I sat in the driver’s seat of the Toyota Prius Robert and I bought. And sat, and sat, and sat. Taillights as far as the eye could see.
“There’s so much traffic in Howard County!” I said, out loud. I caught myself. It was a tasteless thing to say.
“Come on, Colleen,” I thought to myself. I was complaining about vehicular traffic on my way to meet a woman who works against a much more dreadful kind of traffic–or trafficking, rather: human trafficking.
I got to Andrea Nunez’s office shortly thereafter on Patuxent Woods Drive. I sat down for just a moment in the waiting area before she came out to meet me.
“Hi, Colleen!” she said in a pleasant voice. Later I asked her if she’d ever considered voice acting or broadcasting work. Her voice is unusually easy to listen to.
We sat down in a medium-sized conference room to talk about what human trafficking is and how she’s fighting against it.
More To Do
Andrea taught me a lot about human trafficking, but she’s only been at her post for a month. I latch on to memorable phrases, as the classical, medieval, and Renaissance rhetoricians will tell you some phrases made to do. And Andrea taught me one about human trafficking
“Force, fraud, coercion are the key elements any lawyer has to prove to show the trafficking,” Andrea said.
She made an umbrella shape with her right hand and tapped it on the table between us when she explained to me what falls under the definition of human trafficking.
“Someone’s making someone have sex or work. Those are the two buckets: sex and labor. And sometimes there’s some overlap,” she said. I could tell she felt confident in this legal approach to the basics of the topic, and it’s probably because she started out her professional career as a lawyer. She got a Bachelor’s in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland at College Park, took a couple of years off to work, then attended the University of Michigan Law School.
“It was cold but great,” she said. We laughed at that. The day we spoke was cold but great too!
RoCo’s good friend, local progressive activist, and marketing consultant Deeba Jafri had an uncompromising take on human trafficking and its costs: “Human trafficking destroys lives,” she said in a text exchange with me when I told her I was going to meet Andrea later that day.
Time and Traffic
I’d met Andrea a couple of weeks earlier at the monthly, general membership meeting of the Ellicott City and Western Howard Democratic Club (EC&WHDC). Regular readers of this website will know that I’m that group’s vice president. My superior, President Sue Geckle, had gotten Andrea to come to talk to the group about her work. After her hour-long presentation, I thought I must speak to Andrea more. This is such a timely issue, and I felt like Andrea could teach me so much more about it. She agreed to meet with me immediately.
Andrea and I were meeting at a threshold moment for her. She’s been on this job for just a little over a month, although if she hadn’t told me that I’d never have known it. She’s very poised and confident. She wore a lemon-yellow dress and her long, dark hair fell to one side of her face.
Previous to her position in HoCo, she’d been the Honorable Tom Hucker’s Deputy Chief of Staff on the Montgomery County Council for 5 years.
“I have a month in and I still want to do a lot of learning and listening from groups in the community and all the stakeholders,” Andrea said of her plans for her time in this role. She wants to spend time talking to people like HopeWorks, law enforcement, and the many county and citizen groups that exist to confront this topic.
“Everyone is really nice and eager to work together, so that’s great, but I still have a lot more to see and understand about how it works here,” she said.
So one piece of the puzzle that she mentioned a few times will probably come into play a lot as Andrea gets a lay of the land over the next few months: the Howard County Human Trafficking Prevention and Awareness Coordination Council.
That group should be the hub of a lot of our conversation, a lot of our decision-making going forward,” she said. This Council will help Andrea and others wrap their heads around a complicated issue before, as she said, she or anyone else can recommend the county do anything.
The Council has seats at the table for law enforcement, advocacy groups, and even survivors of human trafficking.
Trafficking Training
Andrea said that aside from the Council, something she’d initially like to do a lot of is awareness and trainings about how to spot and respond to human trafficking. In fact, the next day she’d be going to talk to a group of high school students and their parents after our chat. Andrea also said she’d like to do more on the labor side of the trafficking puzzle.
“There’s sex and labor, and often sex gets a little more attention from law enforcement for a variety of good reasons. But I’d like to move the ball forward on the labor side and, you know, help Howard County detect and prevent labor trafficking, she said, nodding. “There’s also housing.”
Her sudden shift in gears made my ears perk up.
“There’s a chronic shortage of housing for survivors of trafficking,” she said, I think, sensing my piqued interest.
If she had lots of money to earmark for this problem, Andrea would build a “huge, awesome” shelter.
“But where would they go after that?” she asked me looking past me out the window.
That’s why she’d build in wraparound services like case management, therapy, transportation, job training, on-site lawyers, and more. She’d also allocate some of that theoretical money to more long-term housing.
“There are some really great ones nationwide that could be good models,” she said.
Another RoCo best friend, progressive activist, and immigration attorney, Becca Niburg, offered some input on the topic via email the next day: “Howard county sees trafficking because of Routes 95 and 1. Although human trafficking doesn’t actually involve movement, often traffickers do bring people from state to state,” she said.
