens to be 10 to 15 used condoms every day, and there’s a young person staying there with doesn’t appear to be apparent.

[00:09:29] You know, that’s even more corroboration. So there there’s a number of things that can put people onto that sex trafficking could be going on. The other fundamental I think a lot of people don’t understand is if you’re under 18 years old and you’re engaged in commercial sex. The buyer, in fact, is a sex trafficker.

[00:09:47] So you don’t even have to have a pimp or a scary guy around the corner. And so we try to let people know if they’re training hotels or businesses. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to check off 10 different things. If you see something that looks like prostitution, call police and the police, they might set up a sting.

[00:10:04] They might do more surveillance. They might go knock on the door. But that’s ultimately how you slow this down because here’s what traffickers don’t want. They do not want to go to a hotel where they get arrested. Their property, which is the children they’re selling get arrested or their buyers get arrested.

[00:10:19] And if they go to a property where someone’s calling the police every time they suspect, even prostitution, they’re not gonna go there. So, so I would just say in general common sense, if you see something that looks like, you don’t even have to figure out if it’s sex trafficking. She might be 17, she might be 19, might be sex trafficking, might be prostitution.

[00:10:37] Just do the right thing and call law enforcement. so that’s generally what we like to talk about. In this case in particular, I mean, as I said, a hundred of the 200 date, I’m calling them dates, but dates that she had to see, were done in cars, much more visible to, a hotel that had cameras and they allegedly had security that were walking the property.

[00:10:57] I mean, they certainly should have seen that. You know, there’s high foot traffic coming in and out. In this particular case, there was testimony about a night. a night front desk person that actually would call the traffickers and warn them if the police were on the property. So there was a, you know, there was multiple layers of, of what they knew or should have known.

[00:11:15] Sandie Morgan: Well, and in one of the articles that I read about this case, there were condoms sold to the minor and by motel staff. Explain that.

[00:11:28] Patrick McDonough: This is a perfect example of, like they, they should know. So one of the victims that I mentioned, she ended up seeing one date, she didn’t have a case, but she had to see that one date in that car to get the room for everybody else. She testified that her and another girl, and they had a picture of them in the hotel, very scarcely clad.

[00:11:47] Look, I think she was even younger She might’ve been 15. But anyway, young girls walking up to the front desk multiple times and buying condoms, and they’re just selling ’em to these girls, these young children. I mean, that, that should clearly be a red flag, right? That’s not, something that, that should happen without there being some follow up.

[00:12:06] Sandie Morgan: Yeah. I usually just go ask for extra soap or something. Yeah, I didn’t even think about, that kind of availability. So, so the evidence really clearly demonstrated that the staff ignored those red flags. Then how did the defense, respond to that?

[00:12:33] Patrick McDonough: Well, here’s, and I wanna caveat this, there are a ton of wonderful hotel operators that do the right thing. So this is not, you know, a blanket all hotels are terrible. Our economy hotels are terrible. There’s quite a many wonderful people, but here’s the, every case I’ve ever had, they bring the manager in that typically either lives at the hotel or is there full-time.

[00:12:54] They have cameras. There’s kind of no question they know what’s going on, but they just deny it. They just flat out say, never saw it. Dunno what you’re talking about. never seen prostitution, never seen sex trafficking, not on my watch. And so they, again, it just, you know, becomes a a he said, and then it’s not just a, she said, that’s why we build the case.

[00:13:12] Right. What our victim said, what the two other victims said, how our expert testifies what police officers would come in and say that this is a hot spot. but they just deny it. Basically. The two things they do, they start, or three, they start with denying it from the hotel standpoint. Then the lawyers try to

[00:13:30] get the jury to think that the standard is much higher. They try to make it sound like you have to have a criminal conspiracy, which you do not. And, and they just say, sh you know, she might have been sex trafficked and I feel sad for her, but you know, we don’t know about it. How would we know about it?

[00:13:44] It’s not our fault. And then the next thing they do is they try to blame. If you’re gonna blame anybody, just put it all on the trafficker. Or they sometimes, in this case, they weren’t as bad. This defense attorney was actually quite, I thought, good to our victim. But I’ve had other defense attorneys where they just, you know, they just victim blame, you know, it’s your fault.

[00:14:02] You wanted this, why didn’t you leave? you were at other hotels. Why are you picking on us? So it’s just always, it’s like a little kid getting caught this, handing the cookie jars just everybody else’s fault. You know, they’re just making stuff up.

[00:14:13] Sandie Morgan: So you just mentioned the victim and the, we talked about the damages paid. When will that money be available to the victim? I’ve been in this. For a long time, and I think I’ve won. We’ve got restitution ordered and then I find out that the survivor is still waiting. What’s the likelihood of that?

[00:14:42] Patrick McDonough: And so, so that is, so here’s the pros and the cons of, of a trial, right? The, the pros are you have an opportunity to really get what is just. And I think this, this verdict was just, and it’s obviously, sends a message. The downside to a trial is they always appeal it. Right? And so, you know, there’s gonna be an appeal.

[00:15:01] There’s also, in a case like this, there’s insurance involved and insurance is always trying to get out. So there’s separate appeals on the insurance trying to get out of the case. So there’s no guarantee. I mean, it could be they decide that they’re very nervous and they want to try to settle between that number and, and you know, that could happen in a month or this could drag on for years, that’s the one real risk of going to trial.

[00:15:25] And, and just as an example, I had that trial. I’m gonna get my dates wrong, but I wanna say the 21st of July, or maybe it was two weeks, it doesn’t matter. Whatever week we had that trial, it went for an entire week. I had another trial, not that Monday, but the following Monday, and it was separate trial and we felt really good about it.

[00:15:43] As good as this case, if not better, but they settled for $6 million and they said it wasn’t confidential and she’s gonna get her money in 30 days. You know, so it was less than 40 obviously, but it was, she felt like it was enough for her to raise her child. She wants to start a nonprofit. She’s gonna be able to give back in her own community.

[00:16:02] And so that’s kind of always the rub on trying a case, right? Is, is the money they’re offering upfront enough that it’s a burden in the hand? I’m absolutely getting paid. Verse, “Hey, I’m gonna go to trial and you’re gonna hear my story. But there’s a risk, right?” So there’s still risk that we, you don’t see a penny of it, quite frankly.

[00:16:19] I think we will. I think we tried a great case, but there’s always risks.

[00:16:23] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So let’s talk about your personal vision for legal reform and making a difference. I went online, I looked you up. You are very involved in your community. Talk about how that motivation came to be and how it informs how you serve as an attorney.

[00:16:53] Patrick McDonough: I think everybody really wants to give back in their community and I, I think mine started even earlier than the community I’m in now. I mean, I got outta law school and I was an assistant district attorney and then a district attorney, and one of the big things as a district attorney, we did is we created child advocacy centers because abused kids were always getting re-interviewed all these times and they didn’t have a safe place to go.

[00:17:14] This is a long time ago. They have a lot of those now, but it was kind of new back in the day. and so I think there’s just, you know, some pride in being able to work, but also besides work to be able to, to make a difference. when I came up to, you know, I’m in the suburbs of Atlanta and Gwinnett County.

[00:17:31] I was fortunate to join a law firm that really cared about community, and that’s one of the things that we kind of instill in our lawyers. And I was involved in United Way and some of the things that we did in United Way, I think they taught me. A lot about how we can do wraparound services. I got real involved kind of in the homeless population and it was, you know, not enough to just get someone off the street.

[00:17:51] It was like, how do we help make that person a, a productive person? And so that could be mental health, it could be drug treatment, it could be stable housing, you know, a lot of different things, job training. and so I think that kind of led into this practice, is, you know, kind of led me in to be able to do something that I cared about and was also my day job.

[00:18:09] I really feel blessed that I get to do both.

[00:18:11] Sandie Morgan: Oh yeah. I, I have that same feeling. I get to do prevention. My background early is pediatric nursing and being able to work with kids like we do here in Orange County is a big part of my passion, and I think more and more, and we’ve had conversations on this podcast about how people take, what drives them, what motivates them, and brings that to the table.

[00:18:46] In the anti-human trafficking movement, we are a movement that spans globally. And we need, I saw on your case, as I studied it, that you really had a multidisciplinary team, at the table for this case to support this survivor, to support your case, to teach the jury. And I think I want people to walk away from this and, after listening, to see that there is a place for everybody to do something.

[00:19:21] And you brought up United Way here in Orange County. We work a lot with United Way. So all of the nonprofits and the philanthropists, the social workers, the teachers, everybody has an opportunity to be part of this. Another group that has, An opportunity to be part of this are our policy makers and legislators. And I noticed in reading about you and this case that the TVPRA was a big part of the foundation of this. Can you talk about how that legislation contributed to the success of the case?

[00:20:15] Patrick McDonough: Yeah, there’s no question. I mean that this was  a TVPRA case that was passed in 2008 and, and it has a, the beauty behind that statute is it has a 10 year statute of limitations and if you are a child that is trafficked, so anyone under 18, they have 10 years. Until they, after 18, so basically until they’re 28.

[00:20:35] And, from the legal side, what, what we see often is, you know, when someone gets rescued, the, the first thing they’re not thinking of is, oh, I need to call a lawyer. You know, if you’re in a car accident, you might decide, “Hey, I need to have a lawyer, right?” Or if you have a surgery and something goes wrong.

[00:20:51] People think about that, but certainly people that are trafficked don’t think like, Hey, one of my first things in trauma is I should call a lawyer about this hotel is it takes years, right? For them to kind of put their life back together where that would even register. And a lot of laws, the statute of limitations are just gone before they even realize they have a claim.

[00:21:11] I mean, it’s, it’s fairly new what we’re doing. I mean, a lot of lawyers don’t even know this is the case. It’s, it’s, it’s getting a little more attention with this verdict. And last year we had a pretty big case. but you know, we’ve been doing this for years and I meet lawyers all the time that don’t know about it.

[00:21:23] So certainly a lot of the survivors don’t. But anyway, the TVPRA has been the fundamental. Building block of all of our cases. And it has been a tremendous asset for us. It’s been great. It, it’s not perfect and different circuits view it and interpret it differently. Our 11th circuit where we are is a little more conservative than probably where you are at California.

[00:21:44] So it’s not perfect. I think it will end up at the Supreme Court one day and we’ll get more guidance from them. But it certainly allowed us to do things like we did with this, with this verdict. It’s tremendous.

[00:21:54] Sandie Morgan: Okay. That’s really helpful. And you mentioned California where we are and I, I went back and looked at a podcast we did quite a while ago for listeners, it’s number 187.

[00:22:02]  And our city attorney in Los Angeles on and Rena actually, uh.had a civil case where they based, this on California’s nuisance abatement laws. And the, the focus much like yours is very victim centered and how we support restitution.

[00:22:35] And so the, it was, very interesting for me to compare those cases because both approaches, targeted complicity and failure to act. So the hotel involved in the Southern California case, where these kinds of cases were repeat hotspots for trafficking and the city intervened to force changes and to close those circumstances.

[00:23:10] And a nuisance abatement loss seems a little vague and unrelated, but whatever brings attention, because this is what I picked up from listening to you just now, hotel staff and the community need to understand the red flags and it may show up. As a red flag that, wow, look at all the cars in and outta here.

[00:23:39] This little hotel is right by my neighborhood, and that kind of traffic is, something I’m not happy with. I’m calling the police about it, so how do we educate our community Pat to understand when they see the red flags and how to call and report that if the hotel staff isn’t going to do that.

[00:24:04] Patrick McDonough: I mean, again, I sometimes it’s one of those cliches. But I say kind of it takes a village, right? Like, I’m proud, I have my little spot where we get to do these lawsuits and help survivors. But education is a huge part of this, right? And so there are really good organizations that do that. They’ll go into the schools, you know, into the medical community, train, law enforcement, anybody who’s willing to listen it, it’s definitely worthwhile.

