Steve Monaghan, pictured here at the Baton Rouge Press Club, said he was blown away by teachers’ testimonies. (Credit: Collin Richie)

In August of 2010, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien flew down to Baton Rouge to cover a story regarding accusations that a number of teachers in the East Baton Rouge Parish school system were being victimized.

The story involved a group of teachers who were recruited from the Philippines to teach in public schools here in Baton Rouge. Around 360 teachers, mostly women, were offered a job here, and an opportunity to make up to ten times what they would be making back home.

The deal sounded too good to be true. Turns out, it was.

The teachers found themselves in a nightmare. Instead of making money, they were incurring larger and larger debts towards the recruiting company that brought them here.

“That, in the real world, is much closer to modern slavery than we should be comfortable with,” said an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center in the four-minute piece that aired on CNN.

When the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, filed suit against the recruiter, the allegations were serious – human trafficking among them.

After years of complaints, suits, and appeals, a federal judge ruled last week that the Law Center, representing the Filipino teachers, could pursue a human trafficking case.

The decision is the first of its kind, greatly broadening the term “human trafficking” to include not only individuals brought over for agricultural work, sex work, but now also, educational work, as well as allowing a case to be pursued as a class suit. It’s a victory for both the teachers here in Baton Rouge, as well as countless other immigrant professionals who have fallen victim to similar scams across the country.

Unsavory history

When the news first broke that a community of foreign teachers had been victimized by a recruiting company – and further, that the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board might have been involved – the education community was floored.

“It was really stuff that we weren’t acquainted with,” said Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers. “To be honest with you, it blew me away initially. I had no idea that such things were really occurring. I never knew it existed in education.”

The story begins with an employment recruiting company named PARS, run by Emilio Villarba, in the Philippines back in 2006, and its sister company here in the U.S., Universal Placement International, run by Lourdes “LuLu” Navarro (Villarba’s sister), and her husband, Hothello “Jack” Navarro.

The trio was accused of racketeering, extortion, mail and wire fraud, and human trafficking in a complaint filed by the American Federation of Teachers and the state-based chapter, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LTF). The suit gained national attention as the first scandal of its kind. Though trafficking accusations are common in many fields of migrant work, education was not one of them.

The money-generating scheme is not LuLu Navarro’s first. In fact, she has a history of legal troubles. In California, Navarro plead guilty to felony fraud in the state’s MediCal program; and in New Jersey, she plead guilty to money laundering.

“Her brother was also indicted in the same fraud, but they were never able to serve him,” said Jim Knoepp senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a phone interview last week. “It appears as though he fled the country and went back to the Filipinos before he could be arrested.”

Back in the Philippines, both UPI and PARS were being investigated by the U.S. Embassy in Manila during the period of recruitment.

Perhaps most shocking was the realization that someone of such ill repute could be working with the parish school board, who had a professional relationship with Navarro and solicited her services. Monaghan, mentioning “layers of complicity,” argued that not everyone was unaware of the unsavory practices, though no one spoke up about it until the teachers did.

Voluntary servitude

According to information gathered at testimonial hearings held by the Louisiana Workforce Commission, the scheme, which began in 2006, worked something like this: The recruiters, advertising job opportunities in the U.S., assembled a group of interested educational professionals with the promise of economic opportunities unheard of in the third world country of the Philippines: a $40,000 salary.

The teachers were informed of a $5,000 first-time fee in order to obtain the HB-1 guest worker visa, to be paid to the recruiting company.

That, Knoepp said, was the first indication of something fishy going on.

“A visa really shouldn’t cost the teachers anything except maybe a few hundred dollars for physical examinations and things like that,” Knoepp said.

What’s more, HB-1 visa fees are supposed to be paid by the petitioning employer, not the potential employee.

“The Baton Rouge parish school board, or the other school districts in Louisiana, should have paid the fees for the processing of peoples visas,” Knoepp said.

Then, the teachers were asked to pay another, much larger fee – one that they were not told about up front – in addition to paying their airfare to get to the U.S. If teachers did not want to pay these hidden fees, they had to forfeit the fee already paid.

That type of choice, Knoepp argued, is where the modern slavery comes in.

“At that point, your choices are to walk away and lose five thousand dollars, or continue with the process and incur more debt, in the hopes that you can pay it back,” Knoepp explained.

In total, the teachers were each charged around $16,000 USD, five times the average annual household income in that country, according to the lawsuit. Due to the extent of these fees, many of the teachers were steered towards lenders – “What we would call loan sharks,” Monaghan said – just to be able to leave the country.

Once the teachers arrived in the U.S., they were charged further fees, some including inflated housing and transportation costs, all before the teachers had been able to make any money. Crowded into small apartments, the teachers were told not to socialize with their American cohorts. If they complained about the conditions, Knoepp said, Navarro threatened to have them deported. She also confiscated their passports from them, saying the teachers had to pay all the fees first.

By the time the teachers learned that they had mistakenly entered a dangerous deal, they were essentially left without recourse.

“We’re talking about predominantly a female force,” Monaghan explained (though there were some males), “who were leaving children and husbands. These teachers had come over here, left family and so forth, American dream kind of stuff, except that there was a dirty little inside to it.”

After hearing rumors of complaints in the local chapters of the federation of teachers, Monaghan said the LTF and the Louisiana Workforce Commission started looking seriously into the matter. Monaghan said the testimonies – representing around 360 victimized teachers – were shocking.

“It’s not only ludicrous, it’s sad, it’s tragic, and it’s been going on,” Monaghan said.

Slow justice

In 2010, the Law Center and LTF, on behalf of the teachers, filed a suit against the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board, and the human resources superintendent at the time, Elizabeth Duran Swinford.

The serious charges of human trafficking stem from the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), passed by Congress in 2000. The act has typically applied to reproductive slavery, sexual exploitation, forced labor, and “modern slavery” – a term that can apply to economic situations similar to this case, though never before heard in the field of education.

During the last two years, the Law Center and the teachers they represent have suffered some setbacks. The suit was originally filed against the East Baton Rouge Parish school board and superintendent Swinford. In May of 2011, United States District Judge Andrew J. Guilfod, in California, did find that the school board had been negligent in its duties to properly vet the recruiting company. But Judge Guilford ultimately dismissed the school board from the case, which was a blow to trafficking case.

“The court held earlier in the case that the trafficking act didn’t apply to a public entity,” Knoepp explained. “It might include corporations, and other things that aren’t people, but it didn’t include a public entity. We don’t think that’s right.”

Then, Swinford, who (Knoepp noted) qualified as a “person,” in the legal jargon, filed for immunity regarding the case as a public employee.

Given the climate, last week’s ruling came as a ray of sunshine after two dreary years of court proceedings and seeming dead-ends.

U.S. District Judge John A. Kronstadt’s ruling found that the teachers could pursue the case under the trafficking act, and that TVPA could be applied to a class of people, which is a leap forward for the Law Center.

Knoepp said that the ruling has opened the door for a whole group of people who are being victimized without recourse.

“I think it’s more common than people realize,” Knoepp said.

Monaghan agreed.

“There is significant case law that is being developed here,” he said. “The pride I guess I get out of it is not that it happened here, but that hey, it was happening in other parts of the country too – we at least had something significant to do with making sure that it didn’t continue to happen.”