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that he would continue enforcing the law against immigrants who refuse to follow deportation orders. “It is important that the system have integrity,” Morton said. “I am not signaling in any way that we are not going to enforce the law against non-criminal fugitives” (Gorman, 2009c, p. 11). According to Tim Counts, a spokesperson for ICE, “80 percent of the fugitive population is non-criminal. While we focus on the worst offenders, we are charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.” Counts goes on to state that nonfugitives are not in the clear; if discovered, they, too, will be arrested. “If we get leads, we’re not going to ignore administrative offenders” (Rood, 2009, p. 1).
    Many legal and social service providers were hopeful that the relationship between ICE and legal and social service providers would improve under the Obama administration. And according to Caitlin Ryland of Legal Aid of the North Carolina Farmworker Unit, this seems to be happening. “What we have seen lately is a forging between local law enforcement, ICE, and direct service providers. ICE has indicated to us that they have been given specific instructions [by the Obama administration] to concentrate on employer-focused enforcement actions. We understand this to mean that they are targeting enforcement actions on employers as opposed to workers.” 20
    Ryland states that it is in the best interests of trafficking victims for local police, ICE, legal service providers and direct service providers to have a working relationship: “There are many different types of first responders—it may be a migrant housing inspector, a Department of Labor inspector, an NGO, a health clinic, or local law enforcement. A lack of cooperation between groups can be detrimental to trafficking victims. One example is that of a trafficker of one of our clients who was actually able to use an unknowing police officer to further his trafficking scheme.”
    The trafficker had called local law enforcement in order to stop a victim from leaving the trafficking labor camp. The officer who arrived at the location did not speak Spanish and allowed the trafficker to act as an interpreter between the officer and the trafficking victim. As a result of this interaction, the victim understood—through his trafficker’s fraudulent translation of the conversation—that the police officer was demanding that the victim sign a paper indicating that he could not leave the camp without repaying his alleged debt to the trafficker. “If the law enforcement official had been sufficiently trained to see those red flags, then perhaps this person could have had an opportunity to leave the trafficking situation at an earlier date,” Ryland said. “Additionally, it might have prevented the trafficker from trafficking others. Instead, the trafficker was actually able to use law enforcement to further his trafficking scheme.”
    In September 2009 the local ICE office agreed to inform the appropriate legal service providers when they start an enforcement action. In the past, says Ryland, ICE has placed those found at raids in the local jail—in black-and-white-striped suits—and in the same jail as their traffickers and johns:
    ICE has now agreed to let us know when they begin a raid. If they have identified a potential victim they will try to place the victim somewhere other than the jail for the interviewing process, in an effort to minimize re-victimization. Trust between an advocate and a victim is just that [much] more difficult to foster when a person has been unknowingly re-victimized by people who are there to help them. However, ICE informed us that the extent to which they are able to make these alternative interview arrangements depends on the extent of their working relationship with the specific local law-enforcement agency involved in the raid.
    One of the challenges in forging relationships between law enforcement and legal and direct services is that