[00:24:28] Just take your example. the hotel that, that we sued, there was probably a hundred maybe. I dunno. I, I have different hotels. I’ll say that there’s often 50 to 200 cars coming in and out that aren’t staying there. And what they’ll often tell you is there are these budget hotels off of an interstate, but you’re seeing like Jaguars and BMWs coming in and out, right?

[00:24:49] So if someone cares about that and they, and they see that and they call law enforcement, it may not be enough for law enforcement to make an arrest, but they can say, okay, we need to do surveillance and then they can surveil that, right? Or they could go interview the, the hotel owner. The people that are best empowered to do this are obviously the people that work at the hotel ’cause they live there or they work there full time and they see it.

[00:25:12] But if they’re not gonna do it, certainly getting law enforcement to try to do more things, you know, do more drive-throughs, to get local community to be educated. All of those things are great. And if you have someone who’s great is what you’re talking about in, in Los Angeles, you know civil law, I can only sue someone when a client contacts me and says I was trafficked there.

[00:25:32] law enforcement and district attorneys and other agencies can sometimes just target a hotel. ‘Cause they say, that’s so bad. That is a nuisance. Right? And they, they can do that. We can only target where our clients take us. So it it, it really takes, like I said, it takes a village, it takes everybody, but everybody can, can certainly, do their part.

[00:25:51] Sandie Morgan: So Pat, what kind of advice do you have for the hospitality industry as these kinds of cases are becoming more routine? You mentioned your case and then the next one that settled for 6 million a week later. What’s your advice?

[00:26:12] Patrick McDonough: Well, the hotels, what they need to know is if they’re gonna turn a blind eye, they can be held accountable. And I, and I’m hoping that that message is now getting across it is not really hard what they need to do. All they need to do is train their staff, right? Fairly easy. I mean, these brands certainly can set things up in their portals and they can do basic training and this is what you look for.

[00:26:34] And when you do that, you should notify, law enforcement. And again, the training’s not that difficult, but ultimately what it always comes from the top I’ve, I’ve talked to multiple front desk people and they say, “Hey, I’m working at this hotel”, and they tell me, I don’t care what it is. It could be a drug dealer or sex trafficker.

[00:26:51] Just rent the rooms, make the money. Same person making $12 an hour, goes down the road and works for a different hotel. And they say, if you see anything, you let me know immediately. And call law enforcement. So they just really have to make sure they want to do the right thing, that they aren’t trying to profit off this.

[00:27:08] Because it’s really not that hard to clean up. I mean, all you gotta do is really open your eyes, look at the cameras, occasionally walk around a bit,  50 men coming in and out, you know, in a couple hours. Cars coming that aren’t staying there at some point. It, it becomes obvious, right? So they just really wanting to do the right thing.

[00:27:24] But as far as like practical steps, I think training is the most important thing. They just to make sure that all their people, the cleaning staff, the maintenance people, the front desk people are all trained and empowered to do the right thing.

[00:27:38] Sandie Morgan: Wow. I love that. “Empowered to do the right thing” and it is top down Pat.

[00:27:45] I am really excited about the work that you’re doing there. I think the impact is going to be phenomenal as more and more we see more, cases and from my perspective, working with victims, that restitution is life changing and it validates the community’s value for an individual and their life that has been totally disrupted.

[00:28:17] So thank you so much for your time.

[00:28:20] I’m grateful for your leadership and your passion, and we will look for more success in the coming years. Thanks so much, Pat.

[00:28:31] Patrick McDonough: All right. Thanks so much.

[00:28:32] Sandie Morgan: Thanks to Patrick McDonough for sharing his groundbreaking case in changing Survivor Justice. His key insight really stuck with me. Hotels can’t hide behind, “we didn’t know”, when signs are obvious. Simple staff training can prevent trafficking hotspots. Watch for a future episode on how that is already happening.

[00:28:59] What gives me hope is Pat’s reminder. It truly takes a village whether you’re spotting unusual traffic patterns, supporting stronger laws like the TVPRA, or empowering hotel staff to do the right thing. Everyone has a role in prevention. Listeners, if you love this conversation, make sure you check out our website @endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:29:34] If you’d love to help us grow the podcast, you can start just by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back.

Debbie Deem joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss how transnational fraud predators are stealing billions from older adults and the intersection between financial crimes and human trafficking.

Debbie Deem is a retired FBI victim specialist with over 40 years of experience serving crime victims. She’s currently an elder justice victim advocate, specializing in transnational fraud crimes and she serves as co-facilitator for the National Adult Protective Services Association Fraud Forum. She helped start the Victim Assistance Programs at the US Attorney’s Office in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in the early to mid-1990s she discovered what we now call human trafficking victims and was assisting those victims while also working with financial crime victims. After moving to the FBI in 2003, she began focusing on older victims of lottery, sweepstakes, and romance frauds, gravitating toward the most underserved victims throughout her career.

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today’s guest represents a powerful intersection of federal law enforcement expertise and passionate victim advocacy.

[00:00:30] Debbie Deem is a retired FBI victim specialist with over 40 years of experience serving crime victims. She’s currently an elder justice victim advocate, specializing. Transnational fraud crimes and she serves as co-facilitator for the National Adult Protective Services Association Fraud Forum.

[00:01:01] Today we will discover how financial fraud predators are, stealing billions from older adults, 4.9 billion in 2024 alone. And why these crimes mirror the early days of human trafficking recognition. Debbie shares real case studies, including a devastating story of a $380,000 theft, and she reveals practical strategies that families can use to protect their loved ones from becoming targets.

[00:01:37] And now here’s our interview.

[00:01:39] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the ending Human Trafficking Podcast, Debbie Deem.

[00:01:45] Debbie Deem: Thank you very much. Looking forward to it.

[00:01:48] Sandie Morgan: I just love that we are having this conversation. I’ve known you for a couple decades and you’ve been deeply involved in combating human trafficking from the victim side, and today our conversation is going to talk about how transnational scam predators victimize. Our family members and what we can do about that. So I’m excited to have you on our show today, so Debbie, let’s first talk about how your career in the FBI impacted your understanding of victimization.

[00:02:37] Debbie Deem: Sandy, thank you again for having me. And I have to say that actually it was my first work, I was a victim specialist for the FBI, and I’ve been retired. I call myself unleashed for about the last six years, but even before that position, I helped start, The Victim Assistance Programs at the US Attorney’s Office, both in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.

[00:02:58] And it was actually there in their, actually their early to mid 1990s that I discovered both what we now call human trafficking victims, both in sex trafficking, With a domestic as well as an international trafficking, situation and was assisting those. But I also was required under the victim rights law to start notifying victims of all crimes.

[00:03:20] And that included financial crimes and identity theft, when we had cases that were going forward. So when I first became aware, it was actually both groups of victims that had been. Very underserved. Again, not even names for those crimes at that time. But I was obligated to find services that didn’t exist.

[00:03:39] I was obligated to inform them about their rights in the criminal justice system. Um, in some cases, with the traffic victims, they didn’t even speak english. So again, the variety of things, that I found in both situations actually started in the early to mid 1990s. And then when I moved to the FBI, in 2003, I was asked by agents to start visiting victims who, older victims who had been often contacted by phone and just the beginning days of the internet, because they had been defrauded.

[00:04:11] I, I try to use the word defrauded versus scammed. Because it just seems like it, it focuses more on the seriousness of the crime rather than putting any kind of blame on the victim, which oftentimes the word scam does. So what happened is that I was visiting, older victims of lottery or sweepstakes frauds, or the early romance frauds, and I’m seeing so many of these.

[00:04:33] Yet there was no one I could call or contact for help unless identity theft was involved because we did have the Identity Theft Resource Center at that time, and there was just nothing out there for these folks. And in my career, I’ve always gravitated towards the most underserved victims, whoever that was and kind of put my focus on that.

[00:04:51] then once people start addressing it, I move on to something else. And I was able to do that with human trafficking.

[00:04:58] Have a whole bunch of folks came and recognized that crime and great changes happened. So I moved on kind of to these financial fraud victims, especially older adults.

[00:05:08] And I’m still waiting kind of for the army to show up, but, that’s changing and they are showing up now, which is wonderful to be a part of that pioneering effort, that, you know, happened with human trafficking and I’m hopeful will happen with fraud victims.

[00:05:21] Sandie Morgan: Wow. And I really relate to this idea that you saw victims of crimes we didn’t even have names for.

[00:05:31] I often talk to people about my first victim of child sexual exploitation was a 14-year-old boy. I admitted at 2:00 AM before we had names for that crime. And as you grew into this, your focus on serving the victims really drove how you addressed it. And we will have links in the show notes, but you’ve written extensively on this, there is a lot of resource, to help us understand. And one of the works that you published is the neuroscience behind financial scams. A DOJ elder initiative, and this is really helpful for us to understand the science. Can you talk about what that means?

[00:06:36] Debbie Deem: I think you’re talking more about, it was a, a work that I did with Dr. Landy who was a neuropsychologist and he actually

[00:06:44] it was wonderful to partner with him because I think, again, this is a field where we need neuropsychologists, we need therapists, we need legal people, we need financial advisors, we need advocates, we need all kinds of folks.

[00:06:57] But what I think that kind of medical or a psychological perspective can give is some understanding of the human brain and just, What can happen, that excitement kind of thing that if we’re talking about a romance fraud, that excitement, that, that feeling that people get and when they’re in the throes of a new relationship and how real that can seem, even though, all the red flags are there, that this is not a authentic relationship.

[00:07:23] those things can be real. And a lot of the brain chemistry and things like that are so strong in helping people to. Believe that it’s a real thing and it makes it so difficult for them to stop because of that. so I think the work of neuropsychologists in kind of explaining what is going on with the human brain

[00:07:41] as well as in later issues with those older folks or people with disabilities that may not stop and what is happening to them. We certainly need people in that role that can be doing cognitive assessments. Helping with, issues if there does need to be temporary conservatorships or things like that.

[00:08:00] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So let’s look at what are some of those lesser known emotional or psychological effects that financial fraud can have on older victims?

[00:08:14] And I’m not using scam language. I’m learning from you, Debbie.

[00:08:20] Debbie Deem: That’s all right.

[00:08:20] Sandie Morgan: Yes. And, we’re gonna help our community move to conversations that maintain the dignity of the victims.

[00:08:30] Debbie Deem: Yeah. And, and let me address that real kind of quickly. for example, before I discuss what those emotional reactions can be and the, the trauma, the trauma reactions. This is actually probably the most common crime happening around the world. Is these kinds of transnational frauds. And I think that that is becoming true more and more as more and more countries are doing a better job at getting reports in and kind of looking at the issues and encouraging those who don’t report to come forward.

[00:09:00] the FBI reported that only on reported crimes, and again, we know most people do not report. What they found was that $4.9 billion was reported by those 60 and older who cared

[00:09:11] Sandie Morgan: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You just said 4.9 billion with a B.

[00:09:19] Debbie Deem: United States in 2024, even though we know most, and those are just the people that put their age in as being age 60 or older. that was up 33% from the year before. an average of $83,000 was stolen on average. The Federal Trade Commission estimated that the money stolen could be much more.

[00:09:40] And what they estimated that, probably, uh, close to $160 billion a year is stolen by everyone in the United States due to these kinds of fraud crimes.

[00:09:50] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:09:52] Debbie Deem: So I wanted to mention that quickly, and perhaps also before we get into the emotional reactions, talking about the words, because much as the words that we used in human trafficking cases and that often implied victim blaming and shaming and, you know, why would she do that?

[00:10:08] Why would she fall for that? Why would she go with that man? all those kinds of things that as activists in the field, we’ve done a pretty good job of helping people understand that these are people that are victimized and they are not responsible for what happened, that they were manipulated into it.

[00:10:25] And we need to do that same kind of, I think, reframing of our language when we’re talking about these crimes because. Oftentimes the reason victims feel ashamed or feel like they’re to blame is because of the language they use. How could you have been duped for that? How could you be so stupid? How are, why are you so greedy?

