Joel Quirk (BTS): You've worked on anti-trafficking in both law and policy in the US. What's happened to anti-trafficking since Trump returned to the presidency in January?
Luis CdeBaca: There is still bipartisan consensus in the US that anti-trafficking is a valuable thing to do. We see it on Capitol Hill, in churches and across the left and right. That hasn’t changed. But trafficking’s position in this second Trump White House is different to the first.
During the first term, Ivanka Trump was leading trafficking work in the White House. She had some good people working for her. The Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP) in the Department of State, the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) in the Department of Labor, and USAID were all working on this too.
Those at the top were Republicans, but not weird conspiracy-theory Republicans. They were ‘governance Republicans’, for lack of a better term, and they kept an eye on other parts of the Republican coalition. They were able to exempt trafficking programmes from anti-immigrant policies. Funding priorities, the role of the survivor advisory group, even inclusion of LGBTQ communities in the TIP Report – all of those things continued through the transitions from Obama to Trump and then to Biden. We’re not seeing that in this second Trump administration.
Instead, we’re seeing some chickens come home to roost. Back then, people with anti-immigrant or anti-women priorities were prevented from cutting victim care, or treating trafficking as a niche impediment to ‘real’ diplomacy. But now they have an unfettered hand, and evidently long memories.
In the first round of cuts, which were done by the administration under the guise of the Orwellian-named ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, the TIP office was not targeted the way USAID and ILAB were. It was not eliminated, as USAID was. But then, another round of personnel cuts made it clear that TIP was not immune to severe layoffs. What I’m hearing from the inside indicates that this happened as much because of resentment over the office’s successes and its reputation as a killjoy within the national security establishment, as because of any policy priorities or cost-savings rationale.
It may come as a surprise to those who saw the TIP Office as an instrument of US neoliberal foreign policy, but traditional foreign policy elements had been trying to kill the office from its inception. They saw it as a killjoy and raiser of inconvenient truths. This time, they almost succeeded.
The TIP office might still exist, but it isn’t out of the woods
I’m glad that the office has survived (though diminished), and that this autumn it put out what appears to be an accurate and well-researched TIP Report. But decades of experience have been lost. It’s not just about TIP though: without the office’s agency partners, the whole effort doesn’t work. Let me give you an example.
From a programmes perspective, the other agencies were where the real money was. Their projects were multi-million-dollar, multi-year programmes. When I worked in the TIP office, it would receive $15-25m to spread across a funding cycle. Its grants were small – around the $250,000-$750,000 mark – and it had to make a lot of trade-offs. If you did something in Belize, that meant you didn’t do something in Burundi.
ILAB and USAID were doing the long-term projects of developing structures and monitoring programmes, which freed up the TIP office to work more nimbly. It could tackle acute problems now, like mining camps in northeastern Peru, because it wasn’t focussed on creating the long-term, sustainable change that large development projects hope to achieve. TIP could move quickly to an emerging problem, and through a combination of diplomacy, convening, and seed funding, start an intervention that would be incorporated later on into the slower-moving but deeper institutional approach of traditional development funders. With the latter’s funding and staff cut, that model breaks down.
The TIP office might still exist, but it isn’t out of the woods. It’s been announced that it’s moving to another part of the State Department, which is not cool. Thankfully that is the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, rather than the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. If that had happened, it would have revealed a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of this administration about the concept of ‘trafficking’. Anti-trafficking is about civil and human rights, not population management or immigration enforcement.
The new organisational chart, which has the ambassador reporting to an assistant secretary instead of being their equal, is a real down-grade. It will weaken the office’s ability to stand up to the regional bureaus and those who practice foreign policy expediency. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about the organisational changes, the loss of experienced staff, and the funding cuts. We’ll have to see where that goes.
Joel: You make it sound like the first Trump administration was more serious when it came to trafficking. But Trump was telling reporters in 2019 that America needs a wall because bound women were being smuggled over the border with blue tape over their mouths, which was both memorable and fantastical. Trump 1.0 was also inviting vigilante rescue groups to White House anti-trafficking events. From the outside, it seemed demonstrably unserious.
Luis: There are warring impulses in any American administration. And whether it’s 1890 or 2020, different voices in government have always raised the alarm by pushing sensationalist versions of trafficking. This was the case in the first Trump administration, but also in the Biden and Obama administrations.
