Donald Trump and maga Republicans are funding ICE fascist operations without accountability! Innocent people are detained.

Frictionless fascism: Technologies being used for immigration enforcement take human agency and discernment out of the equation.

#ICEOut❗ (Maine Writer- this was a painful opinion for me to include in my blog. Reading this brought me to tears. Yet, I thank Mr. Coleman for having the courage to write this opinion based on his own experiences. Warning⚠️❗ Fascism has no limits to how much cruelty is dispensed for the purpose of seizing and maintaining power.)

Flynn Coleman is a human rights attorney and author of “A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are.” Echo opinion published in the Boston Glob by Flynn Coleman.

One weekend in January, two boys stood quivering at Mercado Central, a Minneapolis market. Their mother had dropped them off for haircuts and walked across the street to cash a check, but she didn’t return. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took her. The boys tried to find her in the detention database but couldn’t because they didn’t know her birthdate. The agents who took her didn’t need it.

This is how ICE now operates: Mobile Fortify — a facial recognition app it deploys — can verify her identity nearly instantly. The technology makes detention possible with nothing more than what a camera captures. The system already had what it wanted. And she was gone.

In my time documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity at the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, I learned that dehumanization requires infrastructure. 

In Rwanda, it took months of radio broadcasts to incite neighbors to kill neighbors. At roadblocks across the country, Hutu militias checked identity cards — Tutsi or Hutu — and made decisions about who would live or die. This took weeks. Even then, some refused to take part. Some hid Tutsis in their homes, risking their own lives. Human beings, even trained for atrocity, sometimes hesitated. 

Violence and dehumanization have always been limited by human friction — the pause before pulling a trigger, the moment when someone looks into another person’s eyes and cannot do the worst thing.

Mobile Fortify needs only seconds to scan a face. That’s the innovation.

This is what fascism without friction looks like. Adolf Hitler needed years of rallies, screaming himself hoarse to convince crowds, a steady drumbeat of dehumanization. 

Benito Mussolini needed propaganda campaigns. Even then, enforcement depended on human beings making decisions at every checkpoint. Mobile Fortify needs mere moments. Point your phone. The algorithm decides. The agent executes. No hesitation. No pause.

Mobile Fortify is a smartphone app that compares faces with more than 200 million photos, without individualized warrants, without meaningful consent, and — according to Department of Homeland Security documents — without any practical mechanism for refusal. Representative Bennie Thompson says ICE treats a biometric match as “definitive” — agents can ignore birth certificates if the app says otherwise. When the machine’s word contradicts yours, the machine wins.

The boys at Mercado Central could not find their mother. 😢

In fact, the government has billions of dollars in surveillance infrastructure. That power asymmetry isn’t accidental. It’s the architecture. Technology determines who can challenge decisions, who can trace targeting, who can find their parents. The algorithm designed the cage. The children cannot see the bars.

On Jan. 14, in Robbinsdale, Minn., another parent stood at a bus stop with their child, waiting for the school bus. ICE detained the parent in front of the child, in front of a bus full of elementary students. The child went to school that day not knowing if their parent would come home. The children on that bus learned what power looks like now: automated, inescapable.

America didn’t invent this template for making dehumanization systematic. China pioneered algorithmic targeting of Uyghurs in 2017. Iran deployed facial recognition for hijab enforcement. Russia built digital surveillance states. But when the United States adopts these tactics at home, it legitimizes them globally. Mobile Fortify doesn’t break new ground — it normalizes the playbook. What was once the domain of acknowledged autocrats becomes standard democratic practice.

The masked agents who surged into Minnesota have begun their retreat. The algorithmic infrastructure remains. Mobile Fortify still scans faces in seconds. Surveillance drones still circle neighborhoods. Administrative subpoenas (requiring no judge, no warrant 😢) still demand digital records — Google accounts, Discord metadata, Social Security numbers — often within hours. The facial recognition databases still hold 200 million images. 