[00:10:43] Those kind of words can really cut deep. to people going through something like this, and even the words that we used to talk about, the criminals, these are con artists, they’re con men. They’re, fraudsters. There’s, you know, scammers instead of being the fraud predators that we know they are, so again, I think changing that language can be so important.

[00:11:05] And helping to reframe the issue and to see that these are crime victims and these were are crimes that are being committed against them and often being re-victimized in it too. So I kind of wanted to get that in before we go into the reactions, but the normal kind of reactions because it always depends on the kind of.

[00:11:21] Transnational fraud crime that we’re talking about. But it’s, often again that sense of blame and shame, not wanting to report isolating themselves from others. Depression is very, very strong. The sense of distrust and betrayal, in almost every one of these where it’s been kind of a long con or they built trust, in the person that is defrauding them.

[00:11:44] There’s this strong emotional attachment to them. You know, we talk about the trauma bond when we’re talking about victims again in trafficking, that same trauma bond appears and love bombing in the cases of romances kinds of frauds. Those same kind of hooks into people are what these predators are doing to the victims.

[00:12:02] So all these kinds of things, that sense of betrayal when they realize that it wasn’t real. Having to grieve a relationship that doesn’t exist, in everybody else’s eyes, but is so real and authentic to that victims, are some of the common things that we see with people. And, and that sense of being re-victimized, because there’s, what are we doing to fill that hole that, that relationship

[00:12:23] or that sense of intimacy that, that, that that relationship presented for them. Whether it’s that chance to win the publisher’s clearing house, or whether it’s chance to, by investing in this big crypto investment fraud, investment opportunity through crypto, that’s gonna make all their dreams come true.

[00:12:40] Pay for their grandchild’s operation or college, all these things they’re gonna do with that money. when all of that collapses or someone comes along and says they’re gonna help ’em recover their money. They’re, they’re so willing to believe that that’s gonna be possible, that they get, you know, re-victimized.

[00:12:57] Sandie Morgan: So this, this progression of victimization and then revictimization. So let’s start, um, someone who’s gonna help them get their money back. And it’s just the next level in the fraud, right?

[00:13:16] Debbie Deem: And a big part of this is impersonations because, you know, what they might do is impersonate the bank. They might impersonate the FBI or Homeland Security, or Interpol or the United Nations. I’ve had, people say that they’re investigators from all of those, and that they’re going to, or the Federal Trade Commission or whatever agency it is, local police, and they’re gonna help that person recover their funds.

[00:13:39] Sandie Morgan: And so here’s the rest of us telling them this isn’t real. And yet there’s this authority figure telling them it is real and we’re gonna help you and we’re gonna make everything right. And of course, it’s very easy to wanna believe that. Okay, so let’s start step one, I am your victim and this is your first contact with me. How do you begin that conversation to help me understand, that I’m not stupid. I’m not, to blame for this. And what are my resources? What can I do?

[00:14:21] Debbie Deem: Well first, let’s talk about the, the main kinds of these transnational frauds, kind of what’s done first, because what I’m going to respond at might depend on what the crime is.

[00:14:31] And unlike, human trafficking and sexual assaults and all these kind of crimes, they basically follow the same basic scenario

[00:14:38] You know,they can be remote or they can be in real life. It can be someone, you know, it can be a stranger. With these kind of fraud crimes, the opportunities to defraud are limitless. One of the main sayings that we say now is that anybody can be defrauded. You’ll hear anybody can be scammed.

[00:14:56] I see people all the time shaking their head and saying, no, not me. I’m too smart for that. but we know that it can happen to anyone. there’s a New York Times story about a financial crime reporter, in her fifties that had over, I think $50,000 stolen. And at one point she thought she was helping the CIA in a transfer Amazon scam. So, um, again, these, these frauds can happen to anyone.

[00:15:20] What we mostly are seeing now, coming again outta the transnational nature of this, is we’re seeing a lot of the, the romance frauds where someone will impersonate, oftentimes they’ll steal an image from someone. |If it’s for women, oftentimes it’s men in the military, it’s doctors serving time, maybe doing doctors without borders.

[00:15:40] It might be an engineer on an oil rig, of course, which explains why he can’t come and visit. Oftentimes, uh, for both sexes, it’s a celebrity or a social influencer that they might have met. Just by liking something on a fan page.

[00:15:54] For men, oftentimes it’s these social influencers or pictures stolen from only fans or similar kinds of models that appear to be under 30.

[00:16:04] that kind of thing that they get involved in with emotionally. Again, all totally false relationships. It’s oftentimes also crypto investment frauds that might start with a text message. And that text message might be something flirty, even if you’re married and you might respond and say, sorry, you’ve got the wrong number.

[00:16:22] and then that person will respond and say, well, you seem really interesting. You know, if the text message was about golf, it’ll be, do you play golf? If it was about.

[00:16:29] Go get, get the pet washed at 10 o’clock. do you have a dog? so they’ll kind of try to entice you into keeping that conversation going and that leads to that crime that is sometimes called pig butchering, which I think you’ll discuss in the next podcast.

[00:16:43] But that’s where a basically a lot of the Victor, Victor. Done relationship, um, crypto relationship or romance investment frauds begin also lottery and sweepstake frauds. Those are huge right now as well. where people will impersonate mega millions or, publisher’s clearinghouse and tell that person that they’ve won that major lottery or sweepstakes, but they just have to pay taxes or pay for courier fees or insurance, where we know that it’s actually against the law to request money in advance.

[00:17:12] And that, anytime anybody is asking you by text or phone or email, whatever means that they want you to pay that money in advance, hang up the phone, disengage, because again, that’s not real. Tech support that is probably impacting older adults more than any other kind of crime where someone may impersonate.

[00:17:31] Um, maybe you get a buzzer or something, a pop up on your computer screen and it says big issues with your computer, big noises coming on, or maybe you’re looking for some kind of a tech help. Or maybe you get a call from someone that says that they’re Apple or that they’re Microsoft and there’s a problem with your computer.

[00:17:50] Oftentimes then you give remote access on one of those remote access devices. Apps that are on your phone or, and you give access to what’s on your computer to supposedly get it fixed. And instead what that fraud predator is doing is they’re getting access to your bank account, they’re getting access to perhaps other things that you have, on your computer and even taking control of it.

[00:18:12] This has moved into a new kind of fraud because we know that criminals are constantly evolving. It’s a crime that’s called sometimes phantom hacking, or also the term used might be a, a bank, security, imposter fraud, where someone impersonates a bank employee, uh, security person and tells you, they might say, uh, Dr. Sandy, it looks like that your account is being compromised. They may contact you over the phone.

[00:18:38] You know, I’m, I’m Debbie with, with “blank bank” and I’m letting you know that there’s a problem with your bank account. it looks like hackers are into your account. In, in one case, a victim was told there was 72 hackers accessing the information on that they’d find found child pornography on her account and that she needed to get it removed.

[00:18:59] She was told that she could not trust, the local bank because the FBI was investigating and they were in on it. So what she was required to do was to go to three different branches and pull out all of her life savings that she had in these banks and take that money out and put them into a crypto investment, a crypto ATM.

[00:19:17] And by doing that, it was a hundred dollars bills. This was back before the law changed, which I’ll mention in a minute. She put in a hundred dollars bills for two or three hours at a time. Different eight crypto ATM machines, thinking that she was putting the money in a federally reserved account.

[00:19:32] These fraud criminals had sent her emails with fake letters from the FBI fake letters from Social Security. She talked to somebody who was impersonated the FBI on the phone. All of them told her that this was real. She was in danger, her money was in danger, and she needed to take all these steps to protect it.

[00:19:51] She couldn’t tell anyone at all, that this was going on. This went on for a period of two weeks. In this situation, the last payment, she said, I can’t do this anymore. There was $80,000 left of her life savings. These fraud criminals arranged to get a courier. A younger person, definitely under age 18, showed up within two or three hours, no car in sight.

[00:20:14] Picked up the money that she had in a shoebox, wrapped up in foil with the last four digits of her social security number on the top of the box. Picked up that money he had asked for a code scan. The fraud criminals had said, we’ll give you this code, only he will know the code. She got the code from him, gave him the money, walked away, and she was out her $380,000 life savings.

[00:20:36] Now, what happened as a result of that and what often happens in these crimes?

[00:20:40] She contacted the police. The police didn’t even come out to take a report. The police did not come out and check ring doorbells because to me, this is possible human trafficking. If a child’s involved, who knows what’s going on with that, with that youth.

[00:20:54] The police never came out. I made an attempt to reach victim services in that county. No response from them as far as having an advocate come out when the bank was, the, the bank never filed an APS report. this is a standard thing they should have done with her taking out that amount of money.

[00:21:11] Sandie Morgan: what’s an a APS?

[00:21:13] Debbie Deem: Adult Protective Services and in the state of California and in most states, these are reportable crimes and banks are what they call mandated reporters. I think in 49 states where they are mandated to report any kind of fraud or exploitation involving a senior or somebody with serious disabilities to adult protective services, it’s almost like Child Protective Services, but they do the same kind of investigations and hopefully services and, and information.

[00:21:40] For someone victimized in this or any kind of exploitation, fraud, they did not even file that report. And to top it off, you know, the banks of course did, did nothing. And Adult Protective Services, when they did come out, just checked to make sure she had food in a refrigerator. And basically asked, you know, well, do you have enough money to live on?

[00:22:02] So this is, and I I mentioned this case because it’s so typical of the experience that these victims go through, there is no reporting of it there was no one telling her that she should also have reported. To a, a national database such as the Internet Crime Complaint Center or the Federal Trade Commission.

[00:22:19] We can talk about that later, so this is just that I use that example because it’s such a good one about the failure of our system responses no matter what the crime is.

[00:22:29] Sandie Morgan: Okay, so let me go back and ask for a little clarification. First of all, what is a crypto ATM?

[00:22:38] Debbie Deem: Crypto ATM, and I’m glad you mentioned that. they’re found all over the United States now, actually worldwide, and you probably can walk by, 10 of them within a two mile radius of your home and not even know they’re there. They’re often in like little delis or gas stations or smoke shops or uh, liquor stores.

[00:22:57] And you might walk right by them thinking that it’s just a regular ATM. But what it is, it’s, it’s actually a fraud machine because I’ve heard people, experts say that there’s really. No real reason to be using one of those unless it’s for fraud. So states are now involved in an effort to limit at least the amount that’s done.

[00:23:14] Some countries are, have actually banned them, but they’re often, it’s, what it means is you can put the money into that crypto. And it goes into some kind of a crypto exchange, where that criminal, that can, can then, or that person receiving it if it’s for honest reasons, although I don’t know what that would be.

[00:23:32] But that person receiving it then can take that money and it makes it very difficult to trace. And I think Erin will probably go into more details on that. But what happened in California? Luckily is back in 2023, our state legislator changed our laws so that these crypto ATMs now can only, are only authorized to allow up to $1,000 a day per machine.

[00:23:56] Sandie Morgan: Okay,

[00:23:57] Debbie Deem: So that has limited what happened to the woman I just described happened in like November of 2023. If that was later, she would’ve been limited to only 1000 rather than the 300,000 that she put in over a period of time.

[00:24:11] but other states have not done that yet, so as a result of passing that law,

[00:24:14] Because the law of unattended consequences in California, once the criminals realized that, money could not go through the crypto ATMs, they did two things. Number one, they got in touch with gangs and other people to be couriers to come out and pick up the money. In cash or in gold bars or one of these kind of ways, and there’s actually internet crime complaint center, FBI warnings that this is a common means now that’s being used or these moves to move to things like QR codes or justCash app and some of these peer-to-peer kind of payments involving crypto to bypass those ATMs.

[00:24:44] So the criminals are always evolving onto the next stage. When we put in protections, they’ll move on and find some new way using technology to, to defraud.