It’s easy for critics of the entire anti-trafficking enterprise to point to those voices and say, “that’s what anti-trafficking is for the US government.” And to the casual observer, the work of the senior policy operating group, the anti-trafficking task force, and much day-to-day work on human trafficking probably does look like an awful lot of taped mouths.
But within this ecosystem, there are political performers, and there are the career people and experts. The latter generally want the former to stop taking up their time, so they can get back to work. To the people doing direct service provision and working on cases, the theatrical stuff is off to the side.
The critics have been saying for 20 years that it’s all just flash and fluff. But a lot of us doing the work didn’t pay any attention to the flash and fluff. It existed so that certain groups on Capitol Hill and in civil society would keep supporting us. And when we got in the room with those groups of people, rather than blackballing them for their clumsy, sexist, racist posters, we’d talk to them about best practices. We’d back up those conversations with materials written by folks who are critical of the movement. It all looked very different from the inside.
My worry now is that, with this new administration and with these new bureaucratic changes, there’s a danger of it actually becoming all flash and fluff. Trump might make that long-standing accusation finally come true. Hopefully the remaining career people can make sure the work still gets done. But everybody is going to have to band together to stand up against the ridiculousness. Or all we're going to have is celebrity, rescue-style stuff coming out of this administration.
Joel: Let’s talk about that ‘real’ work, which for much of your career has focused upon criminal prosecutions. Critics often say that government anti-trafficking work is sold as human rights, but it’s really about criminal justice. That comes with limitations. Criminal justice isn’t good at upstream interventions, but instead focuses on the downstream mess. And prosecutions don't effect the structural changes needed to deal with why people are marginalised, exploited, and vulnerable. How much of the now familiar critique of criminal justice lands from your perspective?
Luis: I was the Involuntary Servitude and Slavery Coordinator and a lead prosecutor in the late 1990s, when the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the UN Trafficking Protocol were both being written. I’ve prosecuted many, many traffickers. And there are over 25 years of recorded statements of me saying, “we cannot prosecute our way out of this.”
That’s why we set up the 3P framework for trafficking: prevention, protection, prosecution. It was revolutionary at the time to not just default to prosecution only, but to conceive of the protection and prevention goals as being equally important, and we did it despite facing opposition. I remember one focus group in 1998 that illustrates the gravitational pull of the “prosecution P”. Through the Justice Department’s Office of Violence Against Women, we brought in some victims and groups working with them to specifically explore what prevention could entail. But their interventions kept returning to how they wanted more prosecutions with better outcomes.
There was a reason for this. The front-line participants kept saying that unless a crew leader goes to jail, unless a pimp goes to jail, then nobody is going to believe that victimised people have rights in America. If your position is that people have the right to not have this happen to them, then those who have impunity have to be seen as punishable. I jokingly say we sent them home without cookies because we weren’t able to leave those two days with a clear vision for the protection P,” but the reality is that many of the people at that gathering became key voices for the modern approach. Some of them founded the Freedom Network of service providers, worked on legislation and implementation, and pioneered prevention efforts such as the Fair Food Program.
Prevention has always been tricky, and a lot of clumsy things attach themselves to it as a result. Things like changing the definition of trafficking to incorporate men who go to prostitutes, as the demand-side ‘abolitionists’ have tried to do. Or corporate social responsibility (CSR) elements that look like prevention, but can then be neutralised by tame auditors or bad multi-stakeholder initiatives. It’s a real mixed bag, I think part because people are simply thinking, “well, we’ve got to try something.”
This is an ecosystem and we need everybody and every solution in it
In the meantime, people with power are committing crimes against people without power. The only entity that can change that power structure is the state. I, and everybody who worked for me on the criminal justice aspects of the issue, always felt that our involvement effected the ultimate power shift.
You have somebody who says, “We don't have any power against the boss because he knows people in the United States. We don't have our documents, we don't know where we are, and we don't know who we can go to.” The boss knows this, and uses it to take advantage of them for a long time. Then one day, the government comes and stands, not with the boss, which is what everybody expects, but with the workers.
To me, that was the criminal justice response we aspired to with the TVPA and the UN Trafficking Protocol. We always knew that it was going to be a really heavy lift getting others on board. How to take that to the Malaysians, or to the Singaporeans? They were still using laws that weren’t on the side of workers. And we wanted to convince them of a post-2000 concept of criminal justice that did the opposite.