Friendly But Fervent
Part of what I liked right-away about Andrea the night I met her at that EC&WHDC meeting is that I could tell that besides her relaxed demeanor and that radio-friendly voice I mentioned, she can be fierce when the need arises. That’s why I know she’ll be an advocate to contend with for victims of human trafficking prevention in Howard County. It must also be why she got this job.
“I think if people knew me they’d know I’m a mix of passion and understanding on this issue,” she said.
She didn’t hesitate to politely interrupt me a couple of times, when, in my bronchitis-and-antibiotics-induced fog, I moved on to another question while she was still answering the previous one.
“This is a great department I think and a great administration to work in. My deputy director Cheryl Mattis, Jackie Scott, my director, all the way to County Executive Ball. I think they’re committed to putting in some real work on this,” she said. Her co-workers in human trafficking prevention here aren’t just putting it on their to-do list like another casual item to be checked off, she told me.
And she and her ilk in this area are putting their noses to the human trafficking grindstone in a county that cares, she added.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much interest there is and activism in the community,” Andrea said. A recent conference and all the community activists who helped plan it showed Andrea just how committed to turning the tide on human trafficking HoCo is.
In addition to learning a lot more about the county and its key players, Andrea pointed out that outreach and awareness-building is and will always be, likely, a part of her job.
“I’d like to be doing tons of public outreach and awareness campaigns,” she said: bus ads, billboards, even making human-trafficking-awareness a part of the school curriculum.
Andrea hopes to create more “robust partnerships,” too, she told me.
“When you talk about human trafficking, labor trafficking and sex trafficking, it touches the hospitality industry a lot,” she said. In that vein, Andrea hopes to build relationships with Visit Howard County, the chambers, business groups, and even the hotels themselves to get everyone to the table working together.
While the county just had a successful conference on this topic, Andrea quickly pointed out that she and the rest of the Department of Community Resources haven’t committed to making it an annual event just yet.
“We’re trying to just be thoughtful about future events and the best us of everyone’s efforts,” she said.
She likes her office small for now. She doesn’t have to do a lot of management of staff, which can be a big energy, time, and resource commitment. Being an office of one, for example, for now, leaves her to devote a good chunk of her professional energy to exploring funding and grant opportunities.
“That’s something I’m hard at work on,” she said.
For now, too, she gets out of the office a lot, and a big staff might pull her back into it more. While that day she was only going to trot out after our talk to pick some stuff up at HopeWorks, normally she’d be out in the community more. She’d be getting to know other players in this area at coffees and lunches, talking to groups of students and parents who were concerned they’d seen some evidence of human trafficking, and getting together with people whose work touches on this issue at task force get-togethers, among other endeavors.
The county’s set up one such task force to look at Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary’s (D-12) vacatur bill. It would help human trafficking victims void their records of crimes they were convicted of but only committed because the person taking advantage of them forced them to.
“Delegate Atterbeary’s a great champion for trafficking issues,” she said. Her aforementioned bill would see to it that crimes that trafficking victims committed because the person who took advantage of them forced them to could be erased from their records. She said another bill Del. Atterbeary’s working on that would hopefully reduce human trafficking if it passed was her bill seeking to reduce the age of legal marriage in Maryland. Many victims of human trafficking, after all, are forced into marriage with partners seeking to take advantage of them.
Andrea was quick to mention the work of another HoCo legislator too and one of our BFFs here at rocoinhoco.com: Delegate Eric Ebersole (D-12).
“Delegate Ebersole was at our conference and he did a great bill last session on trucking,” Andrea said. That bill, now a law, pushed for by another one of our BFFs, local attorney Becca Niburg, required that truckers receive education on spotting the signs of human trafficking and how to respond to it.
Where To Go
Robert’s lifelong obsession with daytime soaps crept into my head then, as I asked Andrea for a good support for those looking for more information on this topic.
“The Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force is a great resource for anyone in the community,” she said. She looked slightly confused when I jotted down that name and also mouthed the words to the old One Life to Live theme song: “Here’s where you go when it looks like the rain won’t end this time.”
I looked back up and smiled at Andrea. She smiled back, and I thought in that second how her gentle–but powerful–way was perfect for work in a field where you’d likely come across situations and people that weren’t all black and white. Parents, children, victims, perpetrators, ancillary figures and more who have a hundred different reasons for doing what they do, like all of us.
I thought of Shaukat Azmi, who’s star-making turn as Khanum Sahib in Muzaffar Ali’s Bollywood classic, Umrao Jaan, re-wrote the book on multilayered portrayals of someone who we might see as indefensible. She played a brothel owner who went so far as to force her own daughter into a life of prostitution, and Robert and I saw Umrao thanks to our Pakistani friend back in Manhattan, Dr. Wali Mahmood, a cardiologist we’d become good friends with many years back.
Azmi died a week after I met with Andrea, and I wondered, “Would Andrea come across such a complicated person in her dealings within the human trafficking industry? How would she deal with that person?
She’s just a month in, so if I check back with her in a few months, I bet I’ll have an answer.
After all, as Andrea said several times to me in our hour-long chat: “There’s lots more good work to do.”
Thanks for reading! Check back with us here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.