[00:24:59] Sandie Morgan: oh my goodness, this is so scary. Okay, so let me go back. This is a great case study and the fact that this is 2025, that was 2023, that is not that long ago. And to understand how far behind we are in the having protocols and prevention strategies laid out, this is significant. So four. A victim that is contacted through a text message, through a dm, a direct message on their social media, what can we say to people about how to prevent that from happening? Your, let’s say your great aunt Isabel. Is lonely and you go see her once a month, telling her not to engage with strangers is kind of like saying that to your 14-year-old who thinks I can take care of myself? Is this the same, basic scenario that we’re dealing with, with keeping our kids safe?

[00:26:17] Debbie Deem: It is. And, uh, before I, I wanna preface that, that first though, because we said these are, these frauds can impact anyone of any age. so they, the, these criminals would target the fraud depending on that age. So if you were one of those very young adults,  or so maybe someone in their twenties, you’re gonna target them with, with job scams, you’re gonna target them with things like crimes leading to sextortion with the images of, the romantic interest.

[00:26:42] It’s gonna be like, products that you can buy online that aren’t real with the older adults. It’s the kind of crimes that I described and, and what we have to try to get those folks to do is, again, not to respond to, any phone call that they get. the FTC said that the fraud phone was still used in like 72% of frauds up until a, a couple years ago.

[00:27:04] So again, it’s not picking up that phone. Unless those people are in your contacts and it’s helping to train people to do that, but it’s also getting the apps, through Verizon or whatever the service carrier is that can do scam warnings and let people know that that’s a potential scam and people will be much more likely not to take that call if it says scam likely.

[00:27:24] So helping them to hook up with that kind of technology that can help with those things. I think also for any age, I think it might be, if I was talking to my great aunt, I might say, “gee, great Aunt Sarah, I had one of these strange messages, and it was about a toll road telling me that I had a fine, that I had to pay. Well, I don’t even have toll roads around where I live. You know, I, I read about these kinds of frauds and I think that’s what happening”, or “I got this strange message saying that my FedEx package hadn’t arrived yet, and I had to hit a link” on and personalize it that way from their own experience so that they’re sharing that information, but it’s not seen as a warning or a lecture on what not to do or that kind of thing.

[00:28:07] It’s more sharing of information in a kind and general way and saying, “Aunt Sarah, you know, let me know if this ever happens to you two. I wanna know, I’m trying to tell everybody I know about this” and I think Aunt Sarah will be much more likely to listen if she not feels she’s not being lectured at or treated differently because she’s older and may not be.

[00:28:25] as responsible or understanding of that fraud that’s happening. so I think that would be one suggestion that I would have. doing things like freezing credit, we always mention, you know, freezing your credit, if I had an Aunt Sarah and I was her only living relative, I would try to be a trusted contact.

[00:28:42] that’s something we’ve encouraged. Um, many states are following up with that. And what that means is that on any retirement account. Or any banking account, I would ask Aunt Sarah to make me her trusted contact. Even if she wasn’t ready to give me something like power of attorney, trusted contact would mean that the bank could be authorized to contact me.

[00:29:03] If Aunt Sarah starts doing anything like this poor woman did that was taking all of her money out at one or two days over a short period of time, that’s out of the ordinary of her normal pattern. and that way I could be contacted. I don’t have access to what’s in her account but it would allow the banks to contact me without that threat of being sued by Aunt Sarah.

[00:29:23] If they did try to reach out to me, knowing that I might be that Aunt Sarah might be in danger. And we encourage this for all family members to try to do. I try to get trusted contacts on anybody because something could happen at any age. So it’s always good to have someone that you could call real quickly.

[00:29:39] I have another situation of a woman, multimillion dollars stolen on a similar kind of crime. These are called phantom hacking, or again, the bank security impersonation fraud. In her case, it started as a tech support where there was a problem with her computer. It led to the same kind of issues. Over a period of, a couple months, she ended up believing she was working again with the FBI and other agencies.

[00:30:03] Took out life savings, took out all of her money to, so in these, to the so-called protected accounts, picked up by couriers, she purchased gold bars. All of this money went. And it wasn’t until her son was notified on one final account where he was listed as a trusted contact, and it finally gave that retirement account the ability to check in with her and say, “Hey mom, what’s going on?”

[00:30:28] And she of course, confessed everything that she had been involved with. But that was, several million dollars too late. And this is a woman in her seventies that now has to go back to work.

[00:30:39] Sandie Morgan: Wow.

[00:30:39] Debbie Deem: So these are the stories we’re seeing. Um, we’re seeing suicides, people that are, suicide ideation. I’ve known of three people just in my county. Are actually, homeless that have one is sleeping in a park right now. Another was living in his car, for a long, long time until he got into a shelter. So again, the impact of these crimes are horrific. People end up having to go to bankruptcy. Tax issues we did not mention, but that’s had this, I call these crimes, the crimes that keep taking because there can be tax issues if you took that money out.

[00:31:12] let’s say Sandy’s a been involved in one of these frauds. You take your money out of your, your, retirement accounts because you think this great crypto investment is gonna lead to all these great things happening, or you’re taking that money out to help your one true love so that he can come and live with you and he just needs money to help with his business.

[00:31:31] Take that money out and the IRS as well as, many states will tell you that you owe taxes on that money, and that’s money stolen, but you’re still having to be re-victimized by having to pay taxes on that stolen money. that’s not right. There’s been efforts in Congress to get that law changed, hasn’t happened yet there’s so many issues like that. Um, people trying to report things on, on things like social media where you report a fraudulent site and it doesn’t get taken down.

[00:32:00] Again, we’re in the beginning stages, right where human trafficking was in the early 2000’s

[00:32:04] Sandie Morgan: 20 years ago. That’s right. Yeah. Okay. So I expected our conversation today to be like taking the lid off my trash can and you kind of telling me what’s in this.But I feel more like we just dove into a dumpster. First, and there is so much more to explore

[00:32:23] And for listeners, in a coming episode, we’re going to be talking about the intersection with human trafficking where fraud stirs. are actually being trafficked to man, those phones and those computers in those direct messages, those texts, those phone calls.

[00:32:48] But we’re gonna save that for another episode, Debbie. Tell me what the best resource is for family members that wanna know how to protect their family, particularly those with any kind of issues of that are psychological that might make them more vulnerable, age related. What’s your favorite resource?

[00:33:21] Debbie Deem: Well, first I, I would hope everybody would you know, get the victim or help, help them, report it to the local police, as well as to the Internet Crime Complaint center @www.ic3.gov .

[00:33:34] And that’s run by the FBI. It’s a, a national, think of it as a library of complaints. So it doesn’t mean that anyone is gonna act on it.

[00:33:42] They get about 2,500 complaints a day. But it’s a library of complaints so that all of those complaints are seen by any sworn law enforcement officer in the United States, whether it’s a detective, whether it’s a postal inspector, an FBI agent. All different places that might be looking for leads on the same case.

[00:34:00] So reporting is is really critical. As soon as you can get the victim to do that, help them save their documentation and all that so that they can do that. But for resources, there are now, and these have only been here for a short time, there’s support groups, there’s national as well as local support groups that are establishing all the time.

[00:34:19] There’s four national ones and actually I can share those with you to put on.

[00:34:23] You’re resource information for people, one of those is fightcybercrime.org. They have great resources online that covers almost any situation of any kind of internet fraud, as well as action plans, what to do, and following up and a 10 week support group for victims.

[00:34:41] AARP has a wonderful one for a victim of any kind of fraud.As well as family members.

[00:34:44] Give an Hour is another one, and there’s a program out of New York, that is doing similar kind of things. So those support groups may be very important, but I think if I had only one resource, it would probably be the National Elder Fraud Hotline.

[00:34:57] And it’s actually sponsored by Congress and it’s run by the US Department of Justice. And it’s probably the single place that I would, encourage people to go to because they will actually help people file reports. They have advocates online that will help them through the whole process.

[00:35:13] So that would be my one source, that I would probably send people to.

[00:35:16] Sandie Morgan: Debbie Deem we are going to keep this conversation going. Thank you so much for your passion, your advocacy, and sharing your knowledge with us today.

[00:35:29] Debbie Deem: Thank you.

[00:35:29] Thanks to Debbie deem for sharing her decades of expertise and helping us understand how transnational fraud crimes are devastating families across America.

[00:35:42] If you have aging relatives, consider having that conversation about becoming their trusted contact on financial accounts. It’s one concrete step you can take today. if you loved this conversation, make sure you check out our website@endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:36:11] If you’d love to help us grow the podcast, you can start just by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back in two weeks. ​

Matthew Soerens joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss the intersection of immigration policy and human trafficking, exploring how vulnerable immigration status increases the risk of exploitation and trafficking.

Matthew Soerens is vice President of Advocacy and Policy at World Relief. He has dedicated his career to responding to the needs of immigrants and refugees through a biblical lens of justice and compassion. He also serves as national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration table, and he co-authored Seeking Refuge on the shores of the Global Refugee Crisis.

[00:00:03] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, brought to you by Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. This is episode number 350. I am Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is a show where we help you study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking.

[00:00:29] Today we are joined by Matthew Sorens, vice President of Advocacy and Policy at World Relief. He has dedicated his career to responding to the needs of immigrants and refugees through a. Biblical lens of justice and compassion. He also serves as national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration table, and he co-authored Seeking Refuge on the shores of the Global Refugee Crisis.

[00:01:06] Sandie Morgan: I’m really happy to Welcome back to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast. Matthew Sorens, vice President of Advocacy and Policy at World Relief.

[00:01:19] Welcome back, Matthew. So glad

[00:01:20] Matthew Soerens: Yeah, so glad to be with you again, Sandie

[00:01:22] Sandie Morgan: we have a lot to talk about. First of all, tell us,briefly, what does world relief do,

[00:01:30] Matthew Soerens: World Relief is a global Christian humanitarian organization that,has existed for about 80 years. Our mission is to boldly engage the world’s greatest crises in partnership with the church. And, and right now as we look at. Crises around the world, we see displacement people being forced to flee from their homes and from their countries.

[00:01:48] In many cases, as really near the top of the list of global crises. It’s also a global crisis, of course, that intersects in many situations with challenges of human trafficking. So this is an issue we carry a great deal about both in the United States and around the world.

[00:02:03] Sandie Morgan: All right. And from the perspective of human trafficking, this is the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. There are several elements in our discussion today that we wanna clarify. First is the difference between smuggling and trafficking. Can you do that in 25 words?

[00:02:25] Matthew Soerens: Sure. I think so. I mean, trafficking under US law is when people are made to work under forced fraud or coercion, whether it’s sex trafficking or labor trafficking. Smuggling is when someone is brought across the border against the law. Now those things can be related. People who are smuggled could also be being trafficked, but they’re not the same thing.

[00:02:43] And I think the risk of. Conflating those terms is that we think of trafficking sometimes as something that happens at the border when actually trafficking can happen anywhere in the world, and it can happen to immigrants and sometimes they’re uniquely vulnerable. But it also can happen to American citizens.

[00:02:58] It can happen within a country. It can happen with people who are outside of their country. And I do think that distinction sometimes gets conflated in some of the political dialogue in some unhelpful ways.

[00:03:07] Sandie Morgan: All right. And,that’s really helpful for our listeners who live along the borders here in the US and beyond. I was in Madrid, in May, in Greece in February, and this issue of smuggling and trafficking being conflated is a. Constant challenge to overcome. Now, you mentioned the issues of fraud and coercion, and people in migrant status often have driving forces that increase their vulnerability. So can you talk about what that looks like right now from a global crisis perspective?

[00:03:52] Matthew Soerens: Yeah, I think one of the reasons we see that people who are migrant or refugees or asylum seekers, these various legal, statuses for people who have fled their homes. Are vulnerable to human trafficking is precisely that they are in a different cultural setting where they don’t know the rules, they don’t know their rights under the law, or what the laws are.

[00:04:11] In some cases, and depending on what their legal status in terms of migration is, that can create further reasons that they’re suspicious of law enforcement. So they may feel like they can’t report if they’re being forced or coerced. Into a work situation where they’re not being paid or they’re being paid less than they should or even into situations of, sexual trafficking.