Joel: I’m not questioning your personal motivation, but I tend to get anxious whenever it feels like the state is being positioned on the side of the angels. Look at tied visa schemes for migrant workers. These schemes ensure that workers can’t access rights, can't organise, and have no remedy for wage theft or sexual exploitation. Yet states around the world are setting them up and enforcing them. There is plenty of evidence out there that the state – including the US government – routinely stands with oppressors and exploiters.
You’re talking about civil law, but they’re all the same system. They all depend upon state violence channelled through the justice system. Because that's what the justice system is. Whether you're doing it in the context of a criminal case, a civil case or an administrative case, lurking in the background of all of it is the power of the state, right?
There are a lot of things we would like to see states stop doing, or areas in which we’d like to see states transfer some of their power over to workers. We push for those things – and that’s beyond just the trafficking world or my old offices. It includes all of us who want have these things.
But we also have to deal with some of the crisis today. When it rains, it’s suddenly an imperative to fix the hole in your roof. You can’t be sitting back and saying, “you should have fixed the hole in the roof before today.”
We need to make sure people can come forward and report a labour trafficking problem, so we can put some of these bad farm labour contractors into the system and start suing them for wages. And that continues to be a challenge.
Everything works together in a systemic way, and you try to add more stuff to make things better for different groups of people. Then you go back and recalibrate. And we have to ask ourselves, is this a moment where we can push to organise new work sites? Or would having a new ILO convention help? For example, the domestic servant convention gives us the tools to support abused domestic servants that we just don’t have with the Palermo Protocol, EU conventions or even national laws. This is an ecosystem and we need everybody and every solution in it.
It’s messy, but that’s the reality of working on this stuff in government
Organisational charts can get in the way of things too. Sometimes we’d end up speaking to people from the wrong ministry at meetings with other governments. It seemed like the right ministry in that these were the people who cared, but they didn’t have the power to get anything done. We really needed instead to speak to somebody from the Ministry of Justice or Ministry of Interior, because the US or European diplomats and I weren’t going to get anywhere trying to empower the Ministry of Labour or the Ministry of Women and Children, whether in southeast Asia or in the Gulf.
Working with a government on this stuff is messy. I might be there on Monday to say people need their passports. The folks from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (DRL) come the next day to talk about disappearances. On Wednesday, somebody else is there to talk about refuelling US Navy ships. And on Thursday, somebody else arrives to talk about soybean production. And what we and DRL were raising earlier can and does create tensions that place these important military and economic conversations at risk. It’s messy, and I see this more now I'm out. But that’s the reality of working on this stuff in government. When the people with contradictory impulses work in the same building, you have to go up against them every day.
I try to get it through to my students that you can't over or under attribute things to states, because states are so many different things simultaneously. What we can know is that, at some level, states are going to act in their self-interest. So if you're there to do human rights work, you're going to have to grab as much leverage for that every time you can.
Joel: No one really thinks we have an international rules-based order anymore, if we ever did – especially when it comes to US policies. How can you engage in trafficking advocacy from a US vantage point, when it's clear that a callous indifference to systems and humans is now firmly established as the operational default?
Luis: There’s been a big loss of trust, which is a grave danger. The notion of American expertise largely comes from the fact that the US never stopped doing these cases, going all the way back to 1865 but especially since the 1930s. In the early years of the TVPA, we had two or three generations of lawyers who'd been doing the cases, myself included. Now we've got people in the US government who basically want to get rid of the experts.
So we’re left asking ourselves, now what? Everything that you see, from fake multi-stakeholder initiatives to whitewashing auditing, shows that you can't trust businesses to self-police. And a lot of the workers’ groups exist on the sufferance of their governments – when they get too effective, they get shut down.
All of us are going to have to come together to figure out what fighting trafficking should actually look like. Even if the US or the EU aren’t looking good at the moment, without them what do we have? Because if it's going to devolve to Riyadh or Kuala Lumpur, then those states will act in ways that – at the very least – aren’t as internally contradictory as the US or EU, and that won’t help anybody.
Joel: Let’s step back to look at the sector as a whole. It feels to me like anti-trafficking has become increasingly incoherent over time. This work now covers supply chains, child soldiers, migrant domestic workers, various forms of commercial sex, and a host of others. And much of this expansion can be traced back to funding. There's this perception that if you can reconfigure your existing portfolio and make it an anti-trafficking project, you’ll get visibility, resources and access that you wouldn't otherwise have had. If the money disappears, does it all fall apart?
