On August 27th, the court in Tanedo v. East Baton Rouge Parish School Bd. (C.D. Cal.) issued a solid decision for the most part denying a summary judgment motion filed by two of the recruiter defendants. The plaintiffs, teachers recruited in the Philippines to work at school districts in Louisiana on H-1B visas, allege that the defendants, including the recruiter defendants, violated the TVPA, the RICO, and CA state law. Last December, the court certified a class for the TVPA, RICO trafficking, and state law claims (with the exception of state law fraud).

Read more background on this precedent-setting human trafficking case here

In May 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Andrew J. Guilford set a historic precedent by granting class action status to a human trafficking lawsuit involving these 350 Filipino teachers In reaching his decision, the Court concluded that it is sufficient that a defendant’s misconduct has created a situation where ceasing labor would cause a plaintiff serious harm. Further, human trafficking also involves violations of other laws, including labor and immigration codes and laws against kidnaping, slavery, false imprisonment, assault, battery, pandering, fraud, and extortion. In other words, the TVPA not only protects victims from the most heinous human trafficking crimes, but also various additional types of fraud and extortion leading to forced labor. And in this case, the complaint alleges that psychological coercion such as seizing immigrants’ passports to restrict their ability to flee, threats to fire Plaintiffs, sue them, allow their visas to expire, or deport them over various issues that generally concerned complaints about living conditions and pay.

Among other things, the plaintiff teachers allege that they were drawn into the recruiter defendants’ fraudulent scheme to force payment of previously undisclosed exorbitant recruitment fees after the teachers had already paid the recruiters substantial fees that would not be returned. Once in the U.S., the teachers felt compelled to work to repay their substantial debts and to make required kickbacks to the recruiters. The recruiter defendants threatened deportation and legal action against the Plaintiffs and other class members – and in fact brought legal action against some – if they protested the fee arrangements.

In their summary judgment motion, the defendants argued, among other things, that before the 2008 TVPA reauthorization, “serious harm” in Sec. 1589 did not include financial harm (the 2008 reauthorization defined serious harm to include financial harm). The court strongly disagreed with this position. Drawing on Dann and Calimlim – both cases in which the trafficking occurred before the 2008 reauthorization – and the congressional record from the initial passage of the TVPA, the court concluded that the broad array of harms contemplated by “serious harm” included financial harm.

The case is scheduled for a jury trial starting on October 2.

Congratulations go to Jim Knoepp, Sam Brooke, and Michelle Lapointe of the Southern Poverty Law Center; Dennis Auerbach and Candice Plotkin of Covington & Burling, and Dan McNeil of the American Federation of Teachers for their brilliant work developing this case, putting together the summary judgment opposition, and now preparing for trial.