[00:04:33] And so we often find that,immigrants of various kinds are uniquely vulnerable to situations of human trafficking. And the less legal protections that they have, wherever they happen to be, the more vulnerable they are, the less likely they are to speak up, to know that they can go and ask for help when they’re being mistreated and, and exploited.

[00:04:52] Sandie Morgan: I quit counting a long time ago. How many frontline service professionals like yourself have told me? Victims didn’t even know they were victims. They often felt like they made a poor decision. but because of their desperation, the risk element, we misunderstand that I am measuring risk. By sitting in my air conditioned home with two cars in the driveway. somebody else is measuring risk by, I don’t know how I’m going to feed my children or where we are going to sleep tonight. So,

[00:05:33] Matthew Soerens: And if I make you know, the wrong decision, do I end up in an even more vulnerable situation back in a country where I was being persecuted or where someone was out to get me? And those are the, the stresses that weigh on people in some cases as they assess what their options are.

[00:05:51] Sandie Morgan: Absolutely. Okay, so right now in the US we are reevaluating a lot of our immigration policies, and some of it has had unintended consequence. And so one of the things that happened just last week. Is from my state in California. Six of our Republican legislators wrote a letter to ask that we be a little more concerned about how we. Implementing some of those policies and I’ll put a link to the letter in our show notes. But Matthew, do you want to give us some background and your perspective on what this means moving forward?

[00:06:46] Matthew Soerens: Yeah, I was encouraged to see this letter. I think it’s responding to something that we’ve said at World Relief, which is we actually really want our federal government to have a little bit of discernment between. Making sure that our government is doing its job and protecting the American population by removing people with due process and fair treatment.

[00:07:03] But people who have been convicted of violent crimes, who present the public safety threat,including those who would be committing human trafficking. We want our government to go after those people and prosecute those crimes. And if convicted of course, and if they’re eligible to, to deport people who’ve been, who are foreign nationals at this.

[00:07:21] What we’ve seen though is that. As there’s been a big push towards deportations, most of the people who are being detained have not been convicted of violent crimes. In fact, it’s only a very small share of those who are detained right now who have been convicted of violent crimes. It’s,a minority who’ve been of those detained, who’ve been convicted of any crime at all.

[00:07:40] And what we’ve seen is a great deal of fear among people who have not been convicted of any crime,but who are concerned about deportation or being detained or separated from their family. And again, that goes to this dynamic of vulnerability that when people feel vulnerable, they don’t wanna talk to the police even when they’re victims of crimes like trafficking.

[00:07:59] and so these,lawmakers there in the state of California. Basically ask the federal government, to use some discernment like yes, to go after those convicted of violent crimes, but not to be so broad in their immigration raids and sweeps that they’re picking up people who have not committed crimes and have not been convicted of crimes.

[00:08:16] And that’s consistent with what we’ve found at world relief most Evangelical Christians want to see as well. We don’t want immigrant communities, we don’t want immigrant churches. To be filled with fear but of course we do want people who have actually, done harm and are a public safety threat to face justice.

[00:08:31] Sandie Morgan: So, one quote from the letter says, the fear is driving vital workers out of critical industries. Taking California’s affordability crisis and making it even worse for our constituents. Matthew, how do we communicate The value that the immigrant labor force brings to us

[00:08:59] Matthew Soerens: I mean, I think in California is sort of a case study of this, but it’s true across the country. The reality is if you eat. You are benefiting from immigrants because immigrants play an enormous role in the agricultural sector in the United States. And again, a lot of that actually comes out of California, but other states as well.

[00:09:16] if you live in a home, there’s a pretty good chance that there are immigrants involved in the construction industry in many parts of the United States. And many of those people have legal status, but frankly, some of them don’t. Some of them came many years ago,overstate of visa or crossed the border unlawfully at a time when that was.

[00:09:31] Fairly easy to do 20, 30 years ago. And what we’ve said at World Relief is we we’re not condoning that violation of an immigration law many years ago, but we also are acknowledging that we have actually benefited from those folks hard work and that many of them are brothers and sisters in Christ.

[00:09:48] And we think that rather than a, a massive sweep that. Removes people after 20, 30 years from the country and separates them from US-born children. Uh, there ought to be a way for them to make things right. You know, whether that’s paying a fine or whatever that legal process would be, that would allow them to get right with the law and then have the confidence to know.

[00:10:06] when they are victims of other kinds of crimes, that they can go to law enforcement, that they’re safe right now. There’s an, there is an incredible amount of fear. It’s having economic impacts, it’s making groceries cost more for everyone when agricultural workers don’t show up to the fields.

[00:10:19] it’s also,having a huge impact on the church. I mean, I had,dinner with friends who told me that their churches actually basically dissolved because it was a small Spanish speaking church and people are afraid to come and no one was showing up because of an atmosphere of fear. Right now in the community where I live.

[00:10:35] Sandie Morgan: Wow. So you mentioned, visa status and for a lot of people we just think, “oh, you have a visa, or you don’t,” and it’s very black and white. But just in a simple search. I found 18 different kinds of visas. Is there a way to package an understanding of the visas temporary green card path, all of those things during this simple podcast, Matthew?

[00:11:10] Matthew Soerens: Um, probably not. It is too complex to do in a simple podcast, but you, I think to even underscore that complexity, it is sort of an alphabet soup. There’s all different letters assigned to visas and there is as at least as many visas as there are letters of the alphabet. You have temporary visas, you have immigrant visas, which are to long-term live in a country.

[00:11:30] You also have temporary protected status, or symptoms as TPS, which is not technically a visa, but it’s under, it is a legal protection that Congress created and that the Department of Homeland Security can grant. And what we’re seeing right now is it can also withdraw. So you know this question of is this person here lawfully or not?

[00:11:48] Might seem like a simple question. When I worked as a legal counselor, some of my job was helping people figure out the answer to that question for their own situation. You know, because they had come in on this visa, they were trying to figure out how do I stay within the terms of this visa. I mean immigration law, this is maybe a helpful example, is similarly complex to tax law.

[00:12:06] And then you have people trying to understand it usually in a foreign language. And so you have people who are doing their best to do everything to comply with the law, who are sometimes not sure if they actually are complying with the law or they always have been complying with the law, and then a policy changes and suddenly they are here out of status.

[00:12:24] They’re unlawfully present literally with the stroke of a pen. Though they didn’t do anything, it’s just a policy change on them. We’ve seen this recently with a lot of Afghans and Haitians and Venezuelans and certain other nationalities who had, a temporary protected status or humanitarian parole protection that has been withdrawn and they went from working lawfully with a valid social security number to now they’re being told they can’t work lawfully and they’re being told to go back to their countries of origin.

[00:12:50] But if your country of origin is Afghanistan. For especially for example, if you came because you served the US military, or you came because you were a Christian, to go back to the Taliban in Afghanistan could be a death sentence.

[00:13:03] Sandie Morgan: Oh my goodness. And if you’re a girl, I mean this is the Global Center for Women and Justice, this is just unthinkable for women.

[00:13:12] Matthew Soerens: Unfortunately, there are few places in the world that’s terrible to be a girl as Afghanistan right now, and that is particularly why our government gave humanitarian parole to certain women and girls to come. But if we, then we as our governments have revoked that status and literally the letters that people have received are very stark.

[00:13:28] They say, “we will find you. If you do not self deport, you will face prosecution fines or deportation back to your country of origin.” And I mean, people are very much living in fear right now who are in that situation. Again, that’s Afghanistan. But it’s also, I mean, the situation in Haiti right now is a country where world relief operates and it’s a very stark,reality on the ground in Haiti.

[00:13:50] I mean, literally you have Haitians who have been told their temporary protective status is being withdrawn, they should self deport or their humanitarian parole has been withdrawn. To self deport would presumably mean book yourself a plane ticket. Well, the FAA tells American Airlines that they cannot fly to the Port of Prince Airport because it is too violent.

[00:14:07] So like this is the level of violence on the ground according to one part of our government. The State Department tells us citizens under no circumstance should travel to Haiti right now. And yet we’re telling literally hundreds of thousands of Hatians who came in lawfully through airports. Sponsored by family members or church groups that they need to return to their countries of or to their country of origin.

[00:14:28] And it’s a really stark situation. And then again, if they stay here outside of the law, they’re afraid of law enforcement in many cases. And that puts them in that vulnerability, where when an employer is not following the law, when they’re subjecting them to a situation that might even rise to the level of labor trafficking, they often feel that they can’t complain about that.

[00:14:49] Sandie Morgan: Which then that ends up being in a space where they become more vulnerable to coercion and having to do things that, under, not more than just simply a threat, but the cloud that they are living in. Other ways that people lose their status. I was on a call recently with, our embassy in Madrid, our students did a study abroad there in May, and so we did a, follow up zoom meeting and I got to meet with quite a few young people who had come here on a J one Visa. And some people had said to me, but what if they come and they stay? And if somebody overstays that visa, then that does put them out of status. And there are problems with that, but those visas are about building relationships that will go on. And our college students, our high school students report having relationships that eventually lead to opportunities for collaboration internationally. How many of your students, well you’re not teaching here, but I am. And my students go and get an international relations masters. They go into foreign affairs. So those experiences develop relationships that are necessary for our future as a nation. There are a lot of visas that are ways people exchange content, information, labor, short term, and I know that it can be complicated, but let’s just look at the categories for a minute.

[00:16:50] The first, there’s a visitor visa.  And people get a visa to come. It’s not easy to get a visa to visit the US.

[00:16:59] Matthew Soerens: Not if you’re coming from what’s not a, a similarly wealthy country, so if you’re from Europe, it probably is easy if you’re from Australia or you know Japan. If you’re from basically anywhere in Africa or most of Latin America or any country where your earnings potential for an hour of work are way more than the United States than they would be in your country of origin.

[00:17:21] The presumption is that, of our government, is that you would overstay your visa for sort of rational economic reasons, and so you’ll be denied that towards Visa most of the time.

[00:17:31] Sandie Morgan: and I already talked about student and exchange visas, but what about the temporary work visa? This really came up in that letter from our California legislators. They want more H two Bs and so on. So what is that category?

[00:17:49] Matthew Soerens: Yeah, so temporary work visas are specific to agriculture, and H twos are often more, other sectors of the economy. the large majority of temporary work visas are either for agriculture or for highly skilled work. So for example, tech visas and then when you. For some folks that is exactly what they want.

[00:18:09] ’cause they want to come for a season, work in the United States, and then go back to their country of origin. I think one of the challenges of our immigration system, and this isn’t new, this is decades, decades old within the laws, that if our Congress hasn’t updated in many decades, is that. When you come to an immigrant visa, meaning a visa to actually come to the United States and live and work permanently, there are basically not a category for immigrant visas that are employer sponsored for those who are not classified as highly skilled.

[00:18:38] So if you are gonna come and do agricultural work, or you’re going to come and work in the back of a restaurant or work in construction. Maybe you could get a family based immigrant visa. Maybe you qualify because you fled persecution as a refugee, a very small number of people might win a lottery that is specific to individuals from certain countries, not Mexico, not some of the countries that send the most immigrants.

[00:18:58] But if you are primarily coming for work, which is actually a major reason that people want to come to the United States and you are gonna work in what’s not classified as a highly skilled role, you’re limited to those temporary work visas. Even those are very limited, and that’s what these law makers are, are speaking to there.

[00:19:14] There’s not enough of them. But then you have the challenge of there’s people who really want an immigrant visa because they want to come in and build their life in the United States, but that’s not available. Some of those people overstay their visas and,join that category of people who have no legal status.

[00:19:29] And again, I’m not condoning that, but I, I think we ought to recognize that a better system would say if we have a long-term labor need in the United States, why wouldn’t we have a process where that person could apply for an immigrant visa to stay lawfully when that is what they want to do and is what their employer wants them to do and, and actually meet the a labor need in the United States as well.

