Alachua Co. human trafficking trial reset for December

Carline Bontemps Ceneus, 32, of Miami, her brother Cabioch Bontemps, 34, of Lacrosse, and Willy Paul Edouard, 47, of Miami, were arrested earlier this summer after being indicted on charges of conspiring to commit forced labor and visa fraud. Ceneus was also charged with document servitude.

The alleged scheme was discovered when Alachua County Sheriff’s Detective Tyson Elliott received a tip from a nongovernmental social services provider who noticed the workers’ basic needs were not being met.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the scheme involved persuading 34 workers to travel from their native Haiti to Florida to take jobs the suspects reportedly told them were well-paying.
Specifically, federal officials said Ceneus and Edouard arranged for the workers to pay recruitment fees. The money for the fees apparently came from loan sharks who secured the loans with the victims’ property in Haiti.
Once the group arrived in Florida, officials said the suspects confiscated their passports and forced them to work on farms by threatening to report them to local agencies or threatening to have them deported to face their unpaid debts for their recruitment fees.

Prayer for the Refugee

I wanted to thank Rise Against for making this song and video. The video depicts how many of the products that we consume here in the U.S are made by slaves in third world countries, including children. In order to fight this we need to change our buy habits. We need to buy FAIR TRADE products!

NBC’S DATELINE SUNDAY “AMERICA NOW” FEATURES CHILD LABOR IN AGRICULTURE IN THE US

On NBC’s Dateline Sunday a one-hour documentary was aired on July 18, 2010 that highlights the plight of migrant families with working children in the United States. The documentary compared the lives of children covered in their Dateline NBC story on migrant child laborers in 1998 to those working in the fields today. The documentary, “Children of the Harvest“, shows that little has changed in the last 12 years and that much of the problem lies with the lack of protections under child labor laws in the US and weak enforcement. It clearly shows that the life of migrant workers and their children continues to be very difficult and that the children continue to be the invisible workers in much of American agriculture. Source – http://endchildlabor.org/?p=947

FCAHT Orlando is currently putting together a subcommittee that will deal with the issue of Child labor trafficking and Fair Trade. FCAHT Tampa Bay is working on organizing a similar subcommittee. Our goal in creating this subcommittee is to examine and analyze the problem of Child Labor Trafficking and it’s many factors and then on a local level help support Fair Trade businesses to directly and/or indirectly contribute to the ending of child labor globally.