Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE — and Abandoned by Respectability Politics

Since January 2025, police raids on therapeutic massage parlors have intensified, focusing on immigrant girls suspected of intercourse work. Amid nationwide protests in opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these employees — amongst ICE’s most systematically focused — are largely excluded from neighborhood protection.

“I’m scared to go to work,” a migrant therapeutic massage employee in New York Metropolis told Purple Canary Music, a New York-based collective of Asian and migrant intercourse employees. “Police vehicles, plainclothes vehicles, all of us conceal when [we] see them … we’ll be arrested as quickly as we exit.”

On June 11, ICE and native police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, raided 9 therapeutic massage parlors, detaining 10 Chinese language girls — their names and whereabouts haven’t been launched. They disappeared into ICE’s sprawling detention system, with amenities from the U.S. to El Salvador and South Sudan. But not a single group referred to as for his or her launch.

Over 90 days in January and February, almost 1,000 arrests in Queens, New York, focused immigrant intercourse employees and avenue distributors. In Arizona, over 200 arrests had been made. In Texas, 11 parlors had been closed in February and May below emergency powers that bypass criminal charges. Throughout 20+ cities this yr, police collaborated with ICE in related raids.

Most go unreported, buried in sealed indictments. In Sanctuary Cities, ICE exploits legal loopholes to deport folks by means of administrative channels, with out judicial oversight, masking the true scale of its operations.

In different labor sectors, worksite raids sparked large outpourings of solidarity and inventive resistance, together with “Adopt a Day Laborer” campaigns and street vendor buyouts. However intercourse employees are left to fend for themselves.

Few immigrant rights organizations defend migrant intercourse employees. Assist primarily comes from different intercourse employees in underfunded grassroots teams like Red Canary Song, Trans Immigrant Project, and DecrimSexWorkCA, the final of which has organized ICE patrols, and distributed over $20,000 in emergency relief to undocumented and different intercourse employees since 2023. Their mannequin is mutual assist, not charity.

“Our undocumented intercourse employee fam are terrorized and with out sources,” wrote Cocoa Makati, coordinator of DecrimSexWorkCA. Intercourse work is migrant girls’s day labor; therapeutic massage parlors are their “House Depot.” Avenue-based intercourse employees are avenue distributors. Like different precarious employees, they construct security networks to withstand raids.

However the broader immigrant rights motion calibrates its messaging to attraction to average respectability — complying with traces drawn between the “deserving” and the disposable. When ICE targets intercourse employees, many stay silent.

The result’s devastating — masked abductions, multiagency entrapments, worksite raids. To some, these actions seem unprecedented. However for these organizing with intercourse employees, they’re all too acquainted. For years, ICE has used migrant intercourse employees as testing grounds for its most aggressive ways.

Throughout Operation Restore Roosevelt in Queens, therapeutic massage employees described “turning to riskier and riskier shoppers and accepting shoppers they don’t be ok with,” mentioned Yin Q, a lead organizer with Purple Canary Music. They really feel “they’re being requested to carry out extra providers for decrease charges,” she added.

Many worry leaving their office at evening to go dwelling. “They carry vans to arrest folks, ready to fill them. Undercover cops take pictures, and patrol officers come after,” mentioned Mateo Guerrero of the Trans Immigrant Project.

Guerrero described how the intensified raids led to elevated police sexual abuse. A trans Latina intercourse employee was stripped on the road in winter, and mocked in police custody, Guerrero instructed Truthout. Others had been pressured to offer oral intercourse in a police automobile to keep away from arrest, Guerrero mentioned. In March, two NYPD officers had been indicted for sexually assaulting and burglarizing a therapeutic massage parlor whereas on responsibility.

“Sexual harassment is the quantity two type of police violence,” Guerrero mentioned. “Underneath Operation Restore Roosevelt, it dramatically elevated.”

Chilling worry unfold all through the neighborhood. In vibrant Jackson Heights, recognized for its LGBTQ bars and Mexican meals carts, the streets grew to become empty. “Not simply trans of us — the overall migrant neighborhood was afraid to exit for a beer.”

Regardless of mounting proof of abuse, most immigrant rights teams hesitate to help intercourse employees. “There’s respectability politics due to political circumstances, and I perceive that as a technique,” Guerrero mentioned, “however leaving our of us behind is dangerous in the long run.”

That’s as a result of policing and deportations start on the margins — with intercourse employees, trans migrants, avenue distributors. As soon as normalized, these ways increase to the broader public.

Testing Their Techniques: Following the Cash in Anti-Trafficking

Applied sciences funded to police intercourse work now monitor everybody. ICE’s surveillance instruments and ballooning budgets had been constructed over many years by focusing on intercourse employees below the guise of anti-trafficking.

The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (2015) approved the creation of the Cyber Crimes Heart inside ICE, enabling wiretaps and web surveillance. Between 2014 and 2018, DHS funneled over $3 million to native police for license plate readers to fight trafficking — now utilized in broader office raids.

Authorities justified journey bans, surveillance, racial profiling, raids, detentions, deportations, asset seizures, even sexual assault as anti-trafficking measures to guard girls and youngsters. However these measures do more harm than good, exposing migrants to additional forms of violence. Most funding went to prosecutions and public campaigns promoting false statistics and racist stereotypes, not victims’ providers — fueling misguided vigilantism and MAGA fearmongering round little one trafficking.

