Twenty-five years ago, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (“TVPRA”), 18 U.S.C. §§ 1581 et seq., as a criminal statute prohibiting forced labor, slavery, peonage, or indentured servitude, as well as trafficking persons (i.e., recruiting, transporting, or harboring them) in furtherance thereof. (The TVPRA also criminalizes trafficking persons for the purpose of commercial sex). Since 2003, the TVPRA has provided victims of these crimes with a private right of action, and such lawsuits have steadily increased over time. In 2024, 280 new cases were filed in U.S. district courts asserting claims under the TVPRA—more than any prior year.
Litigants have achieved significant financial recoveries through such cases, totaling nearly $942 million as of 2024. For example, in 2015, in the Signal case, H-2B workers from India obtained a $14 million verdict against the companies who falsely promised them green cards to lure them to work in shipyards in Mississippi and Texas. In 2021, in one of my firm’s cases, Wang v. Gold Mantis Construction (the subject of a prior OnLabor post), seven Chinese construction workers obtained a $5.4 million judgment after being defrauded into traveling to Saipan, where they had their passports confiscated and worked long hours for little pay under dangerous conditions.
Despite the growing number of civil cases brought under the TVPRA, many labor and employment advocates nonetheless remain unfamiliar with the statute or...
Human rights lawyer, Femi Falana, has accused President Donald Trump of being insincere on the death of an ISIS Commander, Abu-Bilal al-Mainuki. US President Donald Trump had announced the killing...