Prosecutor: Collaboration central to fighting human trafficking

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Prosecutors from Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand may be thousands of miles away from prosecutors in Milwaukee, but all have of them have at least one scourge in common: human-trafficking. And although the cases undoubtedly vary in their facts, they also have similarities.

“Every one of these types of crimes involves the dehumanizing of the victims in different ways, taking human beings and creating commodities out of them so that the offenders can profit,” said Matt Krueger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District.

Krueguer made the remarks on Monday to start a human-trafficking training program his office was holding on Monday and Tuesday for a delegation of law-enforcement officials and prosecutors from Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand. The delegation heard from Resident-Agent-in-Charge Brandon Bielke of Homeland Security Investigations, and Special-Agent-in-Charge Justin Tolomeo of the FBI, as well as judges, prosecutors, and victim-witness coordinators.

Krueger said working together is central to the fight against human trafficking.

“Here in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and throughout the United States, a hallmark of our law enforcement efforts is collaboration across agencies,” he said. “We as the prosecutors are very often involved in the investigations of human trafficking and so it’s not that the prosecutors are just waiting for a case to be entirely investigated and then to receive it to charge it in court.”

Amir Nasruddin, head of the general crimes and public order unit of the Attorney General’s Chambers of Malaysia, said he agreed that successful prosecutions result from prosecutors being involved early on in human-trafficking investigations.

“What I really want to learn from the U.S. is how to get victims to cooperate and how to get them to testify,” Nasruddin said.

Krueger said people in his office think they will be able to learn quite a lot during the two-week training. He said he was interested in learning from the delegation about how their agencies deal with the technological difficulties posed by many ohuman-trafficking investigations, including how they deal with encryption and offender communications using the dark web.

Milwaukee was just one stop on the delegation’s nearly two-week trip to the U.S. The trip also includes visits to U.S Attorney offices in New York, New Jersey, Atlanta and Omaha.