COLORADO IS A CROSSROAD FOR HUMAN TRAFFICKING, BUT AN MSU DENVER PROFESSOR IS HELPING THE STATE AND THE NATION TO COMBAT THE CRIME. STORY LESLIE PETROVSKI
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prawling on all sides of the confluence of I-70 and I-25, Denver has the ungainly look of a city shedding its industrial past. On I-70 the hulking gray Purina plant blocks views of the city’s gleaming skyline. Decrepit hotels and luxury condos rim I-25. Spindly cranes bracket construction projects, rising from the demolition of mid-century office buildings that no longer serve. Denver doesn’t shine from its highways. But it’s the view daily commuters have as they rhumba across the city slowly in traffic—the same view those trafficked into the city see as they arrive for empty promises of jobs or love. Colorado’s highways are among the first characteristics human trafficking experts mention when describing how the crime plays out here. The state capital is the nation’s bull’s-eye: one long day’s drive to Juarez or Saskatchewan; 10 tedious hours on the Great Plains to Kansas City, Mo.; 13 brutal hours across the desert to Phoenix. Denver is a convenient hub for the comings and goings of kids indentured to magazine sales crews or migrant farm workers in bondage to debt. “The way human trafficking manifests in Colorado has a lot to do with its location in the U.S.,” explains AnnJanette Alejano-Steele, MSU Denver professor of women’s studies and co-founder of the nonprofit Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking (LCHT). “We connect folks, east to west and north to south, by virtue of our highways.” Alejano-Steele is co-author of “The Colorado Project to Comprehensively Combat Human Trafficking,” a groundbreaking three-year study conducted by LCHT that examined how the state is responding to trafficking. Although Colorado has its share of issues, starting with its laws, it’s the first state to hold a mirror up to its efforts, gathering on-the-ground data necessary to start corralling the problem on the continuum from prevention to prosecution to survivorship.
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he surprise is the backyard nature of it all. The Colorado Project revealed that trafficking is thriving statewide—in Denver, Lakewood, Aurora, Colorado Springs and rural Colorado—and is as likely to involve a white middle-schooler at odds with her parents as it is an undocumented worker fearing deportation. As a crime, human trafficking sits on the far end of the labor and sexual exploitation spectrum where victims may be subjected to all manner of psychological abuse, beatings and deprivation. In his seminal speech on the subject during the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative, President Barack Obama called the crime “modern slavery,” acknowledging the dark perversion of the American Dream at the core of the problem in the United States. Whether it’s a homeless 15-year-old girl looking to feed herself or a man lured into forced kitchen labor, desperation and poverty breed the vulnerability traffickers prey on. “There’s so much manipulation that goes on there,” explains Denver Police Sgt. Daniel Steele (no relation to Alejano-Steele), who works on the FBI’s Innocence Lost Task Force. “You’re being manipulated because you want something more out of life.”
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pstairs in Denver’s Posner Center for International Development, Amanda Finger, a social entrepreneur who founded LCHT with Alejano-Steele, is describing human trafficking in Colorado. “The characteristics of a state determine how trafficking manifests,” she says. “You have to ask, what are the vulnerabilities?” In the Centennial State, those vulnerabilities include the prevalence of industries such as agriculture and tourism requiring low-cost labor as well as a healthy immigrant population, about a third of which is undocumented and especially susceptible to exploitation because of language barriers and fears of deportation.
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