Each Democrats and Republicans supported the growth of ICE by means of anti-trafficking laws. First established as a part of the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) within the aftermath of 9/11, ICE structured its operations as two departments in 2023: Enforcement and Removing Operations (ERO), which carries out deportations, and Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI), which conducts investigations. This division creates a loophole that lets police in Sanctuary Cities share knowledge with ICE by means of HSI.

Underneath Donald Trump’s first time period, Congress gave DHS $819,000 for the “Blue Campaign”, increasing HSI’s anti-trafficking focus to focus on therapeutic massage parlors. Underneath Biden, ICE’s 2023 price range elevated to $8.48 billion, including $15 million to its Heart for Countering Human Trafficking and $2 million for surveillance. As we speak, HSI’s multibillion-dollar budget funds office enforcement operations, fusion centers, and joint police process forces.

Regulation enforcement more and more makes use of facial recognition, license plate readers, Stingrays, Mobile Fortify, and different surveillance applied sciences — allegedly to assist victims of trafficking, however in follow, to construct circumstances for prosecution and deportation.

State and native regulation enforcement businesses use Traffic Jam (Marinus Analytics) to scrape escort adverts and match faces to biometric databases — with out proof of trafficking. Data brokers like Babel Street and ShadowDragon scrape knowledge from over 200 social platforms, together with on-line video games and relationship web sites. Officers use faux accounts to observe and entrap targets, shopping for geolocation knowledge and utilizing geofence warrants to observe their actions. They collect search queries, and metadata from chat apps like WhatsApp, to profile suspected intercourse employees.

To reinforce what they time period “early detection,” DHS lately launched StreamView, a program that makes use of AI to scan livestreams from public cameras for “suspicious habits” — like strolling on streets the place recognized intercourse employees stroll. Strange acts change into grounds for arrest, when carried out by folks with quick skirts or international accents. This follow legitimized profiling and surveilling the general public primarily based on patterns, fairly than proof, of legal exercise.

The Nationwide Human Trafficking hotline, run by anti-trafficking group Polaris, proudly started partnering with Palantir in 2012. Palantir now holds a $30 million contract to construct a “grasp database” for ICE, and is in talks to develop a bigger database on all U.S. residents.

The One Massive Lovely Invoice (HR 1) allocated $2.5 billion to ICE particularly for AI programs and biometric knowledge assortment — together with facial recognition, iris scanning, and DNA — shared between ICE, the Division of Homeland Safety, Division of Justice, and state regulation enforcement. A lot of this funding will go to Palantir, which has already secured over $1.3 billion in federal contracts in 2025. The Customs and Border Safety (CBP) additionally obtained over $6 billion for the growth of Autonomous Surveillance Towers (AST) and biometric screening applied sciences. This invoice turns beforehand small-scale biometric pilots into foundational nationwide infrastructure.

In New York, ICE accessed over 480 plate readers logging 16.2 million scans in every week — monitoring folks with out warrants or possible trigger. In California, police shared plate data with ICE regardless of sanctuary legal guidelines. ICE makes use of these instruments to raid farms, building websites and meals processing crops in Nebraska, California, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. The expertise that when policed intercourse employees now targets all migrant employees.

Dangerous Women Make Historical past: The Web page and Mann Acts

The primary U.S. immigration regulation and the nation’s first federal policing company had been each born out of the criminalization of immigrant sexuality.

The Web page Act of 1875 barred entry to the U.S. for Chinese language girls, all suspected of prostitution — the primary regulation excluding immigrants by race, gender, and perceived morality. It set the stage for the Chinese language Exclusion Act of 1882, which closed the previously open borders of the nation.

The Mann Act of 1910 criminalized interstate journey for “immoral functions,” a obscure class used to police interracial relationships and intercourse work by focusing on Black and migrant males. The FBI — the nation’s first federal police company — expanded through the enforcement of the Mann Act. As we speak’s raids echo the identical ethical panic of the “white slave trade” — invoking imagined threats and racialized assumptions about migrant immorality to justify broader policing and immigration management.

Mainstream immigrant advocacy champions the “good migrant” — the scholar, mom, farmhand, and home employee. However immigration enforcement started not with “respectable immigrants,” however these hardest to defend. Migrant intercourse employees defy the “good/unhealthy migrant” binary — and that’s highly effective. Most Asian therapeutic massage employees are older girls escaping poverty wages in different extra exploitative jobs. Intercourse work is precarious, however for a lot of, it provides extra autonomy — feeding households and offering some with the one accessible startup capital for different companies, like bakeries.

Intercourse Work Is Labor — and a Line of Protection

As Purple Canary Music urgently warns: “Neighborhoods on the margins are testing grounds for the way policing and neighborhood vigilantism can increase and change into embedded into the each day lifetime of the town … the plan is to normalize the horror.”

For years, undercover officers posed systematically as shoppers, soliciting services in plain garments, earlier than arresting intercourse employees with impunity to earn overtime. It’s now a nationwide tactic — turning workplaces into traps, as masked ICE brokers raid immigrant workplaces to satisfy federal quotas.

Reversing the growth of ICE below anti-trafficking rhetoric requires eliminating the authorized loopholes that permit native police to collaborate with ICE. It requires eradicating the 10-year travel ban and “moral turpitude” clause from immigration regulation — a obscure provision used to deport intercourse employees and different migrants for minor nonviolent offenses.

Defending migrants additionally means confronting whorephobia, racism, and criminalization. In any other case, the state will preserve utilizing the identical fascist playbook: goal intercourse employees and essentially the most marginalized first, then increase its attain to others. Defending the rights of migrant intercourse employees is important to a broader motion for immigrant justice.