Sunday 10pm FRONTLINE: TRAFFICKED IN AMERICA - Investigative documentary series - Frontline and the Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkley goes inside the hidden world of labor trafficking and exposes a criminal network that exploits undocumented minors, the companies who profit from their labor and how governemnt policies helped to deliver some teens directly to traffickers. https://youtu.be/85WVp2GJIvoThe teens grew up more than 2,500 miles from central Ohio, in the western highlands of Guatemala.They were impoverished. The smuggler promised them a chance at a better life in America in exchange for $15,000. To help pay, some of their families traded the deeds to their homes. Once the teens made the dangerous trip north and crossed the border, most were detained by the border patrol and then turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as unaccompanied minors. It was the job of HHS to place them with a relative or adult sponsor, and the smuggler had a network of accomplices who posed as sponsors for the boys.Instead of being safely settled, they were brought to Ohio, and forced to live and work in virtual slavery to pay off their debts.Frontline goes inside the major 2014 labor trafficking case involving the Guatemalan teens, who were forced by a third-party contractor to work against their will at Trillium Farms in Ohio — one of the country’s largest egg producers — to pay off their debts.
Copyright 2019 WLRN 91.3 FM