[00:19:49] And when they do that, then they have the same rights as an American citizen in terms of labor law. Whereas if they are dependent upon their employer for that visa, sometimes they are in in some vulnerable situation if the employer doesn’t happen to be scrupulous. And plenty of employers are very scrupulous, but not all of them are.

[00:20:07] Sandie Morgan: But let’s talk about that for just a minute. That, employer who’s not scrupulous, because this is a scenario that is connected to labor trafficking that I have heard over and over again. Where they didn’t file the necessary, meaning the corporation. the employer did not file the necessary extension ’cause they still need the labor.

[00:20:31] Now, the labor is out of status and vulnerable. Coercion becomes a way to underpay overwork, um, put their kids at risk as well. I’ve talked to teenage girls three or four times who were coerced because if you don’t do this, I’m going to report your father.

[00:20:55] Matthew Soerens: That’s right.

[00:20:56] Sandie Morgan: And so the connection to risk for and vulnerability to human trafficking is very real right here in my backyard.

[00:21:05] Matthew Soerens: Absolutely, and, and it is in probably uniquely in a place with a large number of immigrants like Southern California. But this is a dynamic that happens in rural parts of the United States with you wouldn’t realize how many immigrants are there on serving on farms, and meat packing. And again, I don’t want to cast a broad stroke ’cause there’s lots of really good employers who are treating their workers fairly and doing their best with a very dysfunctional system.

[00:21:27] But there are always going to be people who will take advantage of people who are vulnerable. and that is where we see these situations of labor trafficking arise. And it is why among victims of labor trafficking in the United States, there’s a lot of evidence that immigrants are disproportionately victims and in fact, unauthorized immigrants, those who’ve lost their status or who maybe never had status are uniquely, likely, to be victims in that situation.

[00:21:53] Now, some would say, well, the solution to that is likely let’s not have any immigrants. Actually we have a lot of labor needs that immigrants are, can play a key role in. I think the challenge is not that they’re immigrants, it’s that because of their legal vulnerabilities, they are uniquely vulnerable to trafficking.

[00:22:07] If they had the same rights to speak up if they’re being mistreated or exploited, that would largely resolve the challenge. And I think that’s what we’ve always advocated for at world Relief.

[00:22:17] Sandie Morgan: Wow. So we could spend, hours and hours in this space on visas, but. but we understand that. It may at times increase an entire family’s vulnerability to coercion and ultimately to some form of human trafficking. So Matthew, this is depressing and I need something to do about it.

[00:22:47] And I have people who call me and say, what can we do? And I think you have, opportunities for people to understand better, and we don’t even need to be experts on human rights. We just need to recognize the centrality of human dignity and I can do something for my fellow human being.

[00:23:13] Matthew Soerens: Yeah. I so appreciate that, Sandie. ’cause there are policies that are very dysfunctional and we can dwell on those all day and it’s important to be aware of them. We don’t help anyone, by ignoring the realities, but there’s also are ways that we can respond. some of that is at the local relational level, like get to know the immigrants in your community, not with the presumption that they’re all victims of trafficking ’cause they’re not, but when someone is in a hard spot, when you have a relationship where they feel safe to ask you, what can I do? It can be an incredibly important, way to serve. And then some of the challenges are systemic, and that’s the blessing of living in a democratic form of government, is we can speak into how those policies and systems work and to be really clear at world relief.

[00:23:55] We’re not. Partisan organization will never hear us saying, vote for Republicans or vote for Democrats, or, you know, that sort of thing. But we do wanna invite Republicans and Democrats and anyone else, in positions of authority to pursue policies that recognize the dignity of all human beings, um, rooted in that biblical principle, that affirmed the rule of law.

[00:24:16] And, one of the hard realities is that when the rule of law is not functioning well, people become vulnerable, that also affirmed the dignity and the unity of the family. there’s almost no one more vulnerable to human trafficking than a child who’s on their own. And that’s why laws like the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act,rightly. Treat children who are on their own distinctly from other categories of people.

[00:24:3 Recognizing the unique vulnerabilities. And even now, there’s some concerns that I have with some of the legislation that’s passed recently that could undermine, some of those important laws, protections for unaccompanied children.

[00:24:50] But the way we do that is we reach out to our members of Congress, who are US representatives to our senators at the state level as well, to legislators. and we try world relief and we work with partners, through the evangelical immigration table to. Point people to resources to make it very easy to advocate.

[00:25:05] Uh, people can do their own homework on what, policies they wanna support. But,we try to really stay on top of what’s being proposed in Washington and look at these policy proposals from a human dignity perspective. It’s doesn’t start with one party or the other, but starts with the presumption that all people are made in the image of God.

[00:25:21] And, There’s no perfect legislation, but we really think that our country can do better with a particular concern for those who are vulnerable. And, in the scriptures, which are our motivation at world relief, it’s the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner, which happen to be groups of people who today are still vulnerable and vulnerable to some of these dynamics of human trafficking that unfortunately are very real reality in the United States and around the world.

[00:25:41] I mean, when I say that migrants are uniquely vulnerable. I don’t just meet in the United States. I mean, it’s the central American migrant making their way through Mexico trying to find a safe place to be who was often at the most risk without legal protection and we see that in various parts of the world, unfortunately.

[00:25:57]Sandie Morgan:  So how do you suggest that we contribute to changing the conversation?

[00:26:16] Matthew Soerens: You know, one thing that we’re really passionate about at World Relief, I know you’ve got listeners across a lot broad spectrum of backgrounds, but we are really focused on the church and how do we help the church to be a part of responding to these dynamics? And a, a major starting point there is just talking about the realities of people who are vulnerable from a biblical perspective.

[00:26:26] I think I grew up in a wonderful church. I’m really thankful for the church that I grew up in. It taught me to love the Bible, but somehow I spent the first half of my life in church and yet I missed that. The Bible spoke to concerns of immigration, even though the Bible actually has so much to say on that topic.

[00:26:41] But it just somehow, it didn’t seem like a central focus or something that I realized had a connection to my everyday life, and I think that’s a place, you know, in churches. To start with a discipleship process of how do we think about these issues in ways that are rooted in, not in one political party’s perspective or the other ’cause that’s the, the policies matter.

[00:27:02] But if we start with partisanship on one side or the other, we’re, we’re not starting in the right place, but starting with God’s word, which in the very beginning starts with people being made in the image of God. And you know, what we’ve seen over decades at World Relief is that people who are trying to live out their faith.

[00:27:17] And loving their neighbors, they can play such a vital role in being in relationship with people who have been in vulnerable situations and may still be in vulnerable situations. That’s, I think for me, what gives me a lot of hope is I see more and more churches leaning into that conversation and saying, what can we do in the midst of a tense time in our country to actually love our neighbors in practical ways?

[00:27:38] Sandie Morgan: I think I’m going to recommend to some of our small group leaders that they listen to this podcast and not to find answers, but to begin to formulate their own questions and what it looks like in their community. I talk to one of our adjunct professors this week. As the holiday, I live in Santa Ana, which has a very high Hispanic population. Our federal building is less than two miles from my front door where we have National Guard presence that makes holiday times a little different than we’ve had in the past. And one of the concerns that the letter. That we talked about brings up is people being afraid to go out. And so we know they’re not going to work, they’re not getting paid, and now how do they feed their family?

[00:28:38] And so the food bank, other nonprofits, the civil society organization, the churches, they all step up and they have bags of food ready and no one comes. So we change how we do that and we go pick it up and we take it to them right where they are. I want people to start looking, in your neighborhood to find out who is doing this well from the perspective of caring for your neighbor, whether they are foreigners, orphans and widows unaccompanied children.

[00:29:20] I love that you say unaccompanied children instead of minors. They’re not just a number, and they are found in labor trafficking situations, 20 minutes from my house, trimming boneless chicken breasts and things like that. So this is part of our community, not just in wealthy California, but across our nation. Matthew, final remarks from you. What do you want us to remember about this conversation?

[00:29:59] Matthew Soerens: Yeah. You know, I so value this conversation, Sandie, and I think there’s so many people who are appropriately really passionate about combating human trafficking and I think that’s so vital that people of all backgrounds, but especially again, I think the church needs to lead on that. I think sometimes we’ve missed how connected that issue of trafficking is to the vulnerability of immigration.

[00:30:20] And it just doesn’t, it’s incoherent to say I’m passionate about helping people be free from human trafficking, but I hate immigrants. Like, that doesn’t make any sense because so often the people you’re talking about who are victims of human trafficking are immigrants. you know, and again, for a Christian, our faith compels us to love our neighbor.

[00:30:39] And not only the neighbors who have always followed the law perfectly, which would be probably none of us. but, All people who are made in God’s image. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t find better, that there’s not a place for government to do its job as well. We can affirm that. But even in that, to ask our government to treat people humanely, to use discernment as these lawmakers in California are asking that there’s a difference between someone who’s committed a violent crime and someone who’s only illegal offense was they overstayed a visa 40 years ago.

[00:31:04] Uh, we can treat people. Take into account those different circumstances. Maybe a fine is appropriate Foraying a Visa 40 years ago, whereas, you know, detention is appropriate for someone who, who’s a public safety threat.

[00:31:17] Sandie Morgan: So, point is to some resources.

[00:31:22] Matthew Soerens: Yeah. You know, we’ve done a lot at World Relief to really equip everyday citizens, but also churches to think about these issues, in both fact-based ways. And for those of us who are following Jesus in biblically informed ways. So worldrelief.org, we have a whole bunch of resources for pastors, for lay people, and then opportunities to volunteer with refugees and immigrants in various communities around the United States, and to provide financial support to those who are doing this work as well

[00:31:44]  I think is especially important right now at a time when there’s been,a lot less in terms of governmental support,for vulnerable immigrants and to do so around the world as well. Because again, these are not just US dynamics, these are global dynamics.

[00:31:58] Sandie Morgan: I appreciate that so much. I also, because I’ve spent time working with world relief, I recognize and value how it doesn’t matter where someone’s faith tradition is, they get the same kind of support that is appropriate to their faith tradition. And that is an element for all of us to emulate as we recognize human dignity.

[00:32:29] Matthew Soerens: Yes, absolutely. We are Christians. That’s what motivates us at World relief. But we serve people across a broad range of backgrounds. Those who share may share our faith. Those who come from a different religious tradition, and we believe they’re every one of them made an image of God and a neighbor whom we’re called to love.

[00:32:42] Sandie Morgan: We have enjoyed this conversation very much and it won’t be our last, we’ll put a link to the last time we had a conversation a couple years ago and we’ll make sure that we put you on the roster for when we move to YouTube soon. So thank you so much, Matthew.

[00:33:01] Matthew Soerens: Thanks, Sandie. Appreciate all the great work that you all do.

[00:33:04] Sandie Morgan: Thanks.

[00:33:04] Listeners, thank you for joining this important conversation. If you want to hear more from Matthew, be sure to check out the show notes @endinghumantrafficking.org. We’ve included a link to his book as well as his. Previous episode on our podcast. If you haven’t visited our site before, be sure to subscribe.

[00:33:30] That will keep you up to date on all of our episodes. And one more thing, will you help us grow? Join us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And if you know someone who would benefit from today’s conversation, invite them to subscribe and join us in learning how to be part of ending modern day slavery and human trafficking.

[00:33:57] Thank you for listening. I’ll be back in two weeks.

Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss the critical need for legislative reform to combat online sexual exploitation, focusing on Section 230 immunity and emerging laws like the Take It Down Act.

Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan is director of public policy at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in Washington DC. She has been an advocate for stronger laws to fight sexual exploitation and has had a role in passing key anti-trafficking laws like the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act and SESTA-FOSTA, which changed Section 230 to hold tech platforms more accountable for their role in enabling sex trafficking.

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast, brought to you by Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is a show where we equip you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in the fight to end human trafficking right where you are.