Luis: That assumes there's trafficking money. What countries call “trafficking money” is often actually pre-existing programmes for labour or women's rights. They tack the word trafficking on so the US will give them credit for it, or so they can put it in their reporting.
Congress started doing that a long time ago so that they wouldn't have to actually spend money on trafficking. And that’s partly because the money is not there, it’s in labour. Budgets at the DOL and ILAB didn’t increase because the word trafficking came in. ILAB’s budget was around $30m after it was set up, and it expanded under Obama. Internally, there are decisions to call it anti-trafficking money, which then needs to be spent on trafficking projects – or on good prevention work.
The reality is that the philanthropic funders have largely left over the past ten years. There were a lot of people who unfortunately heard the critiques and walked away. They decided to spend the money on climate or other projects instead of working in an area that seemed consumed by internal fights.
It’s always assumed there’s a Mr. Big of international trafficking out there. That just isn’t true
Just to give one example of how tensions and turf come together to put grit in the gears: in the 1990s, the word trafficking basically got grafted onto efforts against forced labour – called involuntary servitude and slavery in the US – over the protests of those of us who were working on those cases at the time. Most of the cases were forced labour, because forced prostitution was handled by a different regime that focused on movement and morality instead of human rights or labour rights.
From my point of view, if acquiescing to the term “trafficking” was the price of including people in forced prostitution in the protections of Article IV or the 13th Amendment, as opposed to arresting them as immoral or migrant prostitutes, so be it. But then it felt that self-identified “forced labour people” started accusing “trafficking people” of being more carceral than they actually were, or of not understanding the traditional ILO tripartite approach, or of having all the money. And everybody in the real trafficking world of victim care and investigations, trying to make ends meet, is going, “we don't understand how that's the case.”
Joel: You're talking about international development aid and humanitarian assistance, but there are other funding pots. There’s a huge amount of cash for anti-trafficking service delivery and psychosocial support within the US and elsewhere.
Luis: There's cash circulating there, but it's dwarfed by the amount that circulates in child protection or combatting domestic violence. In 2023, the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services got roughly about $125m for victim programmes. That sounds like a lot, until you realise that’s serving 57 states and territories as well as hundreds of tribal governments.
The anti-trafficking world might look at the anti-trafficking spend in the US and say, “wow, that's a lot.” But this is only a small percentage of the tens of billions of dollars that get assigned domestically to tackling violence against women or to child protection. Without labelling it as such, trafficking victims would still be getting subsumed into the broader victimised population, and wouldn’t get services that are optimised for their experiences or the legal avenues provided by the trafficking law.
When trafficking money isn’t interrogated, it becomes easy for governments to say they're spending money on trafficking by claiming credit for everything they are doing for victims of violence or other social harms.
Governments would try to get credit for general anti-poverty or education campaigns as anti-trafficking spend. They’d claim they’d made a choice to address root causes as opposed to investigating cases; meanwhile the country was out of compliance with Palermo and neither serving survivors or dismantling slavery/trafficking operations. Their “root cause” spending was only tangentially related, such as a water project or school funding that was going to be done regardless of whether it was labelled as a trafficking response. We sometimes had to fight internally with those in the State Department’s regional bureaus, who wanted to let “their” countries off the hook in that way.
But rather than recognising that countries might be wildly overstating their spending on trafficking, there was a ‘how-dare-trafficking-be-so-well-funded’ response from some people in the movement. I heard this a lot.
Joel: We've talked about anti-trafficking being an ecosystem, and that feels useful for analytical purposes. But a lot of people want it to be a social movement. Is it?
Luis: I’ll start with how trafficking itself is organised, because there are a lot of similarities. We’ve found that the top down, hierarchical structure is a thing of the past now. Traffickers can pick up the phone and send migrants somewhere, or advertise for workers in a multitude of different ways.
Labour recruiting in organised crime has changed. It’s always been assumed there’s a Mr. Big of international trafficking out there. That just isn’t true, because everybody's more networked now.
It’s the same in counter-trafficking – we’re a network rather than a triangular structure of organisations. It's a community because of the work. And as more people are doing the work, more people are reading each other's stuff and getting to know and trust each other. The work is the driver, rather than some pinnacle of organisation.