The tech industry is spending hundreds of millions to ensure no regulation follows, building a political war chest to keep violence frictionless. The agents may withdraw. The algorithms never do.

Hundreds of children remain in detention facilities across the country. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago, detained in Dilley, Texas, wrote: “I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

Frictionless fascism removes the last human barrier to atrocity: the pause — the moment one’s conscience might emerge from the depths. Even soldiers trained for systematic violence sometimes refuse orders. Even forces prepared for ethnic cleansing sometimes let people through. The algorithm never refuses. Never hesitates. Never witnesses. It doesn’t need years of propaganda or to convince anyone to hate. Doesn’t need belief, consent, or even your attention. It just needs a face to scan.

Donald Trump and the Republican maga cult are making innocent migrants disappear!

Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People

Intentional Cruelty❗ Opinion published in the The New York Times by Jeff Crisp*

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin,😟😢 but, also, explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

Some of these efforts have faced legal challenges. Starting in 2022, for example, the United Kingdom attempted to establish a program that would have automatically deported some asylum seekers and migrants entering the U.K. illegally to Rwanda, costing over half a billion pounds — more than 200 million of which were paid upfront. The British Supreme Court ruled that the policy was unlawful, and Britain’s prime minister scrapped the plan last year.

But many countries remain undeterred. In 2023, Italy signed a deal that allowed it to send certain migrants rescued by Italian ships in international waters to detention centers in Albania, and is persisting with the effort even in the face of legal setbacks. This spring, the European Union proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for rejected asylum seekers.

Although these deals take various forms, states that enter them are motivated by similar concerns. The world’s richer states wish to retain control of their borders and are particularly aggrieved by the arrival of people who enter by irregular means, especially when they are coming from low-income countries that many associate with crime, violence and terrorism. Governments in destination countries are attracted to such deals by the promise of financial, diplomatic and military support.

Throughout much of the West, as public sentiment has turned against newcomers, policymakers and pundits alike have portrayed migrants as a threat to national security and social stability. 

These innocent migrants, they argue, impose an unsustainable burden on government budgets and public services and deprive citizens of jobs. (Maine Writer: These desperate migrants carry a lable being "migrant", as though they are somehow not really human beings!)

Racism and xenophobia, fueled by populist politicians and right-wing media outlets, have also played an important part in creating a toxic environment in which the expulsion of migrants to arbitrary destinations is increasingly considered legitimate.

But how legitimate is it? Third-country deportations often sidestep due process and violate international law, under which it is forbidden for states to deport such people to any place where their life or liberty would be at risk. It is also plainly unethical, imposing additional stress on people who have undergone traumatic journeys and who are then dumped in far-off, unfamiliar places.

Several of the countries slated as deportation destinations have bleak human rights records and are unsafe for all civilians, let alone foreign deportees, who are likely to be targets of abuse and exploitation. In the worst instances, as with U.S. deportees in El Salvador, they can find themselves in jails where the authorities routinely inflict physical and psychological violence on inmates.

These deportation deals also have corrosive consequences for international politics. They encourage smaller, weaker countries to engage in transactional behavior, commodifying human life by trading immigrant bodies for cash, development aid, diplomatic support and international impunity. They may even strengthen the impunity of authoritarian regimes that violate the human rights of their own citizens. In the case of El Salvador, for example, deportees from the United States reportedly included some leaders of the criminal gang MS-13, who were thought to be in a position to expose links between President Nayib Bukele and the gang.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, a network of international instruments, institutions and norms have acted as guardrails, if imperfect ones, to ensure that refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are treated humanely. Now it seems as though the president is looking to rewrite the rules of this system to one in which people are pawns.

By expanding the practice of forced relocation, Trump is using migrants as currency in a global network of geopolitical negotiation. His administration is normalizing the use of vulnerable people as bargaining chips to extract better deals with friends and foes alike. He is setting a dangerous precedent for other democratic countries by ignoring the moral and reputational cost of shipping desperate people into terrible conditions. 