[00:00:23] Today, I’m honored to welcome Dr. Eleanor Gaetan to the show. She’s director of. Public policy at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation that’s in Washington DC. She has been an advocate for stronger laws to fight sexual exploitation and has had a role in passing key anti-trafficking laws. Like the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act and Cesta Fossa, which changed Section 230 to hold tech platforms more accountable for their role in enabling sex trafficking.

[00:01:07] sandie: Eleanor, we have been in the same movement for decades, and it is exciting to see how some of our long held dreams have come to fruition.

[00:01:21] And one of mine has been to have you on this podcast.

[00:01:24] 349-guest: Oh, professor Morgan, thank you so much. It’s really a delight to join the coast. I’m speaking to you from Washington DC I know you’re there in California, and we together embrace all the advocates in between.

[00:01:36] 349-sandie: Well, and for our listeners who have been long time subscribers, my former podcast intern, I Dallas.

[00:01:46] she’s working with Dr. Gataen. So I, it was like full circle, the both coasts, all of us hands held together in this work. It is hard work. It takes dedication and long-term determination. Some people might even say we’re a bit stubborn.

[00:02:09] Dr. Gaetan: Certainly stubborn have to be persistent and stubborn. But the great thing about the field of human trafficking and the, you know, this was only identified as a crime in the year 2000. So let’s recall that, that, that there wasn’t a name for human trafficking. until 22, the year 2000, and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

[00:02:27] So it’s a relatively new field and yet the advance, the progress has been as a result of human champions and a few, you know, it’s a small movement that has mountains.

[00:02:42] Sandie: and you were instrumental in passing the first Trafficking Victims Protection Act here in the us. Tell me about that.

[00:02:51] guest: So I worked for U-S-A-I-D in Romania, and Romania was an example of a country where when the. When communism ended in 1989, 1990, people had been trapped in their countries. People were desperate to travel, and they lost a lot of jobs, and so people really needed work and they were seeking work abroad.

[00:03:11] So young women were especially vulnerable to those promises of a babysitting job or a waitressing job, or an elder care job. Around Western Europe and around the world. and so vulnerable to the, the promises of traffickers. So we witnessed in Romania and Moldova entire villages of young women being being lured abroad, and so many of them abused badly in both legal brothels and illegal prostitution around, around the world.

[00:03:39] I mean, the US government was supporting a, a trafficking shelter in Romania and Bucharest that I was helping to manage as a democracy officer. And it was shocking to me that it wasn’t, it wasn’t a, a shelter, it was a detention center. So women were being abused in, say, legal brothels in Germany were arrested, repatriated to their home country.

[00:04:01] There’s 20 years old, they come back with nothing and then they’re put in virtually like a prison cell and told they’re supposed to stay in this shelter, but it’s a detention center. And of course they ran away. So I was witnessing the lack, complete lack of services to help people who had been traumatized at a young age in the sex trade, in the commercial sex trade around the world.

[00:04:23] Sandie: Wow. And I was in Athens, Greece at that time, and we saw the recidivism as the girls that were quote on quote rescued, just came back to us from Romania, from Moldova.I see their faces even as we’re talking right now.

[00:04:38] 349-guest: But to answer your question, it was all those stories from people like you in Greece and me in Bucharest feeding into Washington. So Congress was hearing from both feminist and faith-based organizations about this terrible crime that really takes advantage of the hopes and dreams of youth. I mean boys too, as we know, but mainly women and girls.

[00:05:04] And Congress was hearing that and became a bipartisan effort to exert US leadership to end this crime, define it and end it. But at the beginning, it  as you well know, professor Morgan, it really wasn’t international crime. And yet the US didn’t look at itself and say, to what extent do we have human trafficking, both sex trafficking, labor trafficking happening in our own country?

[00:05:27] That came a little later. with iterations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, but, but it really was the sources Americans abroad reporting on what they were seeing, what you and I were seeing around the world that caused the, the passage of TVPA.

[00:05:42] 349-sandie: Eventually that led to the ripple effect of similar legislation in dozens of countries and eventually over 150 and our US. community there in Athens, Greece was very much a part of eventually getting the Greek version passed before the Olympics arrived in 2004. And this really brings up how important legislation and policy is in our movement.

[00:06:20] I know a lot of my students, their dream is I’m gonna go and rescue girls. I’m gonna go and start a shelter, things like that. But. The work that William Wilberforce did is a model that I have stuck to in my career of trying to bring together thought leaders and policy implementers. Tell me why policy is critical?

[00:06:54] 349-guest: So we’ve just discussed really a great example in which, in, in human trafficking had to be defined legally before you could create a framework for both preventing the crime and prosecuting the criminals and helping the victims. Until we had that law. We didn’t have a framework of reference in order to both prevent it and help those who suffer from the crime.

[00:07:20] So policy is crucial to, making operational prevention efforts, protection efforts, prosecution efforts. And what has happened though is that with the internet trafficking is a great example. A perversely excellent example of how a crime changes as it moves online. It’s even more devastating today, the way people are groomed online, and then it moves into real life.

[00:07:51] But, but the internet has been, ruinous for many people who’ve fallen into the clutches of predators, and we don’t have sufficient legal response to online trafficking.

[00:08:06] 349-sandie: Well, in my world here, there was great celebration when Congress passed the Take It Down Act and I felt like people sort of set their tools down and said, ah, now we can, we can. We’re done. But that’s not the case, we still have to fight the battle on the new frontline, which is online, on the internet, where some folks, estimate 80% of recruiting happens.

[00:08:43] The stories of Sextortion are heartbreaking and must be addressed. So tell me what else we need to do besides the Take It Down Act

[00:08:58] 349-guest: Wonderful. So the Take It Down. Act was so crucial because it criminalizes for the first time the uploading of non-consensual sexually explicit material, and this was absolutely ruining lives, right? So cases of I’m, I’m friendly with a woman who had no idea that her boyfriend took pictures of them involved in sexual relations.

[00:09:22] She thought it was just happening in one room, and instead he made recordings. She had just turned 18. He posts them on PornHub, and in fact, only years later she gets a call from a high school friend and said, you know, I think you’re on PornHub.

[00:09:40] And she looks at that. She looks, looks it up. And indeed it is from, a, a moment that she thought was private and it’s online.

[00:09:50] It immediately triggered in her so much anxiety and upset. She tried to contact PornHub. There’s no human being you can reach to get material like that down. This is called image-based sexual abuse. And it wasn’t a federal crime until Take it Down Act. So. Now it’s a federal crime and also the the bill, the the legislation requires digital platforms to have a real life help desk.

[00:10:18] Where you can go and say, this is not consensual. Take it down. And the platform is required within 48 hours to take it down. Now this will remind you probably of copyright law, if I post three minutes of Beauty and the Beast on YouTube, it is immediately taken down because copyright law is so embedded in our legal framework in the United States, and you cannot just rip off some Disney film and post it as your own.

[00:10:44] little personal snippet on YouTube, but the same coverage didn’t help individuals who had their images posted on into the public. And of course, this, this friend of mine had that material circulated internationally. It showed up on 45 websites. There’s no way to take it down once it gets really viral and out in the world.

[00:11:05] so Post-traumatic stress disorder is common, losing jobs or relationships, it can be ruinous.

[00:11:15] Eleanor Gaetan: And interviewing, women who’ve suffered image-based sexual abuse really underscores the fact that it feels like an ongoing trauma. So. You can have a trafficking incident.

[00:11:26] It happened to you. You were violated by a predator. You had a horrible experience. It’s in the past and you go through a healing process, but when images are up online, you’re being raped and it’s online and you can’t get it down. You feel? You experience that as ongoing, ongoing sexual assault. So that’s why it’s, it was especially crucial for a utterly bipartisan bill.

[00:11:49] 349-guest: It was introduced a year ago by Senator Ted Cruz in Texas because teenagers who were victims of deep fakes take it down, act all. So includes AI generated deep fakes. So these young, these teens in a high school in Texas had images made of them by another high school, a a male in, in their high school.

[00:12:09] They couldn’t get it down. And they went to Senator Cruz and he was really moved by their personal story. And that’s where, that’s the origin of the, of the bill.

[00:12:19] 349-sandie: Wow. Okay, so what’s the next

[00:12:22] 349-guest: step, right? So that’s criminal, that criminalizes, image-based sexual abuse. But there’s another bill pending called the Defiance Act. And that, it targets the acts of uploaders, but it provides a civil right of action. So victims have a path to justice and can sue, sue those who commit this crime?

[00:12:45] In US law, of course, having a criminal component and a civil component really helped amplify the weight of the law and, and start to, you know, people need to be convinced they really shouldn’t do this. But if you suffer, no consequences, the criminality increases.

[00:13:04] 349-sandie: and for the victim, sending someone to prison does have a sense of justice, but also the element of restitution that is afforded more in our civil approach

[00:13:21] 349-guest: exactly.

[00:13:22] 349-sandie: so significant.

[00:13:24] So tell us about the Defiance Act.

[00:13:27] 349-guest: Well, defiance Act is fascinating because we have, like Senator Durbin from Illinois, a Democrat, very, very, excellent leader in this field. And Senator Graham, a Republican from South Carolina. Again, we’re protecting that bipartisanship on the house side. Uh, representative Ocasio-Cortez is, is the a, a lead sponsor together with.

[00:13:49] Uh, Lauren Lee, representative Lee is a Republican from Florida. This is so important to our movement. You know, party label is irrelevant when this horrible thing happens to you. Image-based sexual abuse or human trafficking, doesn’t matter what your politics are. So we’ve worked really hard on Capitol Hill.

[00:14:09] Um, ZI will only support bills that are. That have both Democrats and Republicans in support. So defiance is, is got that civil piece. So does a, a bill that, Senator Blackburn from Tennessee and Senator Coons from Delaware, uh, propose no fakes act. Now this goes to the problem of the, that the music industry has identified that voice likenesses can be AI generated voice likenesses can.

[00:14:38] Be projected on the internet and people don’t know the difference between, like this, this country singer was testifying, McBride, country, country Music Star testified with Cozzy’s lawyer Kristen Price. And but it also allowsAn individual who suffers from image-based sexual abuse to sue for damages.

[00:15:00] So there are a few approaches, to the image-based sexual abuse problem, but we need, it’s like, think of car safety. We need seat belts, we need airbags. We need speed limits. We need driver’s licenses, all of the above in order to protect people who are riding in cars Well. The internet has been the Wild West.

[00:15:21] There have been no restrictions on the internet. For a, for a policy explanation, I can provide a policy explanation for why the internet is so dangerous, especially to our youth. And so also addressing the fact that the internet is an utterly unregulated market. Now, I personally am a small government person.

[00:15:40] I think we should have a limited government. However, it is fundamental American jurisprudence, this idea of liability. If you harm another person, you should be liable. That is one of the reasons we walk into a Walmart or a, or a Target, and there’s no puddles on any floor. ’cause those, stores are highly aware of liability for if somebody slips and falls in that store, they will be sued.

[00:16:06] And individuals get big settlements right from, from slipping and falling. Right? It’s, it is the job of that store to maintain health and safety for those who walk into it,

[00:16:17] So we don’t have similar jurisprudence on, well, we don’t have correct laws to protect people online that we do to protect people in the bricks and mortar reality of three-dimensional world.

[00:16:31] And that is, is the frontier in which people like me work on policy. That is our most important frontier right now is to protect people online.

[00:16:41] 349-sandie: So, I remember the first time somebody really made me stop and think about this a long, this is a long time ago, Ernie Allen, and he started including me in letters to attorneys general about Section 230.

[00:17:00] So if you’re one of my students and you’re like, what, what? just look up section 230, do a lit review, but let’s get in a capsule. What is section 230 and why is it like a cornerstone in this battle?

[00:17:20] 349-guest: Excellent question. So it’s the section  230 is one provision of a bill called the Communications Decency Act. It was passed in 1996 when the internet was a baby, and Congress wanted to benefit this promising reality of the internet and the worldwide web. And so there had been some cases where, one of the early, like MySpace or an AOL, it, it, it’s a, one of the early manifestations of the internet.

