Congress Passes Bill Backing 'Self-Care' for People Pursuing Prostitution Stings

The IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act would provide outreach and training to Homeland Security Investigations staff.

Both houses of Congress have approved the IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act (S.670) and it's now awaiting President Joe Biden's signature. The bill would provide "self-care" services to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) staff exposed to victims of human trafficking.

On its face, there's nothing wrong with providing additional psychological support for federal agents who work with trafficking survivors. But HSI—a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has quite a questionable record when it comes to "helping" trafficking victims. At times, HSI has been known to subject suspected victims to potentially traumatizing experiences. And much of the "human trafficking" work the agency does just involves plain old prostitution stings.

HSI's Human Trafficking 'Help'

Check the fine print on state and local cops' sex sting excursions and you'll frequently see HSI listed as a partner, particularly when these prostitution stings target Asian massage businesses.

At best, these stings tend to be dubious uses of resources and authority—marshaling the power of Homeland Security to, say, arrest a few dozen men looking to pay a consenting adult woman for sex or arrest people with "escort service violations" and random outstanding warrants.

At worst, they put people vulnerable to violence and sexual exploitation in more precarious positions—by helping arrest sex workers and saddling them with court fees and criminal records, for instance, or helping seize the assets of immigrant sex workers and masseuses—and even subject suspected trafficking victims to sexual encounters under false pretenses.

HSI agents had at least 17 sexual encounters with Asian massage workers in Mohave County, Arizona, in 2018, for instance. Dubbed "Operation Asian Touch," these excursions were billed as a way to investigate human trafficking.

Women arrested for performing paid sex acts with HSI agents or informants may wind up deported afterward.

This is not to say that HSI never helps investigate cases of actual violence and exploitation involving prostitution. But in covering this area for a decade, I've encountered countless cases of HSI offering dubious or even dangerous "help" to human trafficking victims and immensely fewer instances of the agency actually seeming to stop abuse.

Whatever good HSI does on the sex trafficking front, it's pretty incidental to the ample operations that simply target sex workers, massage workers, and their customers.

What the IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act Would (and Would Not) Do

The IMPACTT Human Trafficking Act, from Sen. Gary Peters (D–Mich.), was co-sponsored by two Republicans (Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford and Texas Sen. John Cornyn).

The first thing it would do is establish in HSI an Investigators Maintain Purposeful Awareness to Combat Trafficking Trauma (IMPACTT) program to "provide outreach and training" to HSI employees who have been "exposed to various forms of trauma in working with victims of human trafficking." The training might include "self-awareness training" on recognizing things like burnout, "compassion fatigue," and "vicarious trauma," along with education on "mechanisms for self-care and resilience."

I don't know about you, but I find it a little bit amusing and also immensely eyeroll-worthy to see social media self-help tropes like "self-care"and "burnout" creeping into federal legislation.

At least this bill isn't all about providing resilience training for the poor HSI agents forced to bust immigrant women for prostitution.

It would also create a formal HSI victim assistance program to "provide oversight, guidance, training, travel, equipment, and coordination to Homeland Security Investigations victim assistance personnel" and recruit more forensic interview specialists and victim assistance specialists. "Currently, only the largest HSI field offices have a victim assistance specialist, but this legislation would ensure that every HSI office with a human trafficking or child exploitation task force would have a survivor assistance specialist to carry out this important work," said Rep. Glenn Ivey (D–Md.) during a September 23 House floor debate about the bill.

The efficacy of these specialists is debatable—I often see press about prostitution busts make nods to the victim services specialists HSI had on hand but nothing to indicate these specialists helped in any substantial way or even found any victims to help. Still, they're theoretically there to offer kinder, gentler, trauma-informed interactions with potential victims, and that can't be a bad thing.

The victim assistance program would also be tasked with offering material support. One of the few tangible things that the IMPACTT bill stipulates is that the victims assistance program will "purchase emergency items that are needed to assist identified victims in Homeland Security Investigations criminal investigations, including food, clothing, hygiene products, transportation, and temporary shelter that is not otherwise provided by a nongovernmental organization."

Of course, "no additional funds are authorized to be appropriated for the purpose of carrying out this Act," which is sort of telling. I'm not saying HSI needs any more money for these purposes. But bills geared toward throwing more cops and more enforcement at a problem tend to have large budget increases attached so it seems worth pointing out that the expansion of victims' services isn't getting a commensurate boost.

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