As Trump works to bring this evil 👺👿new paradigm to life, leaders the world over will be watching closely. If he can pull it off, so can they.

*Mr. Crisp is an expert on migration and humanitarian issues.

This is an obituary I never expected to find. Mourning for patients who knew Dr. Paul Farmer

This is a sad obituary to read because Dr. Farmer was only 62 years old. Undoubtedly, he was a wonderful physician and humanitarian.  I have a signed copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains, purchased from Dr. Farmer when he visited the University of Southern Maine, in Portland.

Paul Farmer, (born October 26, 1959- died February 21, 2022) Pioneer of Global Health, is dead at 62.

Obituary published in The New York Times, by Ellen Barry and Alex Traub: As a medical student, Dr. Farmer decided to build a clinic in Haiti.  It grew into a vast network serving some of the world’s poorest communities.

Clinics are few and far between in rural Haiti. In this satellite clinic, which Zanmi Lasante set up temporarily in a community’s schoolroom, Dr. Paul Farmer examines patients and prescribes medication for a wide range of medical concerns.

Partners in Health (Injustice has a cure).

Paul Farmer, a physician, anthropologist and humanitarian who gained global acclaim for his work delivering high-quality health care to some of the world’s poorest people, died on Monday on the grounds of a hospital and university he had helped establish in Butaro, Rwanda. He was 62.

The cause was an “acute cardiac event,” according to a statement by Partners in Health, the global public health organization that Dr. Farmer helped found.

Dr. Farmer attracted public renown with “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World,” a 2003 book by Tracy Kidder that described the extraordinary efforts he would make to care for patients, sometimes walking hours to their homes to ensure they were taking their medication.

Dr. Paul Farmerwas an avid collector of proverbs in Haitian Creole. Among his favorites was the phrase, “Dèyè mòn gen mòn,” or “Beyond mountains there are mountains.”

He was a practitioner of “social medicine,” arguing there was no point in treating patients for diseases only to send them back into the desperate circumstances that contributed to them in the first place. Illness, he said, has social roots and must be addressed through social structures.

His work with Partners in Health significantly influenced public health strategies for responding to tuberculosis, H.I.V. and Ebola. During the AIDS crisis in Haiti, he went door to door to deliver antiviral medication, confounding many in the medical field who believed it would be impossible for poor rural people to survive the disease.

Though he worked in the world of development, he often took a critical view of international aid, preferring to work with local providers and leaders. And he often lived among the people he was treating, moving his family to Rwanda and Haiti for extended periods.

News of Dr. Farmer’s death rippled through the worlds of medicine and public health on Monday.

When Dr. Paul Farmer traveled to Sierra Leone, during and after the Ebola epidemic, he intentionally visited Ebola survivors, like Yabom Koroma (center left) and her family in the Mountain Court section of the capital Freetown, often bringing them gifts or inviting them to share a meal.

“There are so many people that are alive because of that man,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a brief interview, adding that she wanted to compose herself before speaking further.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser, broke down in tears during an interview, in which he said he and Dr. Farmer had been like “soul brothers.”

“When you talk about iconic giants in the field of public health, he stands pretty much among a very, very short list of people,” said Dr. Fauci, who first met Dr. Farmer decades ago, when Dr. Farmer was a medical student. He added, “He called me his mentor, but in reality he was more of a mentor to me.”

In the latter part of his career, Dr. Farmer became a public health luminary; the subject of a 2017, documentary, “Bending the Arc”; and the author of 12 books.

In 2020, when he was awarded the $1 million Berggruen Prize, given annually to an influential thought leader, the chairman of the prize committee said Dr. Farmer had “reshaped our understanding” of “what it means to treat health as a human right and the ethical and political obligations that follow.”

Dr. Farmer, who never settled into the easy life of an elder statesman, was vigorously involved in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, prodding the Biden administration to drop intellectual property barriers that prevented pharmaceutical companies from sharing their technology.