[00:17:50] there was concern that how on earth could the internet company, which is really just a highway for information, how could it be held liable for activities? By those posting. Right. So it’s, it’s almost like saying the highway isn’t responsible for a drunk driver. Because that drunk driver is in a car going down the highway, just using the highway as, as a a, a transit, a method for transportation.

[00:18:16] And with that idea of the internet as a big neutral highway. The CDA, the Communications Decency Act included few provisions, that were like Good Samaritan provisions saying, you know, the, the, the internet service providers, the ISPs could not be held liable for  what, what was being posted and what was happening online, because they aren’t publishers, you know, they’re, they’re just like a highway for information.

[00:18:45] Okay. That bill was actually gutted by the Supreme Court around some First Amendment, questions. But what stood was the provisions known as CDA 230, which said, the internet service providers cannot be held responsible for what is being posted by the content that is being posted online.

[00:19:04] Right? That’s all protected by the First Amendment. But fast forward to today and so many courts interpreted those provisions as providing like a wall of immunity, an entire wall of immunity for these, social media platforms and an internet service providers. So we have a case, lemme give you an example.

[00:19:27] Let’s look at an example. We have a case against Twitter. Now it’s called X, but the case occurred when it was Twitter. Two boys, 13 year olds. They think they’re talking to a 16-year-old, and it’s Snapchat. It’s not a 16-year-old girl. She keeps asking them to do various sexual acts, including acts with each other, and when she wants to meet them, they block her.

[00:19:53] Two years later, so they’re 16. All those images and the boys of course thought it was disappearing. Right. Snap is a, is a platform where people think the, the images disappear. That Predator had made a video of all those separate images and it was child pornography. These were young teens, 13-year-old boys engaged in sexual activity that is by definition, child pornography.

[00:20:18] It was posted on Twitter, it was circulating on Twitter, and thank God somebody called the mom of one of the boys and said, your son is up in his room talking about taking his own life. Because he’s so mortified that these images of him full, fully unclothed are circulated at our high school. Mom intervened.

[00:20:40] She was a nurse intervened and, and, thank God this her son is alive today, but he still suffers the mortification of those images being blasted around the world. The family, excellent family. The mom and dad were both nurses and they shared shifts so that they would always be home for their kids.

[00:20:59] Alert. The police, the police come and say, are you sure you wanna file a report? Your son produced pornography, which is illegal. We could arrest him for producing

[00:21:10] 349-sandie: Mm.

[00:21:10] 349-guest: I mean, what crazy

[00:21:11] 349-sandie: Oh my

[00:21:12] 349-guest:Right? And then the family contacted Twitter and said, take it down. These are young boys. We verify they’re 13 years old in these videos.

[00:21:23] Twitter came back and said. This doesn’t violate our community standards and left the material up. The only reason that video was taken down was because the family’s pastor happened to have a friend who was a DHS, a Department of Homeland Security agent, flashed a badge from DC and, and Twitter took it down, eventually.

[00:21:45] So we have a case, we are with a group of lawyers representing that family. It’s mom is Jane Doe and, and the boy is John Doe. The two boys are, John doe’s. In the filing. So as we’ve entered discovery, we got through in into discovery. The Twitter actually says, we, we don’t care if you call this sex trafficking, because money was made by the advertising, right?

[00:22:07] So Twitter was monetizing those images and making money through the ads. That as people were viewing the material. So our legal argument is you’re monetizing commercial sex, sex sexual material, that’s commercial sex act. And so under the Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act, that’s sex trafficking, Twitter comes back and says, doesn’t even matter.We have the rights under CDA  230.

[00:22:35] That’s not our problem. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s on our websites, but that’s not our problem. CDA two 30 protects us, and, and we don’t have to take it down. We, we don’t need to deal with it even though they. They demonstrated that they knowingly were aware of this material online and they left it up.

[00:22:53] So this is a battleground. We’ve lost this lawsuit, but we hope it goes to the Supreme Court because it’s time for the Supreme Court to really look at this and say, what are you talking about? That’s child pornography, a federal offense. You cannot be facilitating child pornography online. That’s just one example of how, These companies really think they have no responsibility to take down material that is federal criminal material, and they hide behind CDA two 30 to leave it up.

[00:23:26] 349-sandie: So how do we begin at not just the national level, but at the local level to combat this

[00:23:38] to begin initiatives that call for reform. What can everyday people and politicians at school boards, politicians in local government, city state, professors, thought leaders in our universities? What’s our role in, CDA 230.

[00:24:05] 349-guest: So two schools of thought have emerged and California as is so often as a leader, California passed an excellent bill called the Age Appropriate Design Code,

[00:24:17] and it said companies are should be obligated. These products are used by youth, you know, adult used by all kinds of people all day long

[00:24:28]  before a product, a service, a platform is launched, it needs to be tested and we need to verify that it’s age appropriate and we need to make sure that unsafe products aren’t lost.

[00:24:41] So it’s also within the sort of product liability zone of the law. Right. And California, passed the age appropriate design code, which was passed in Vermont. For example, just a few weeks ago, it’s being challenged in court by the, the, the big tech companies. and, and we’ll see where that goes. But that idea is let’s look at these platforms from the product liability standpoint.

[00:25:06] So it sort of sides steps the CDA immunity problem and brings new legal theory to bear in order to force these damn companies to be responsible. They’re unbelievably, there’s like so little accountability, an excellent book,  just finished reading it this week. There’s a book called Careless People.

[00:25:29] It’s written by Sarah Wynn Williams. She was for 10 years, the Global Public policy leader at Facebook, or Meta, you know, meta owns Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. And she testified in the Senate, as she says in her book, Careless People that Meta Tracks children so closely. And knows even their negative emotions, they target ads to kids who are suffering, like fear of having being too fat.

[00:25:58] So they’re targeting those kids who fear they’re too fat with material about diets and even dis eating disorder material. It’s terrifyingly irresponsible, and yet they hide behind CDA 230. So the age appropriate design code in California, we’ll see how it goes in the courts, but more states should probably pass the age appropriate design code.

[00:26:25] But also, states are looking at AI. Let’s, what about curbing ai? You know, artificial intelligence is being used. To, to generate deep fakes, pornographic material, using your face, but putting in a different body, and that’s terrible for, for the victim too. So state level legislative action is relevant. meanwhile, we just this week a senate office shared with us a bill that would repeal CDA 230, and we were very excited to see for Democrat senators and for Republican senators both.

[00:27:03] Already committed to introducing that bill. It hasn’t been introduced yet, so I’m not gonna say who the, members were, but high level, important members of the US Senate have said, enough is enough. We must, force these companies to be accountable ’cause they are not policing themselves. So there’s, there is a bill pending in, in, we believe there will be a.

[00:27:24] A bill pending in Congress to repeal CDA 230. I’m gonna mention one thing, that was we were disturbed at in, that came out of the house side. We’ve all heard about the big beautiful bill, the budget reconciliation bill on the house side. It include a very disturbing set of provisions that said no state can regulate AI for 10 years.

[00:27:46] Wait a second. A moratorium on state regulation of AI. Why? Our country is a, is a set of 50 states that have their own, you know, have community standards, have their own laws. Why would states not be able to regulate AI? So protests have been raised from, from Republican and Democrat senators. So we hope it will not succeed on the Senate side and we’ll nip it in the bud.

[00:28:11] But that’s how powerful big tech is in Congress, that they’re able to engineer a really absurd, right, 10 year moratorium, guess what that is? That is giving AI that same kind of immunity that the internet had under CDA 230 we’re, we’re still struggling to try to get away from the utter. Corporate irresponsibility that CDA two 30 gave us, and now we’re facing an attempt to give that to ai.

[00:28:40] sandie: Wow. Okay. So much to think about here. Let’s give some links and suggestions for how people can gain the knowledge and insight to be an articulate, advocate for change in their local community. I am all about pursuing knowledge so that we can show up in these spaces with more than passion, more than anger.

[00:29:14] So give us three examples of resources we can look to.

[00:29:21] 349-guest: So I’ll send you a link to Professor Mary Gra Leary’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in which she really deep dives into CDA 230. It’s an excellent, testimony from earlier this year. That’s superb. There, there have been a number of investigative pieces. The Wall Street Journal has done several investigations that are good reads.

[00:29:45] for example, in 2023, they revealed that social media algorithms connect pedophiles to children. They, they provide pedophiles with more and more links to kids. You know, quite shocking. Or in your introduction, you, you mentioned, so I can send you links to some of the exceptional Wall Street Journal investigations.

[00:30:10] There is a super law center called the Social Media Victims Law Center. They’re featured in a new documentary, it’s called, Can’t Look Away.

[00:30:21] 349-sandie: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:21] 349-guest: this documentary is just extremely well-informed about the, the, CDA  230 immunity problem. And also, the tragedies of families who’ve lost their loved ones because of irresponsibility that the CDA 230 immunity promotes.

[00:30:38] Right now, this Social Media Victims Law Center has over 4,000 families whose, whose children have been harmed or who have lost their kids as a result of responsibility in social media. and, and there the Social Media Victim’s Law Center website is quite informative. So I’ll, I’ll send you that link.

[00:30:58] There have been over 24 Congressional briefings on this subject since 2019. So in the last six years, over 24. Congress is about the best educated on the online harms. We are hoping this Congress 2024. no 2025, 2026, the hundred 19th Congress is the one that will get serious.

[00:31:22] 349-sandie: Okay. I think we will have to have another conversation for sure. And I wanna bring this also to, you mentioned the faith-based community, and I think this discussion belongs in our local

[00:31:43] religious community, the youth leaders, the folks doing parenting classes, how do parents respond? So I’m gonna probably call you and ask you to come back and talk with me about that. All right?

[00:31:58] 349-guest: Absolutely

[00:31:58] Love to, and, and I know that the White House has set up a faith-based office, that is looking at these issues. So hopefully we’ll get some more federal guidance because one thing, and you know, professor Morgan from the human trafficking movement, it’s, it’s, there isn’t enough federal.

[00:32:17] Federal guidance on best practices. You know, there are jurisdictions around the country that are doing some very good work or, or places where, like San Diego has a, a superb district, attorney or who, who has helped engineer like MOUs between police and direct service providers. And it’s very, it’s it like women who are in exploitation or being exploited, being trafficked and getting them into services. There are some jurisdictions that are doing this well, and then there are places that are absolutely, without model. You know, they’re not, they, they, they don’t have a highly functional system for moving victims into services. So I wish we got more tips and tips from the federal government, right? The Department of Justice sees all this happening around the country.

[00:33:03] Well, tell us who’s doing the best job.

[00:33:06] 349-sandie: Those are good questions. I’m gonna start a list of questions and look for guests that will join us to discuss those. Dr. Gataen, I am delighted to have this conversation.

[00:33:24] We’re gonna keep it going, and thank you so much for being part of our podcast today.

[00:33:30] 349-guest: It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much. I hope I can come back on because it’s, it’s so important and you’ve done such remarkable work over the years by combating human trafficking. Thank you for everything you’ve done.

[00:33:43] 349-sandie: Oh, thank you. And we’ll get together maybe in the same space in the spring for Ensure Justice. And I want our listeners to start planning now for March, 2026. Thanks so much.Have a great day.

[00:34:00] 349-guest: Bye-bye.

[00:34:01] Wow, Eleanor, thank you for shedding light surrounding section 230 in the fight against online sexual exploitation.

[00:34:10] Your expertise really helps me understand better how advocacy and legislative reform play vital roles in protecting communities. Listeners, I encourage you to take the next step by visiting our website, @endinghumantrafficking.org to check out our show notes and other episodes. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the important conversations we’re having.

[00:34:45] We’d also love your help in growing this podcast. You can start by just following us and connecting on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. And if you know someone who would benefit from today’s episode, invite them to subscribe and join our community. Thank you for listening. I’ll be back in two weeks.