Ontario Police say they have broken up a human trafficking operation.

Markie Dell was 19 when she was trafficked.

They're controlled emotionally, they're controlled through violence.

The victims were transported daily at a given time to work as cleaners.

They're confused and they're unsure of what next steps are. That fear of the unknown is really real.

You've seen the news reports. Human trafficking is a heinous crime that violates the basic concept of human dignity. Though numbers are difficult to tally, it's estimated that traffickers are robbing a staggering 24.9 million people of their freedom. Canada Border Services Agency, the CBSA, is the enforcement arm of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and in working with local police and the RCMP, has conducted several crackdowns of cases of human trafficking of foreign migrants into Canada. But what is the fate of women and girls trafficked into Canada for sex trade or forced labor, once they are rescued by authorities or their traffickers have been reported? Many of the victims brought from outside Canada have no legal immigration status. But will returning them to their countries of origin place them once again at risk and is the risk of being deported keeping several victims in hiding from authorities? 

In some cases, some people feel anything is better than back home.

Many of the international cases, they know that the authorities in their countries are not the most pure. They they are afraid to come forward.

Cambodia is very unique because it's going to take probably, you know, a couple of generations for the society to build up those social structures again that support victims of human trafficking.

In a June 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report by the U.S. State Department, the United States and Canada are among the few countries which meet legislative standards for anti-human trafficking legislation and prevention. But the TIP Report also shows the vast majority of countries and regions internationally do not comply with even minimum legislative standards to combat human trafficking or are not making significant enough efforts to meet them. With some regions still lacking the legislation to protect women and girls, could a rescue by CBSA or the RCMP end up in a ticket back home to further victimization?

I spoke with Cassandra Smith, who is the Harm Reduction Coordinator at Black Cap, The Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention. She spoke to me about the more insidious means of trafficking that abusers use to exploit women and girls from African, South American and Caribbean countries. 

We see it happen a lot among family and close friends. So let's say an older sister is here or an aunt and she has a husband who has a great job and they have a house full of kids and she's like "Look, I need some help. I have a cousin back home or my younger sister and she's not doing nothing, so let me let me get her out here" and they're living in substandard conditions and they're literally the hired help. It's not that random stranger that's sending for you. How do they know how to get you? Who's investing in your ticket? In whatever costs that are involved in getting you here? It's usually a family member. So if it's not a family member, it's a potential spouse. So it's someone who knows someone else "Oh, so and so, you remember her? She has a nice son. He grew up now and he wants a wife" and by the time she - he's not the same little boy she knew. He's up here, he obviously feels like he has a sense of power and dominance over her because of the status situation and that abuse of power also takes place and it's money as well. Sorry to say, people are looking for the easiest ways to make a lot of money and when they look at drug trafficking, the running from the police, buying product, competition, all of those other factors, they find it easier unfortunately, to traffic people.

The Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention works with women involved in the sex trade who have no legal status and also helps find interim subsidized housing for victims regardless of their illegitimate immigration status. Latoya Brown is a social worker with Black Cap and a survivor of Toronto sex trade. Now, she works with women, educating them on safer methods of sex, distributing protection from STIs, as well as birth control. She talks about her first-hand experience with trafficked non-Canadian women used in massage parlors, hotels and strip clubs.

I was 17, I think or 18. Something like that. I started in it because I needed to support myself and my daughter and stuff like that, pay my rent. I did come from a single mother home. I used to work, like, strip clubs and the spa, which was just rub and tug before and I could leave like, if I worked at the spa at night, I could leave between a thousand to two thousand dollars and the strip club, you could leave with a thousand to three thousand or more. Girls that were trafficked in, they mostly worked in spas because really, some spots you don't need your license to work, so it's easier to escape or not communicate with people than if you're in a strip club, there's a lot of girls, there's a lot of people to communicate with. The last time I was in a spa, I know you sit in like a living room. You just sit there watch TV until, we call them tricks, would come in and then you'll walk, they'll pick you and then that's the only time you're interacting with someone, other than the girls that are there. What are they, like, Syrian countries and stuff, you'd have a lot of those girls in those spots. But the club was like, mostly white girls and then you'd have some Asians that, they come, they work for a bit and then you don't see them again. So that's how you know that they weren't there legally. Like, they just came and then they're gone. They'll smuggle the girls in, like, bring the girls in, have them work and then send them back or something.

Harm Reduction Coordinator Cassandra Smith explained that for women who managed to escape their traffickers some, would find their way into the shelter systems.

There are a lot more human trafficking victims in the shelter system than the city knows of.

But even with managing to escape and find shelter, fears of being deported might make non-Canadian victims of trafficking hesitant to access social services.

They're afraid of being sent back, they're afraid of being judged and they also don't know that there are protections. There are ways to keep them safe.