“It’s not just about health security, in the senses of defending yourself,” he said. “It’s not just about charity, although that’s not so bad. It’s also about pragmatic solidarity with those in need of assistance.”

Paul Edward Farmer Jr. was born on Oct. 26, 1959, in North Adams, Mass. Paul’s mother, Ginny (Rice) Farmer, worked as a supermarket cashier, and his father, Paul Sr., was a salesman and high school math teacher.

When Paul was around 12, his father bought an old bus and fitted it with bunks, converting it into a mobile home. Paul, his parents and his five siblings spent the next few years traveling, mostly in Florida, living for a time on a boat moored on a bayou. He credited this period with giving him “a very compliant GI system,” a knack for sleeping anywhere and an inability to be shy or embarrassed.

One summer, he and his family worked alongside Haitian migrant workers picking oranges, listening curiously as they chatted to one another in Creole from atop ladders. That was Paul’s first encounter with Haiti, the country that would captivate him in his 20s and then propel him toward a career in public health.

After graduating from Duke University, he moved to Haiti, volunteering in Cange, a settlement in the central Artibonite plateau of the country. He arrived toward the end of the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, when Haiti’s hospital system was so threadbare that patients had to pay for basic supplies, like medical gloves or a blood transfusion, if they wanted treatment.

In a letter to a friend, he wrote that his stint at the hospital wasn’t turning out as he had expected. “It’s not that I’m unhappy working here,” said the letter, excerpted in Mr. Kidder’s book. “The biggest problem is that the hospital is not for the poor. I’m taken aback. I really am. Everything has to be paid for in advance.”

Dr. Farmer decided to open a different kind of clinic. He returned to the United States to attend Harvard Medical School and earn a degree in anthropology, but he continued to spend much of his time in Cange, returning to Harvard for exams and laboratory work.

Over the years, Dr. Farmer raised millions of dollars for an ever-expanding network of community health facilities. He had a contagious enthusiasm and considerable nerve. When Thomas J. White, who owned a large construction company in Boston, asked to meet him, he insisted that the meeting take place in Haiti.

Mr. White eventually contributed $1 million in seed money to Partners in Health, which Dr. Farmer founded in 1987, along with Ophelia Dahl, whom he had met volunteering in Haiti; a Duke classmate, Todd McCormack; and a Harvard classmate, Dr. Jim Yong Kim.

In 1996 he married Didi Bertrand, the daughter of a pastor and a school principal in Cange; she was described in Mr. Kidder’s book as “the most beautiful woman in Cange.” She became a researcher for Partners in Health and survives Dr. Farmer, along with their three children, Catherine, Elizabeth and Sebastian; his mother; his brothers, James and Jeffrey; and his sisters, Katy, Jennifer and Peggy.

The clinic in Haiti, at first a single room, grew over the years to a network of 16 medical centers in the country, with a local staff of almost 7,000.

Among them was a teaching hospital in Mirebalais, about 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince, that opened in 2013 and offered chemotherapy drugs, a gleaming new $700,000 CT scanner and three operating rooms with full-time trauma surgeons. There, poor patients with difficult diseases paid a basic fee of around $1.50 a day for treatment, including medication.

Partners in Health also expanded into Rwanda, where Dr. Farmer helped the government restructure the country’s health system, improving health outcomes in areas like infant mortality and the H.I.V. infection rate.

Dr. Farmer died in Butaro, a mountain town on the border of Uganda where he and Partners in Health collaborated with the Rwandan government to build a complex devoted to health and health education. Dr. Farmer had homes in Rwinkwavu, Rwanda; Cange, Haiti; and Miami.

Bullies and public health- Justice for All with Gary Haugen

"...no matter where you are in the world, no matter which country you’re in, people with power – whether political or police – tend to abuse it if they are not held accountable..."- Gary Haugen, leader of the International Justice Mission (IJM)
As a nurse, I found this article to be interesting on several public health topics: poverty, security, health and safety!

