AS A LAWYER AND A NONPROFIT FOUNDER, I LEARNED THAT SEX TRAFFICKING EXISTS IN EVERY CORNER OF AMERICA. EVERYONE IGNORED ME. SO, I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT IT.

In 2015, I was among a group of professional people who organized a nonprofit corporation to provide free and low-cost legal services to immigrants. Living in Houston, we all knew many good, hardworking people from Mexico and Central America who had slipped across the Southern border without permission years earlier, including the strong, gentle men who tend and keep our yards full of beautiful flowers and leafy trees and the polite women who quietly clean the offices in our downtown buildings. Many lived in the country fo decades but couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer to apply for citizenship. Their foreign born children didn’t know how to apply for DACA.

My friend, Pauline, knew about our mission and told me that her church had established a place north of the city where they provided refuge to young, immigrant women. She offered to get me permission to visit.

When our lawyer for Houston Justice for Our Neighbors and I drove north on the appointed day, we kept getting lost since neither Google Maps nor Texas State maps indicated the precise location. Eventually, we drove down a dirt road in the piney woods and came upon a barbed wire fence with an intimidating, steel security gate. With tree branches hanging down over the road blocking out the sun, it felt secretive and unsettling. This was not what I expected in more ways than one.

In her small, untidy office, the manager explained that the girls in their care, ages 9 to 17, were not immigrants. They were American girls that had been rescued from sex traffickers, but not before suffering through years of beatings, degradation, and rape. The heavy security was to keep out their traffickers. The mission of the counselors at Freedom {;ace was to restore and rehabilitate the girls so they could go back to their families and live relatively normal lives.

I was shocked by this information. I had never heard of “sex trafficking.” I had no idea that criminals used fraud, force, or drugs to coerce young girls into becoming captive sex slaves. Like most people, if I thought about it at all, I thought that women engaging in sex work were adults who wanted to do it for the money. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The manager took us on a tour in a rusty old golf cart. The wooded property was an abandoned, rustic church camp and the group living quarters were unpainted wooden bunk houses. A few old horses used for equine therapy grazed in the nearby pasture. The girls we saw looked pretty but without makeup. They looked like my daughters when they were teenagers. I thought about their parents and how painful it would be losing your child to a life where they were forced to sell their bodies to many men night after night until they died from a drug overdose, or sexually transmitted disease, or were just worn out and died.

After that visit, I couldn’t stop thinking about those girls and the thousands like them, both from foreign countries and local. I told my friends what I had learned but they either didn’t believe me or didn’t choose to hear about it. Wanting to know more, I read the few available books on the subjecting in 2014, usually written by survivors, which were chilling in their detail; one clinical study of the business of human trafficking in Asia; and one written by a New Zealand investigator who worked with an international nonprofit agency that investigated brothels around the world in order to inform local law enforcement. The literature was sparse but the scope of the commercial sex industry was wider than I could ever have imagined.

Children at Risk, a nonprofit focused on child welfare, conducted van tours for ordinary people to observe places where sex trafficked girls were sold. I sadly discovered that some of these places were near where I lived, in the “best” part of Houston. But they were everywhere in the greater metropolitan area.

A notorious madam was currently on trial for running an infamous brothel/cantina, Las Palmas II, in an Hispanic neighborhood close to downtown where she and her family sold girls, including children. She paid padrones to kidnap and traffic the girls across the southern US border to her brothels. I followed the trial with great interest. After some of her victims testified to the horrors they suffered, the court gave her a life sentence. But disappointingly, two years later another woman and her family were arrested for conducting the same business a few miles away. There was too much money to be made and soon the Mexican cartels took over the sex trafficking smuggling business. Unfortunately, the open borders during the past three years have increased the number of girls trafficked exponentially.

My research showed that half of the girls sex trafficked in the United States are immigrants from every part of the world and half are domestic. The average age of victims is 13-14. Traffickers are now even grooming and kidnapping Houston girls in their high schools. In fact, Houston is the largest hub in the country for sex trafficking because of its location near the Mexican border and location on Interstate 10. The Port of Houston and Bush International Airport also facilitate the transit of victims.

I have made my living as a historian and a lawyer by writing. I felt that I had a moral obligation to make other Houstonians aware of this terrible crime that was so prolific in our city. I concluded that the most effective way I could raise awareness was to write a story that ordinary people would want to read.

The local press published an article about a young Mexican mother who went into Monterrey to interview for a secretarial job. When she woke up she was in a brothel in Texas. Her family didn’t know what happened to her until she was rescued years later. Her story became the in aspiration for my first thriller/suspense novel, SEARCHING FOR PILAR. It is the story of three young Mexican girls who are drugged and trafficked by a cartel to Houston. Their padrone forces them to work in the back rooms of a glitzy men’s club in the Galleria and then in a cantina/brothel like Las Palmas II until Pilar’s Mexican brother, an American female lawyer, a priest, and a Hispanic private investigator find her four years later. It is a story of courage, family, and faith, but also of moral depravity.

By 2018, when my book was published, there was greater awareness among the public of sex trafficking but it was far from universal. At my first reading a neighbor’s home, a tall, elderly, gray-haired man interrupted me, stating loudly, “There’s no sex trafficking in Houston.” But many people did hear my message and I have been invited to speak to book clubs, nonprofit organizations, universities and other forums.Someone always tells me, “I had no idea this was happening until I had your book.” SEARCHING FOR PILAR has sold thousands of copies and I was honored by a prestigious international organization for bringing attention to international sex trafficking.

We should all be aware of evil and speak up in whatever way we can when we see it to prevent it from happening again. With that kind of support, perhaps these unfortunate young girls can safely turn the page towards a happier chapter.

SEARCHING FOR PILAR is available in paperback or digital on Amazon and all online booksellers.