When Federal and State Systems Converge: Foreign National Human Trafficking Victims Within Juvenile and Family Courts

This article highlights the concerns facing foreign national children who are both victims of human trafficking and under the jurisdiction of juvenile and family courts. Human trafficking is modern day slavery in which individuals, including children, are compelled into service and exploited. Foreign national human trafficking victims in juvenile and family court systems must navigate both the state system and a complex federal immigration system. This article explains the federal benefits available to these children and identifies the best practice approaches for juvenile and family court systems to increase identification of and support for foreign national child trafficking victims.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90039/1/j.1755-6988.2011.01073.x.pd

Incorporating a \u27Best Interests of the Child\u27 Approach into Immigration Law and Procedure

United States immigration law and procedure frequently ignore the plight of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This ignorance means decision-makers often lack the discretion to protect a child from persecution by halting the deportation of a parent, while parents must choose between abandoning their children in a foreign land and risking the torture of their children. United States immigration law systematically fails to consider the best interests of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This failure has resulted in a split among the federal circuit courts of appeals regarding whether the persecution a child faces may be used to halt the deportation of a parent. The omission of a best interests of the child approach in immigration law and procedure for children who are accompanied by a parent fails to protect foreign national and United States citizen children. Models for eliminating these protection failures can be found in United States child welfare law and procedure, international law, and the immigration law of other nations, such as Canada. Building from these models, the United States must implement and give substantial weight to the best interests of directly affected children in its immigration law and procedure

Introduction to Special Symposium Feature: Successes and Failures in International Human Trafficking Law

The Essays in this issue of the Michigan Journal of International Law showcase the results of an important and historic symposium held at the University of Michigan Law School in February 2011. Acknowledging the ten-year anniversary of both the international Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons (Trafficking Protocol), and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the United States, the conference brought together an extraordinary group of legal scholars, government officials, and practitioners to examine the successes and failures in international human trafficking law. The need to evaluate both the successes and failures in antitrafficking law is evident in the existence of the laws themselves. This symposium focused on evaluations of the contemporary attempts to end modern-day slavery because historical approaches to combating slavery by simply relying on legal prohibitions have proven ineffective and insufficient

We Don\u27t Need To See Them Cry: Eliminating the Subjective Apprehension Element of the Well-Founded Fear Analysis for Child Refugee Applicants

This article addresses a barrier to effective protection faced by child refugee applicants. Currently all refugee applicants, including infants, are required to satisfy two elements of well-founded fear. All applicants must prove that they face an objective risk of persecution and that they subjectively fear this risk. But children often cannot exhibit the subject apprehension element of the test. As a result, UNHCR, and the U.S and Canadian governments issued guidelines that encourage decision makers to accept other evidence to prove a child\u27s subjective apprehension when the child is unable to exhibit fear. However, this approach does not go far enough. By allowing subjective apprehension to remain a part of the well-founded fear analysis for child refugee applicants, the threat of effective protection being denied is quite real. A recent case in the United States highlights this point. A nine-year old hearing impaired child was denied asylum by an immigration judge despite objectively clear evidence of potential risk of persecution simply because the child did not satisfy the subjective apprehension requirement. In order to protect child refugee applicants from such mis-guided decisions in the future, this article proposes a solution of only requiring objective risk evidence from child refugee applicants in order to establish a well-founded fear

Examining the Reality of Foreign National Child Victims of Human Trafficking in the United States

Human traffickers prey on the vulnerabilities of other people. Poverty, lack of education, and language barriers are keys that human traffickers use to successfully exploit others. For foreign national children who have been trafficked in the United States, these same vulnerabilities are often ignored by the immigration system. From its inception, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) has been touted as a tool to combat grave human rights violations that affect children. In fact, the TVPA\u27s legislative history is rife with stories, statistics, and anecdotes involving children-often young girls. The TVPA has always recognized the failure of a one-size-fits-all approach for victims of trafficking, and that the needs of child victims can be quite different than the needs of adult victims. In light of this reality, a number of TVPA provisions make special exceptions or accommodations for children. On paper, these accommodations may seem satisfactory. Unfortunately, for trafficked children within the immigration system, like the ones described below, the reality can be quite different

COVID-19 Pandemic’s Impact on Online Sex Advertising and Sex Trafficking

Disruptive social events such as the COVID-19 pandemic can have a significant impact on sex trafficking and the working conditions of victims, yet these effects have been little understood. This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on sex trafficking in the United States, based on analysis of over one million sexual service advertisements from the online platform Rubratings.com, using indicators of third-party management as potential proxies for trafficking. Our results show that there have been measurable changes in online commercial sexual service advertising, both with and without third-party management indicators, in the United States, with a significant decrease occurring around the time of the start of the pandemic and the issuance of stay-at-home orders followed by an increase to levels well above pre-pandemic levels corresponding in time to when COVID-related restrictions were relaxed. We argue that the initial decrease could have been induced by a loss of demand for sexual services due to pandemic-related health concerns, but that a confluence of factors, including the lack of economic and social support for those working in the commercial sex industry, may have increased the number of people vulnerable to being exploited and becoming trafficking victims. This research adds to the under-standing of the way sex trafficking adapts to events in the public sphere

Incorporating a \u27Best Interests of the Child\u27 Approach into Immigration Law and Procedure

United States immigration law and procedure frequently ignore the plight of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This ignorance means decision-makers often lack the discretion to protect a child from persecution by halting the deportation of a parent, while parents must choose between abandoning their children in a foreign land and risking the torture of their children. United States immigration law systematically fails to consider the best interests of children directly affected by immigration proceedings. This failure has resulted in a split among the federal circuit courts of appeals regarding whether the persecution a child faces may be used to halt the deportation of a parent. The omission of a best interests of the child approach in immigration law and procedure for children who are accompanied by a parent fails to protect foreign national and United States citizen children. Models for eliminating these protection failures can be found in United States child welfare law and procedure, international law, and the immigration law of other nations, such as Canada. Building from these models, the United States must implement and give substantial weight to the best interests of directly affected children in its immigration law and procedure

Introduction to Special Symposium Feature: Successes and Failures in International Human Trafficking Law

The Essays in this issue of the Michigan Journal of International Law showcase the results of an important and historic symposium held at the University of Michigan Law School in February 2011. Acknowledging the ten-year anniversary of both the international Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons (Trafficking Protocol), and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the United States, the conference brought together an extraordinary group of legal scholars, government officials, and practitioners to examine the successes and failures in international human trafficking law. The need to evaluate both the successes and failures in antitrafficking law is evident in the existence of the laws themselves. This symposium focused on evaluations of the contemporary attempts to end modern-day slavery because historical approaches to combating slavery by simply relying on legal prohibitions have proven ineffective and insufficient

Examining the Reality of Foreign National Child Victims of Human Trafficking in the United States

Human traffickers prey on the vulnerabilities of other people. Poverty, lack of education, and language barriers are keys that human traffickers use to successfully exploit others. For foreign national children who have been trafficked in the United States, these same vulnerabilities are often ignored by the immigration system. From its inception, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) has been touted as a tool to combat grave human rights violations that affect children. In fact, the TVPA\u27s legislative history is rife with stories, statistics, and anecdotes involving children-often young girls. The TVPA has always recognized the failure of a one-size-fits-all approach for victims of trafficking, and that the needs of child victims can be quite different than the needs of adult victims. In light of this reality, a number of TVPA provisions make special exceptions or accommodations for children. On paper, these accommodations may seem satisfactory. Unfortunately, for trafficked children within the immigration system, like the ones described below, the reality can be quite different