An excellent positive correlation between protecting public health and providing people with safety in the article "Justice for All", published in the February 2017, The Rotarian Magazine- 

by By Sallyann Price for The Rotarian
Link to a human trafficking website with more data

In 1994 Rwanda was reeling from the genocide of as many as 1 million people over 100 days, the apex of decades of civil conflict in the East African nation.

Gary Haugen: The hidden reason for poverty the world needs to address now

Gary Haugen, then a young human rights attorney working for the U.S. Department of Justice, landed in Kigali to head a United Nations unit investigating the genocide and gathering evidence needed to prosecute the perpetrators for war crimes.

“There was basically no functioning government, Haugen recalls. “So much chaos is unleashed when there isn’t a civil authority exercising control. A lot of people tried to help, sending food and medicine and providing housing and education, but when it came to the problem of violence, very few people stepped up to that challenge.

Haugen established the International Justice Mission (IJM) in 1997 to address violence in developing countries. The organization has 17 field offices and works with local investigators to rescue victims of violence, support survivors, strengthen law enforcement, and bring violent criminals to justice. In his 2014 book, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence, Haugen argues that the progress made in the global fight against poverty means little when citizens’ basic safety is threatened.

At the 2016 Rotary International Convention in Korea, Haugen talked to Rotarians about one of the most harmful forms of what he calls the “everyday violence affecting the world’s poorest people – forced labor, or slavery. “Slavery is not a relic of history," he said, noting that an estimated 35 million enslaved people are hidden in plain sight, all over the world, generating $150 billion in profits for traffickers who seldom face prosecution. “It’s vaster and more brutal than ever. And it’s more stoppable than ever.

Haugen sat down with contributor Sallyann Price in Seoul to talk about the importance of addressing violence and safety in development work.

The Rotarian: How are poverty and violence related?

Haugen: When people think about the world’s poorest people, they don’t usually think about violence. They think of hunger, disease, and a lack of education and job opportunities. But just as important is daily vulnerability to violence, and not necessarily the violence that makes headlines: war, genocide, mass atrocities.

The form of violence that is far more destructive is what we call everyday violence – that’s sexual violence, police abuse, land theft, and forced labor. On a daily basis, these types of violence make it very difficult for the common poor person to improve his or her situation. You can give all kinds of goods and services to alleviate poverty, but if you’re not able to restrain the hands of the bullies that have the power to take it all away, you won’t see the kind of progress you want.

Abuse of power is a very simple human dynamic. It’s what a kid will understand in the schoolyard: There’s the kid who’s stronger and bigger than everybody else, and he’s abusing that power to take something from the victim, whether it’s lunch money or possessions or just their dignity. You see the same dynamic in the adult world; it just manifests itself in more adult, violent ways over time and on a bigger scale.

TR: Your address to the Rotary Convention focused specifically on the issue of slavery. Why this message for this audience?

Haugen: We are in a moment in history when forces are coming together to make it possible to end slavery in our lifetime. For the first time, enslavement is completely against the law everywhere. It’s an ancient evil that still exists, but it’s no longer the center of the global economy.

Rotary has demonstrated a unique capacity to focus effort on a global problem that simply shouldn’t exist anymore. Look at the example of polio: We have a vaccine that works perfectly well and we agree that everyone should be safe from this disease, but there’s an access gap. Similarly, everyone should be safe from slavery, and no parent should have to worry about a child being enslaved. We know that a combination of effective law enforcement and excellent survivor support can measurably reduce slavery, and violence overall. Rotarians, in their work to end polio, have shown the kind of focus and determination we need to succeed in that struggle.

TR: How do you respond to scientist Steven Pinker? In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, he argues that this is actually the least violent time in history.

Haugen: If you look at the broad scope of history, there is, on average, much less violence in our world today. That’s good news because it shows progress is possible. But think of the comparison with polio – fewer people are vulnerable to the disease, but does that mean we don’t finish the job? Like polio, the violence that remains in our world is more concentrated in the lives of the world’s poorest people.

