Where’s Clinton on Slave Labor Here at Home? : He faults China while his Justice and INS minions refuse to act on peonage in El Monte.

President Clinton goes on about prison labor in China but has yet to say a word about slave labor in El Monte. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno is immorally silent on the failure of the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, who reports to her, to lift a finger to protect Thai women forced to work 18 hours a day “or until they drop,” seven days a week.

I am not referring to April, 1992, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles first learned that slave labor was being conducted in El Monte, 15 miles east of downtown L.A., and closed the case that July along with other investigations of peonage. That crime can be traced to Bush appointees.

But there is a nine-page record in the possession of the local U.S. Attorney that also details criminal indifference on the watch of this Administration. On May 24 of this year, an INS agent spoke to the attorney for a woman who escaped from the garment factory/concentration camp in El Monte, where she had been imprisoned for four years. Three years after claiming they could not get a federal warrant based on an anonymous tip, the INS suddenly had an eyewitness to slavery at the location. And she was willing to testify.

The escapee detailed how a smuggling ring operated within Thailand to recruit their human crop and transport them to the factory prison complex in the United States. The affidavit compiled by the INS is nauseatingly detailed:

“Female Thai informant stated that . . . on most days they were forced to work about 16 hours or until they dropped . . . . She stated that the employers frequently threatened them that if they escaped their families in Thailand would be subjected to violent reprisals . . . that anyone leaving the townhouses unsupervised--even to just walk inside the compound--were harshly scolded. She stated that the employers often warned them that if they escaped . . . they would be vulnerable to being raped. She stated that the employees are totally cut off from outside contact . . . that she is aware of about nine who have escaped but who are too afraid of reprisals against their families in Thailand to come forward.”

The informant said that the bosses of the operation are “very well connected” in Thailand, “and as a result could carry out violent reprisals with impunity. The informant stated that even the local U.S. Thai newspapers would not dare expose the slave operation when she informed them of it.”

Despite these expressed fears, the escapee met on May 30 with an INS agent and took him to the complex on Santa Anita Boulevard in El Monte. She observed that: “Since her escape, a guard had been posted in the driveway of the compound facing the seven townhouse units . . . the perimeter wall has been both heightened by corrugated steel panels and also topped by rolls or razor wire . . . the rear windows of the townhouse units serving as work shops and employee quarters have been closed/paneled with wood three-fourths of the way to the tops of each window.”

The slave labor went on round the clock:

“After dark lights were on in all townhouse units . . . the garage doors on the five townhouse ID’d as quarters/production units were partially opened about one foot at the bottom and fluorescent lights were on in each . . . . The suspected factory appeared by the lights inside to be in production after normal business hours until I terminated surveillance at 2200 [10 p.m.]”

Stop and listen. Two years at a sewing machine for 16 hours a day, seven days a week for $200 a month making garments that fashionable people wear. If she said no, they broke her bones. The Constitution forbids slavery, and she had been a slave. What prevented the U.S. Attorney from asking for a search warrant?

Nothing would have been done about this situation had California Labor Commissioner Victoria Bradshaw, a Wilson appointee, not received a tip and asked the INS to join in the raid. INS Acting District Director Donald Looney wrote a letter Aug. 1 instructing her to wait. There had been enough waiting.

We’re talking slavery here, right? How dare the President complain about human rights violations anywhere in the world when his own agents don’t give a damn? Are our standards lower than China’s?

And how dare Janet Reno’s INS now keep these exploited young Thai workers imprisoned in orange uniforms, taking them in shackles from where they are being incarcerated on Terminal Island to the federal building in Los Angeles for interviews? Haven’t they suffered enough at the hands of the federal government?