Organizations like the FCJ Refugee Centre work with victims and advocate for their legal immigration status. Loly Rico, a part of the FCJ Refugee Centre's anti-human trafficking team, herself a refugee from El Salvador, knows the dangers women face if they are deported back to the countries from which they were trafficked. Loly works with immigration lawyers to get the women into the refugee determination system, which may offer them protection in Canada.

When Immigration Canada implemented The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, that's the new act that was in 2002, already there was one component about trafficking because Canada was one of the leader countries at the Palermo Convention against human trafficking and through the Canadian Council for Refugees, we started doing a kind of coordination and started pushing to have something to protect them. What happened is that many of the international cases, they know that the authorities in their countries are not the most pure and least corrupt in law enforcement. They  are afraid to come forward because they are afraid that if they are deported back, most of the time, the traffickers they know where they live and they can continue threatening them. Or they are afraid to go back because they feel shame. Or in their country, they don't have any kind of support for victims of human trafficking and they can get trafficked again. Not in Canada but going to another country. In that case they don't want to live at that moment because they have a lot of fear.

But despite provisions made in Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, in Loly's experience, very few human trafficking survivors are successful in making a refugee claim.

it's a very small number. The majority of the cases, they don't go through the refugee process because they don't have a refuge case. They go through other process like humanitarian and compassionate grounds. 

According to the Canadian Council for Refugees, many trafficked persons don't meet the very narrow refugee definition, set out by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Making a claim also in some regards, offers less access to social services than if the IRCC offers victims a temporary resident permit. Even if victims make an application for permanent residence on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, HC applications have very long processing times and do not place a stay on deportation, which means a victim can be removed from Canada even before their application is considered. To give some perspective on what trafficked victims may face in countries lacking proper legislation, I spoke to Ratanak International's executive director, Graeme Illman. Ratanak International is a Canadian faith-based organization that works on the ground in Cambodia, in rehabilitating and repatriating victims of human trafficking. But much of Cambodia's current infrastructure and its historical conflicts have left the country vulnerable to trafficking.

I can comment from a Cambodian perspective because Cambodia is a very unique climate to work in, just because of, I don't know how much you know of Cambodia's history in the last 40 or 50 years but it's pretty brutal. Just with the influence from the Vietnam War and it could derive the Khmer Rouge and the genocide that happened back in the late 70s. So all of that takes Cambodia into a very unique picture as far as the cause of being very vulnerable to trafficking and then how you how do you fix that? Because it just made the country so vulnerable because everything during the Khmer Rouge era was decimated. All the social structure was basically dismantled systematically by Pol Pot. So that's what gave rise to Cambodia being so vulnerable for trafficking both domestically and sadly internationally as well. So that's why Cambodia is very unique. There's trafficking issues, obviously that's a global issue, but Cambodia is very unique because it's going to take probably a couple of generations for the society to build up those social structures again that support victims of human trafficking and help them to you know be rehabilitated. What we usually say to people here is that, you know, when you know a young woman from Canada is trafficked, that's still obviously a very terrible thing, but we have social structures in place that can  provide proper rehabilitation, all those kinds of things. It's not perfect but it's way further along than a developing country like Cambodia that's been through what it's been through.
 
Illman also explained Cambodia's lack of anti-trafficking legislation also left the country vulnerable to sex tourism, where vacationers from other countries with more stringent laws would visit Cambodia with intentions of taking advantage of its unregulated sex industry. 

Donald Baker was another huge case here in Canada. He was another guy from this area who was travelling all over Asia abusing kids. These guys prey on the countries that they know that the laws aren't there. So you could take two flights to get into Cambodia, 10 years ago. You take a taxi from the airport and you know from research online that there's one area that we're familiar with but it was, at the time, particularly for pedophiles and you walk in and you could have your choice of kid. Like, it was that easy.

I hoped to find a non-status victim of sex trafficking who could tell their story but the search proved difficult in Toronto. Stephanie Amores, who previously worked with Ratanak International, explained that the city's recent crackdowns and regulations have driven Toronto's sex industry even further underground.

It is a lot harder to find them because they aren't on the streets as much anymore. The problem is a lot of them, anymore really, especially because of this law but even before the law went into effect, honestly, most illegal activity, you you would just be shocked maybe to hear this although you might already have discovered this fact by now but it goes on in suburban Canada and America. Your next-door neighbor who has the two or three-car garage, nice house where they just pull up on their SUV, that's where all the brothels are now. It's going on where, you know, people order girls to their home. It's not strip clips and massage parlors anymore. So it's just happening so much more surreptitiously now. They're so much harder to find and track down and you can't just burst into your neighbor's house.

In speaking with CBSA investigators, the uncertain status of foreign traffic victims has proven problematic, as witnesses are at risk of being deported before their traffickers can be fully investigated for prosecution. While the question may be asked if it's logistically possible to offer amnesty to all foreign traffic victims who end up in Canada, the lack of guaranteed safety or regularization of non-status victims may be a contributing element, keeping international human trafficking alive and well in the shadows