Wealthier countries provide a measure of security and law enforcement on a public basis, but in the developing world, personal safety often means hiring private security. The world is now divided between those who can afford to pay for their own protection and the billions who are left in lawless chaos, experiencing extreme levels of violence.

TR: What role can more powerful members of society, like Rotarians, play in improving the situation?
Haugen: In much of the developing world, the public systems of justice are so broken that those with wealth and resources do not depend on them. Every culture debates the role of government and the range of services it should provide, but there should be no doubt that the most basic of those services is seeing to the security of its citizens. Those with the opportunity to lead must invest in public security so all citizens can enjoy that same safety.

It’s fascinating that the most common forms of violence in the developing world are almost always against the law already. The problem is not the absence of law, but the absence of law enforcement that protects everyone. That’s our focus at IJM.

TR: When did you first see this pattern?

Haugen: After I graduated from college, I lived in South Africa. The big issue at the time was the apartheid crisis. That’s where I started to see what it was like to live in a society of violent oppression and abuse. After law school, I went to work for the U.S. Department of Justice, where I worked specifically on the problem of police abuse in the United States. I started to see that no matter where you are in the world, no matter which country you’re in, people with power – whether political or police – tend to abuse it if they are not held accountable. I saw the particular problem of violence against the poor when I was sent to Rwanda in 1994 to direct the UN’s investigation into the genocide there. A lot of people tried to help, sending food and medicine and providing housing and education, but when it came to the problem of violence, very few people stepped up to that challenge. Slavery in this era strikes me as a similar issue: We are aware of it, we can stop it, and it is up to us to take that responsibility.

TR: How does IJM help a community plagued by violence?

Haugen: In many parts of the developing world, people have given up hope that law enforcement will ever protect the poor from violence. Our work demonstrates that it’s possible to change. The recovery of that hope is a game-changer.

We begin with what we call collaborative casework with the local authorities. We recruit a local team of lawyers, investigators, and social workers and start working on individual cases. As we try to bring the criminals to justice, we start to see the broken points in the criminal justice system.

When we begin working on a case, we pursue a baseline study to measure the prevalence of different types of violence and the performance of the police and the courts. Working from those two baselines, we can measure when the criminal justice system starts working better and violence decreases. Over hundreds of cases over many years, we’ve documented that it is possible to transform a broken law enforcement system into one that protects poor people effectively.

TR: How is that progress measured?

Haugen: One measure of success is the relative ease or difficulty of committing a particular crime. Cambodia is a great example. When we started working there 15 years ago, you could arrive in Phnom Penh and within an hour you could easily purchase a child for sex. That’s much harder to do now. Our project there focused on enhancing the criminal justice system’s capacity to send sex traffickers to jail, and we’ve seen hundreds of convictions since then. Our baseline study found that as many as 30 percent of commercial sex workers there were children. That figure is closer to 1 percent now. Also, because the Cambodian authorities are effectively enforcing the law, IJM is no longer needed. That’s our ultimate objective.

TR: How does IJM determine where to intervene?

HAUGEN: IJM uses a variety of criteria for assessing the location of a future project, including prevalence of crime and the political will of the government and local law enforcement to address crime. Because our model of justice system transformation centers on building capacity in the public justice systems of the countries and communities we’re working in, it is imperative that there be at least some desire to address the problem from within law enforcement.

TR: How can Rotary members help keep communities safe as they plan humanitarian aid projects in the developing world?

Haugen: Ask people what they need and connect with local groups addressing those needs. Since people are less likely to talk about violence, Rotary members should be very intentional about facilitating conversations to explore specific problems. Once you start the conversation and sharpen your focus on this issue, you start to see it over and over again.

Rotary is already raising the bar of excellence in terms of sustainability and accountability in its projects. But violence fights back in a way that is different from hunger or homelessness. If you take on violence, you may end up putting yourself on the line in some manner. The willingness to take on this challenge is a powerful message. 

Check the website: Polaris- freedom happens now