When Bradley Myles leaves home in the wee hours of the morning, he’s heading for trouble.
With colleagues from Polaris Project, Myles, ’02, trolls certain seamy streets of Washington, D.C. Other times he is summoned by police to grimy rented apartments that are unfurnished except for rows of bare, stained mattresses separated by bedsheet curtains hooked on nails. Sometimes the apartments are in sylvan suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.
In such places, he meets modern-day slaves, immigrants who have been trapped into working as a prostitute or a nanny, a farm laborer or factory worker. At rock bottom, they work in bondage, too fearful of violence against themselves or family members to find a way out.
Myles, 29, is the deputy director of Polaris Project, one of the nation’s largest anti-human-trafficking organizations. Polaris Project, begun in 2002 by two Brown University seniors, has five offices, a staff of 32 and thousands of volunteers worldwide. It was named for its intentional similarities to the 19th-century Underground Railroad, the network of activists who used the North Star to help guide black slaves to freedom.
Some 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for all sorts of forced labor—in groups or singly—across international borders every year, according to the U.S. Department of State. Although the activity is illegal, modern-day slavery is thought to be a $32 billion industry that has increased in proportion to globalization and the rise in numbers of people migrating to find work.
In the basement of a Washington, D.C., house, Myles met a Mexican woman he calls Maria to protect her identity. She told him she was in her early 20s when smugglers conned her into paying more than $5,000 to get into the United States. Maria was promised a lucrative job as a housekeeper or receptionist; instead she was forced to work in the sex trade. She had had to turn over her earnings to a man whom police had just arrested. Myles, notified by an officer, was trying to persuade Maria to call the National Human Trafficking Hotline run by Polaris Project.
Polaris (www.polarisproject.org) works to coordinate the efforts of law enforcement and social service agencies, health care organizations, shelters, pro bono attorneys, immigration officials, educators,
lawmakers and the public. On some days Myles is a desk jockey, contributing to the District of Columbia Human Trafficking Task Force or meeting with doctors, lawyers, owners of apartment buildings, software developers—anyone—to persuade them to donate services, products, time.
Myles joined Polaris after working a corporate job with a government contractor. During a research project, he called social-service agencies that encountered human-trafficking victims. “As I learned more, I had an awakening. I did not want to be one step removed. My passion for the subject began almost to bubble over.”
As Myles spoke with Maria that evening, she reminded him of a woman he calls Lena, whom he met about three years ago when he had just begun working at Polaris. A Good Samaritan helped Lena escape from the basement of a house in a leafy northern Virginia town, where a brutal gang forced her into sexual services. Lena probably obtained the Polaris hotline number from one of many “covert” outreach materials such as bookmarks, mirrors, bandages or bandanas that are distributed by Polaris.
Myles and his colleagues found her shelter with members of an Asian-American church that is part of the Polaris network. The team hooked her up with health care and education, and eventually immigration attorneys got her a “T visa.” T visas allow human-trafficking victims to remain in the United States if they help prosecute their oppressors. Lena “is now married, has children, owns a small business, is self-sufficient and has put her past behind her.”
Through a translator, Myles offered Maria encouragement. “It takes courage to make the call.”
Two weeks later, Myles was still waiting to hear from Maria.
