If received as expected, Oliver said, the institute would use it to fund an outreach program and a hot line with translators in 40 languages available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It also would pay for housing, medical and legal help to those victims who come forward.

Weiss said a goal of the outreach program is to educate members and leaders in various ethnic communities to look for signs of smuggling and trafficking.

Once the victims are identified, translators and representatives from the International Institute will speak to them, offering them housing, job training, medical care and assistance in obtaining special visas for trafficking victims. In exchange, law enforcement will seek their assistance in identifying the individuals responsible. "It's not going to be easy," said Oliver about getting victims to cooperate. "We're talking gangs being involved. In many cases, threats have been made against the victim's family back home."

Patel, himself an illegal alien from India, mailed their falsified travel documents back to co-conspirators in Great Britain so they could be reused with the next group.

In February, Hussein Mutungirehe was sentenced to six months in federal prison for harboring a female child and transporting male children to the Canadian border.

The children, all from Rwanda, arrived illegally in Connecticut after Abiba Kanzayire, a co-defendant, obtained visas from the U.S. Consulate in Burundi. She did so by claiming they were her children.

"We know the children came in through New York, stayed in Meriden and were taken to Canada," O'Connor said. "We don't know what happened to them after that."

Just last month, O'Connor was a keynote speaker at a conference on human trafficking conducted in Bangkok, Thailand, by the U.S. Department of Justice's International Law Enforcement Academy. Law enforcement representatives from many Southeast Asian countries attended.

"They wanted to know what they could do to work with us," he said. "We are a destination country. It's their wives, their daughters, their children, their relatives that are being trafficked here."

"Their law enforcement officials are trying to do the best they can," he said. "They've created investigative units to combat this, but what they don't have are the preventative social service institutions like we have in the United States. Most of that work is being done by missionaries and religious organizations."

While in Bangkok, O'Connor was taken on a tour by law enforcement of some of the seedier areas. What he saw was "a booming sex trade," which left him feeling how important "our efforts to strike at the source are.

"Children are the most vulnerable," he said. "They are the least able to protect themselves," he said. "Smuggling children is an endeavor where profit rather than a child's well-being is the common motive."

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