The Washington Post: Trump administration cuts legal funding for victims of human trafficking
Source: https://wapo.st/2B4hmEJ
President Trump’s administration has mandated that federal funds used to help human trafficking victims clear their criminal records, often accrued while forced into prostitution or sex slavery, no longer be spent for that purpose. After a burst of protests last year did not change the Justice Department’s decision, four top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr this week asking why his department made changes that “fly in the face of the spirit and plain language” of laws passed to help trafficking victims.
A study by the National Survivor Network found that more than 90 percent of survivors of human trafficking had been arrested, and about half of them had been arrested at least 10 times. “Trafficking survivors who have criminal records,” said Jean Bruggeman, executive director of Freedom Network USA, “are unable to get access to affordable housing, employment in the career of their choice, higher education, because they continue to have to explain and discuss a criminal record that was unfairly put upon them in the first place.”
Child sex trafficking survivor Beth Jacobs, now a victims advocate, told the National Survivor Network that she couldn’t rent an apartment in her name, couldn’t have her name on the mailbox and sometimes had to hide from landlords because background checks by property management firms found her criminal record. “It’s horrible to live that way,” Jacobs said.
Congress recognized this problem years ago and, around 2004, passed legislation that specifically provided funds for lawyers to seek both vacaturs — which clear convictions — and expungements, removing convictions from permanent records, Bruggeman said. State court systems have various ways to vacate and expunge convictions, but experts said it requires a lawyer to successfully navigate the paperwork, hearings and assorted legal hurdles of each system.
But suddenly last year, the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime inserted this line into its grant applications for aid to trafficking victims: “Direct representation on vacatur or expungement matters through court filings or through other litigation services, is NOT an allowable cost under this cooperative agreement or with FY 2018 funds.” Other programs for trafficking victims are still being funded.
Bruggeman said, “From speaking with people within the [Justice] Department, this was not a recommendation from the staff [of the Office for Victims of Crime]. This was something that came from the top, from the political side.”
Members of Congress, trafficking victims, victims’ rights organizations, local prosecutors and the American Bar Association all raised protests last year with the Justice Department. The department responded to the ABA and Congress with letters that said excluding legal help for victims was done “to preserve resources for the many other critical services provided under these grants.” The nearly identical letters, signed by assistant attorneys general Stephen E. Boyd and Alan R. Hanson, reminded that attorneys could still offer referrals to people offering victim services locally, and that they could still use money sent by the federal government to state crime victims’ funds, though states may dole out those funds according to their own priorities and are not required to address any vacatur or expungement cases.
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