A lot of people believed slavery ended in 1865, but really, that was just the beginning of enforcing it
Let’s say there was some hierarchical “Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking” that suddenly decided everyone should now use a particular word, or a particular verb tense. Of course that doesn't work. People just use whatever word they want, and what they need to get the job done. I would love it if we could all get together in a room and hash things out and make those connections, but this is way more than just 20 people.
Thankfully, these days a movement doesn't have to be hierarchical to be a movement. What’s important are the voices and the ideas, respect, and a shared end. That’s why the creation of Beyond Trafficking and Slavery was so important. From my perspective within government, BTS posts gave voice to things that we were seeing on the ground, and provided a way to bring concerns into the policy and advocacy space.
I thought about that when you ran the interview with Humanity United titled “Why do anti-trafficking donors fund their critics?” I think that contributors to BTS underestimated just how much their insights were influencing and advancing those of us in government who were trying to move past the ideological traps of the Bush Administration’s initial implementation of the TVPA and Palermo Protocol.
Joel: There's a lot of chasing the next big thing in anti-trafficking. There's this attitude of, ‘I don't want to wait. I want it solved now.’ It seems like it makes people chase rabbits down holes.
Luis: Is it solvable, though? I never want to give up on this, and maybe it's because I was tasked with enforcing the end of slavery in the US. At that point, a lot of people believed slavery ended in 1865, but really, that was just the beginning of enforcing it.
So you end up having to do your time in the trenches and then pass it off to somebody else. And this is a place where a carceral lens can actually be helpful. I came out of working in the women's movement and on Latino civil rights. Not one of my colleagues there ever said anything like, “we are going to end violence against women” or “we are going to end racial violence.” Because they know there’s a man who was born today who will end up raping somebody 30 years from now, and there is somebody who will murder somebody else 30 years from today because of racial animus.
In the same way, there is somebody who will force somebody else to work against their will 30 years from now. And when that happens, I want somebody to do the things that we developed to be effective for that person.
Ideally, very few people will need that intervention. But it’s a complex task. We’re trying to make it so that somebody born today into a patriarchal, racist, capitalistic society is not going to manifest those ills onto somebody else 30 years from now.
I don't even think I would have said it was solvable when I was young and hungry. It's much more the case that we do a good job fighting against this tragedy, but we also know there's going to be another murder, another enslavement. And maybe we just do better for the victim, or their family, or we forge a better society which makes it less likely to happen. I don't think that's giving up. But this is endemic, because we're talking about humans and humans do bad things to each other.
Joel: Anti-trafficking was slipping even before Trump. Where do you think we’re going, and where should we be trying to go if we have any say in the matter?
Luis: There’s a pessimistic version and an optimistic version – and maybe we can end up in the middle. Funding comes and goes, and we have to fight to restore it, but anti-trafficking is not and should not be reduced to just a funding pattern. It is a manifestation of a core human right, whether articulated in Article IV, in ILO conventions, the Palermo Protocol, or domestic laws.
So we have to look at how those are being implemented, and what is happening to those concepts. In the US over the last 150 years, we’ve seen how strong protections for workers and excluded communities get ‘lawyered down’ and weakened in furtherance of the bosses’ interest and the interests of the dominant community, only to see renewed enforcement and action a few decades later.
The cycle repeats in generational intervals, and since the 1990s we’ve been lucky to have prolonged the backlash. So at this juncture, at my most pessimistic I see courts preventing people from bringing cases further down into the supply chain, and starting to chip away at the understanding that servitude can be the result of psychological, not just physical, coercion.
It goes in both directions, by the way. Not just narrowing the definitions, but expanding them to cover other social harms: the slipperiness of the legal terms and definitions is a feature that can be harnessed by smart people for outcomes that were not contemplated or intended when we were negotiating the TVPA and the Palermo Protocol. We’ve seen this with the Jeffrey Epstein lawsuits and the prosecution of Sean Combs. The “trafficking” term has bled over into general sexual assault or misconduct, when in 2000 they were really meant to apply to coerced commercial sex.
I don’t normally fight over the definitional stuff. But I think there's enough slipperiness in the US definition of sex trafficking that it has allowed for a wider application. The reality is that good lawyers will use whatever tools they have to fight for their client.
This is how Common Law comes to exist – over the centuries, people use statutes and concepts in ways that eventually clarify what those concepts are. And the intentions we had in writing and negotiating those instruments don’t necessarily match what you now see in practice. Lawyers will continue to use them in different ways if the courts say, “yes, that is an effective way to use them.” The silver lining is that the trafficking statutes can thereby help vindicate those who have suffered. But maybe that comes at the cost of definitional clarity.
