Sex Traffic Rings in California Stopped by Police

http://pilr.blogs.law.pace.edu/2012/06/11/sex-traffic-rings-in-california-stopped-by-police/

Sex Traffic Rings in California Stopped by Police
Jun 11th, 2012 by Lindsay Farrenkopf
CNN’s Freedom Project went undercover with the Human Trafficking Task Force in Orange County, California, to follow officers breaking up a suspected Asia sex trafficking ring.



Chinese organized criminal gangs such as the snakeheads operate worldwide, facilitating human smuggling and trafficking out of China. The International Organization for Migration reports that organized crime rings smuggle up to 200,000 Chinese migrants into Australia, Canada, the U.S., and other countries each year.



Chinese women and children are trafficked for sexual exploitation to North America, Europe, and other Asian countries. In the U.S. several women were arrested in Houston, Texas, for transporting Chinese women into the country for prostitution. Los Angeles and New York are other common destination cities. In 1999, the Immigration and Nationalization Service estimated that up to 5,000 trafficked Chinese women were in L.A.

A woman, Soo, spoke to CNN about her sympathy for the victims of sex trafficking. Soo spoke about how sad it is that women come to the United States with dreams of a better life and are tricked and wind up being a sex slave in an Asian massage parlor. The women in California were given little food and clothing, according to police.

California and New York are taking steps to try to locate these sex rings but they are all underground and determining which massage parlors are legitimate and which are a front for prostitution pose problems. It becomes a costly investigation that our current system has not been able to tackle.

Should this investigation be a federal immigration matter? What laws could the United States pass to deter this type of crime against humanity?