Media

On a Mission to End Slavery

Attorney An Phong Vo, along with Boat People SOS, helps victims of human trafficking find a way to escape

By Lise Olsen, Houston Chronicle , June 9, 2011, 10:51PM

After 10 days in a Jordan sewing factory, Phuong-Anh Vu knew she'd been tricked: Her first paycheck was $10 — a tenth of the promised pay, meals were barely enough to survive and when she and other Vietnamese workers protested, the owner summoned police. "Policemen pulled on their hair and beat their heads on the beds and on the ground, and there was blood everywhere," said Vu, who led a strike and eventually fled to Thailand and finally Houston.

Her daring rebellion and escape - as well as years spent with other trafficking victims in transit in Thailand - helped motivate the Houston office of the nonprofit Vietnamese American Boat People SOS to ramp up its outreach to asylum seekers in Asia.

Her story and the stories of others like her also provided personal motivation and a new mission for human rights activist An Phong Vo, an attorney based at the nonprofit's West Houston office who began working with trafficking victims in 2007. Along the way, Vo became one of the leading U.S. experts in helping victims to obtain special visas to stay in the United States and stabilize their lives.

Phuong Anh: New Houstonian Tells Of Her Time As Near-Slave

Houston Press By Paula Beltran, Fri., Oct 1 2010 at 8:01AM

The promise of a $300-per-month job was enough to convince Phuong Anh to sell her home in Vietnam and move to Jordan. Things didn't turn out like she expected. Earlier this week a tearful Anh told her story of resilience and survival to an utterly engrossed group gathered at a private home in the Galleria area by the Coalition to Abolish Modern-day Slavery in Asia (CAMSA). "We were poor, we just wanted to work and here we are being beaten to death," Anh said through an interpreter. When Anh made it to Jordan she learned there was a reason she wasn't allowed to read her contract before signing it while still in Vietnam. For ten days of arduous and grueling sewing work, she and her coworkers were paid $10.  Although she was the newest arrival to the workroom, Anh bravely led a strike. "Immediately they took our food and water, cut off the electricity and confined us," she said. "I called Vietnam for help from the government and we were told to do as we were told."