I might be over-thinking it though; the jury in New York acquitted Sean Combs of sex trafficking but convicted him under the pre-2000 statute that criminalised transportation for prostitution or illegal sexual activity. So they were able to see the difference between the two concepts.
Right now, we’re good at identifying shortcomings, but it’s unclear whether we can come to a consensus on best practices
Switching over to optimism, this is how we end up with innovative approaches we haven't thought about yet. There are ways of using technology and community building skills such that workers and survivors get a voice. And I don't mean a tokenistic attempt at inserting a ‘worker voice’. I get annoyed by that term, because a lot of that is simply an attempt to outsource auditing functions and make the workers do what the company should have been doing anyway. But rather, if we can do things that actually support people and get day-to-day workers involved in this – especially the folks in the global migrant worker community or the sex worker community – then things that we haven't thought of will emerge.
You'll notice that I didn't answer your question by predicting what governments will do. I'm an American who played a very key role in this. I do believe that having a big, wealthy country who can and will act against its own rabid self-interest is a very valuable thing. There are limits to that, but compared to a lot of other governments I’ve worked with, the US actually does a lot of stuff that leaves people asking, “what's their angle?” And it turns out they don’t actually have an angle; the folks who work on childhood education in-country actually want kids to be able to read better, for example.
US leadership on this is important, because the US is capable of working in 190 countries simultaneously in a way that almost nobody else is. But we are currently being forced to re-think our reliance on the US as the central actor that funds and organises this. That would still be a valid concern even if the Trump administration disappeared tomorrow.
Right now, we've got a good mechanism for identifying shortcomings, but it’s unclear whether we can come to a consensus on best practices. I've fallen into that trap, especially when teaching my class on slavery in the built environment. It’s really easy to say, “here are all the problems with the architecture, construction and engineering sectors, here's why multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and auditing sucks.” But then I risk creating a bunch of nihilists in my class – so I've been wrestling with that. We can't always point to the exact same three organisations that have made positive change, as much as I might be inspired by them and want to see them scale. If we’re serious about prevention, we have to continue to push to identify and scale what works.
This has been tough for us as a community/movement. It's been tough for the funders who scratch their heads and say, “we don't know what works and doesn't, because you guys can't get your act together.” And we're saying, “this is really hard.”
Joel: Let’s say anti-trafficking is a super tanker. Can you steer the super tanker in more productive directions, or would it would be better to just jump off and start swimming in another direction?
Luis: The problem is, there's still going to be a super tanker, and it's heading towards town. So, do they find your skeleton in the wreckage having tried to pull the wheel as far over as you can? Or do you jump off knowing that downtown is toast? I know you guys have written about this kind of problem in the last few months. It takes a lot to choose to stay and try to keep the super tanker from hurting people.
Even when states help people, they're like elephants in a room full of mice. They hurt people just by being there. My choice is to be in the middle of that. Being from a colonised community that then gets regenerated through immigration gives me a particular perspective. I see the opportunities that my family gained by being in New Mexico in the US, as opposed to Guadalajara in Mexico itself. My family lived with a higher level of services and less corruption as a result of my great, great-grandparents being colonised. We’ve also lived with generational trauma since then. Both of those can be true simultaneously.
So I look at that and I see how states hurt people, and specifically how the US hurts people. But I also see how it doesn't hurt people. My decision was to be part of that, to try to steer the super tanker and minimise the hurt and maximise the good it can do.
To circle back to your earlier question, if you put a gun in my head and said, “is there a trafficking movement?” I’d say I think there probably is one, but it's more of a community. And the more we try to make it a movement, we put stresses on it that it doesn't deserve. What I see is a whole bunch of really good people who are running towards the problem with whatever solution they can offer (with the exception of a few people, who can hopefully be steered away from counterproductive approaches).
All the critiques and proffered solutions tend to establish to me that this actually is a community, because we all care about the same thing. The focus is the underlying right to be free from compelled service. Once people get to the point of caring for some of the affected communities, then we can knit everyone into something that might not look like a movement, but certainly looks like a community.
Joel: I feel like you're presuming too many people are operating in good faith.
Luis: I've been in law enforcement and a diplomat for my entire career, so I do not presume anything about people or countries behaving well. But I want to live in that world.
