The Migrant Commodity
It is estimated that America is home to over one million slaves, many of them children, smuggled into the country and forced to work off the cost of their transportation as indentured servants on farms and in factories, as sex workers, or as soldiers in a criminal organization.
Joseph Koehler, Assistant U.S. Attorney, is a career prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona and a nationally recognized authority on human smuggling. Join us on Monday, Nov. 17, 10 a.m., for Koehler’s illuminating presentation as he describes an underworld of darkness and despair that few of us know exists. But, as the famous British abolitionist William Wilberforce once observed in a speech to the British House of Commons in May of 1789, “you may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know”.
Koehler will explain how cartels and other criminal organizations prey on desperate migrants, enticed with promises of an economic promised land in the United States, who are forced into slave-like conditions on the pretext that they must pay off a debt that will never be repaid; threatened with violence to the migrant and their family back home if they do not do the bidding of their “sponsors”.
Koehler, who has spent decades prosecuting and specializing in international human trafficking cases, will describe how couriers are solicited over social media to serve as shuttle drivers to get the human cargo into the United States and delivered to “sponsors” who are often sex traffickers, or “contractors” providing low-cost labor who work and live in inhuman conditions. The southern border is the primary thoroughfare for a major portion of the smuggling of humans into the United States. As part of a federal team dedicated to the arrest and prosecution of human traffickers, Kohler has been involved in the rescue of hundreds of their enslaved victims.
New Hearing Assist System in Renaissance Theater: The new system uses a small battery pack and a neck loop which will work with T-Coil enabled hearing aids. You can check out a battery pack and neck loop for each Speaker Series from a LifeLong Learning volunteer in the Lobby. A personal identification card is required. The battery pack and neck loop must be returned to a volunteer after each performance. Speak to a Lobby volunteer for assistance.