Jamel Jermaine Muldrew, 32, was arrested on human trafficking charges earlier this month in a sting in Florida.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Muldrew reportedly drove a rental car from Houston to a Citrus Park motel in Florida where he was apprehended, according to an arrest affidavit. Muldrew is accused of delivering a juvenile victim to the Tampa area for the purpose of prostitution and was arrested during a surveillance operation.
This most recent case is emblematic of the state's larger human trafficking problem, which has an estimated 300,000 victims, including nearly 79,000 minors and youth victims of sex trafficking, according to a study conducted by the Institute on Domestic Violence & Sexual Assault (IDVSA) at The University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work.
“Few states have this kind of insight into the number of people being exploited,” IDVSA director Noël Busch-Armendariz, who led the study, said. “And more importantly, each count reflects a human being living among us in slavery-like conditions; our findings certainly give us all a call to action.”
In an interview following a major sex trafficking bust code named Operation Patriot last fall, Sunni Mitchell, an assistant district attorney with Fort Bend County's child abuse division and human trafficking unit, discussed the difficulties in arresting and prosecuting these crimes.
“A proactive investigation means it's not just law enforcement waiting for a tip," Mitchell told the Ft. Worth Times. "It's law enforcement going out, looking to see what is out there and how we can help these people.”
Claire Andresen, another assistant district attorney in Fort Bend County's child abuse division, credited Operation Patriot's success to the assistance provided by the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance (HTRA) task force, which is based out of the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas.
“It combines local and state law enforcement with federal law enforcement and then also social service organizations,” Andresen said, “Being a member of that task force gives us so many resources for not only investigating and conducting these proactive investigations but also obtaining justice for victims, making sure that victims are restored and especially giving us technology that can help with the identification and prosecution of these individuals.”
Human trafficking is a large-scale criminal enterprise worth $150 billion that affects 25 million people worldwide, with over 23,000 known victims in the United States in 2018, according to a report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation; Texas has the country's second-highest rate of human trafficking offenses.
Gov. Greg Abbott recently began collaborating with a data initiative called Lighthouse late last year in order to help fight sex trafficking in the state.
