Chinese migrants lured to Oklahoma are victims of labour, sex trafficking, official says
- Oklahoma’s attorney general, speaking to the US House Homeland Security Committee, testifies that Chinese nationals are often forced to work on marijuana farms
- The number of Chinese nationals trying to cross into the US from Mexico has increased exponentially in the past year
Undocumented Chinese nationals recruited on international websites to cross into the United States are becoming victims of labour and sex trafficking, often on illicit marijuana farms run by Mexican and Chinese syndicates in Oklahoma, the state’s top law enforcement official said on Wednesday.
“These ads, in Mandarin, are thinly veiled offerings to engage in criminal activity,” Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said in testimony before the US House Homeland Security Committee in Washington.
One such advertisement “offers jobs for a ‘massage spa’ to people who are ‘able to endure hardships’ and who have ‘good hygiene’,” he said.
Drummond was participating in the Republican-led panel’s first impeachment hearing for President Joe Biden’s top border official, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, over the flow of immigrants coming across the Mexican border. He agreed with his fellow Republicans that the federal government had not done enough to control the influx.
He said that “every single case” of illegal marijuana growing being investigated in Oklahoma had some level of undocumented labour trafficking, “particularly in operations run by Chinese nationals”.