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Pueblo Woman Sells Baby, Human Trafficking #s Hard to Find
February 28, 2007 5:22 PM
A woman has been arrested in Pueblo for allegedly selling her baby. Newspapers are reporting that 23-year-old Nicole Uribe-Lopez was arrested Tuesday on charges of felony trafficking in children. Police say she sold her five-month old boy to Jose and Irene Lerma, ages 47 and 27 respectively. All three are now being held at the Pueblo county detention center.
To get some perspective on these kinds of crimes, we talked to Amanda Finger, who is the coordinator of the Polaris Project in Denver. The Polaris Project is a nationwide organization that focuses on human trafficking and tries to help victims of the crime. She says baby selling doesn’t seem to be common in Colorado.
FINGER: It’s not something that we typically see on a regular basis here in the US, let alone Colorado. So this is a fairly new case for the state, in terms of mobilizing the network to figure out how to address it.
KRCC NEWS DIRECTOR ERIC WHITNEY: But, Finger says, the state doesn’t have a good idea of how many people might be victims of human trafficking here, whether they’re infants being sold, agricultural workers being exploited, or people working in the sex trade.
FINGER: It is a significantly underreported crime and there’s still a lot of training that’s going on to be able to identify victims of trafficking.
WHITNEY: Three federal grants have been awarded to groups in Colorado, including the Polaris Project and the Salvation Army to help law enforcement officials and others learn to recognize victims of human trafficking, and where they can turn to help victims get help. But, Finger says, no one in the state has a budget to go out and look for victims before crimes are reported.
FINGER: There’s no funding for outreach services.
WHITNEY: Newspapers are reporting that all three people arrested in Pueblo this week are Mexican nationals, but that the child that was allegedly sold was born in Pueblo, and is therefore a U.S. citizen. Finger says that because human trafficking crimes very often involve people with illegal immigration status, there hasn’t been much in the way of services for U.S. citizens who are victims of trafficking crimes, but that’s changing.
FINGER: Most of the funding prior to 2006 was really focused on providing services to foreign nationals. So organizations and agencies are just now able to receive some funding, and in here in Colorado we’re still searching for that funding to be able to provide U.S. citizens who are victims of trafficking the services they need, too.
WHITNEY: Last year the Colorado launched a study of human trafficking in the state. It recommends creating a system to more accurately track victims of the crime, and increasing penalties for perpetrators. At present, human traffickers face 12 years in prison.
Posted by Eric Whitney on February 28, 2007 5:22 PM | Permalink
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