Victims of trafficking in Idaho face coercion at every turn, both on streets and inside justice system

Editor’s note: As concerns about sex trafficking escalate, one prominent Idaho nonprofit is providing a form of rescue that some survivors say leaves them trapped in another cycle of control and coercion, funded by questionable Medicaid billing. This is part three of a three-part series called “Savior Complex.” Read part one here and part two here.

(InvestigateWest) — Victims of trafficking in Idaho face coercion at every turn, both on the streets and inside the justice system

The choice is always the same, though not always explicit: Obey me or go to jail.

Jay, a survivor of human trafficking in Boise, said she’s faced this choice from traffickers who want control over her body. From police officers who want information about her abusers. From judges who order her to follow strict probation requirements. From service providers who make a living off of survivors like her.

It’s not an empty threat.

When she stopped obeying her trafficker last year — refusing to do his laundry, mow his lawn, buy groceries or do his job for him — she said he planted drugs in her bedroom, knowing it would violate her probation conditions. When a probation officer later found methamphetamine and marijuana in her bedroom, a Boise police officer arrested her on felony and misdemeanor drug charges, according to the probable cause affidavit.

It didn’t matter that her probation notes identified her as a human trafficking victim, or that she’d been getting support from a local anti-trafficking organization since at least 2021 with her probation officer’s knowledge. She went to jail, and her trafficker faced no consequences.

“That’s how it happens,” Jay said. “He got scared that he was going to get arrested for trafficking. So he put me in jail before they could put him in jail.”

Jay, now 43, has been trafficked for sex and labor since she was 10 years old, she said. She’s spent the last five years in and out of jail and prison, for crimes involving drug use and possession that she and her anti-trafficking advocates say her traffickers coerced her into committing. Fearing police retaliation for speaking out, she asked to use a street name for this article.

Idaho’s failure to treat Jay as a victim isn’t a fluke. It’s a strategy that Idaho, like Texas and some other tough-on-crime states, uses to fight human trafficking — in effect, finding traffickers by first criminalizing their victims. Victims are arrested for crimes connected to their trafficking situations, typically involving drug charges, and then interrogated about their traffickers. It’s meant to keep victims safe and crack down on trafficking, but few traffickers have ever been prosecuted in Idaho, even as their victims are locked up for low-level crimes, according to state court data and interviews with survivors, police and advocates.

Some anti-trafficking advocates fear this strategy is being reinforced by new state laws passed in 2023 and 2024 that intensify Idaho’s efforts to identify traffickers through their victims. Police argue the laws are necessary to increase prosecutions of traffickers, especially as some states with a less police-heavy approach have struggled to keep traffickers away. In Washington and Oregon, for example, law enforcement and government workers acknowledge they have limited ability to hold traffickers accountable even as victims openly walk city streets, InvestigateWest reported last year.

But Idaho’s approach also comes with consequences for those it aims to help, human trafficking and criminology experts say. Survivors, saddled with criminal records, arrest warrants and strict probation conditions, can become trapped within a justice system meant to protect them. It exposes them to conditions both in jail and out that make them vulnerable to further contact with traffickers and diverts them to treatment programs with little to no regulatory oversight.

It leaves many survivors feeling exploited all over again.

“They’re not viewed as victims,” said Jennifer Zielinski, director of the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition, a Boise-based nonprofit that advocates against human trafficking and provides case management, services and resources for survivors.

Of more than 150 people served by the coalition last year, nearly all had criminal records, Zielinski said.

“You can see the difference in the system targeting them, and then using their criminal record as a way to control them and then essentially allow abuse without even addressing the fact that they’re victims,” she said.

It’s an approach that Zielinski and others say Community Outreach Behavioral Services, or COBS — an organization for human trafficking survivors that an InvestigateWest investigation revealed may be committing fraud — relies on.

In 2020, COBS and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched a task force in Idaho to combat human trafficking, contributing to increased attention on the issue. As task force members identify more victims in the state’s jails and courts, COBS has received a stream of new clients, funneled into its safe houses. COBS founder Paula Barthelmess estimates about half of the women in her program are on probation. Although Barthelmess promotes the program as voluntary, survivors say the reality is that if they leave or break her strict rules, they could be facing another arrest.

Idaho’s practices reflect a mindset common across the country that survivors must be “saved” by authorities who know what’s best for them, even when the survivors themselves disagree, anti-trafficking experts say.

“If they think that arresting them and forcing them into a program is going to be what saves them at the end of the day, I haven’t seen the evidence to show that,” said Meredith Dank, an associate professor with the New York University Marron Institute of Urban Management who researches human trafficking and exploitation. “For a lot of people, having that conviction on their record, having their names in the media, really does more damage than anything else.”

‘We do this to protect them’

For Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, there’s no gray area when it comes to human trafficking. It’s a “cancer,” a “crime that perpetuates untold misery,” an “absolute stain on our communities,” Labrador has said.

It’s become a political drumbeat in Idaho in recent years, inspiring new laws, the creation of a criminal justice subcommittee, sting operations and even a state-funded mission sending state police troopers to the U.S.-Mexico border to focus on the issue.

With human trafficking under a microscope, more cases are being identified. News headlines throughout Idaho flashed a shocking statistic last year — human trafficking in the state spiked nearly 300% from 2021 to 2022.

But the spike was driven almost entirely by just one agency: the Nampa Police Department, which works closely with COBS to identify human trafficking survivors. In 2021, Idaho logged four human trafficking offenses, all from the Nampa Police Department, according to the Idaho State Police Uniform Crime Reporting Program. In 2022, that shot to 26, with 22 of those from Nampa police. (These numbers reflect an even greater increase — a 550% increase versus the 271% initially reported by the media — because law enforcement agencies have updated their data since last year, according to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program.)

Jason Kimball, a Nampa police lieutenant, said the surge comes from the department’s increased efforts to find human trafficking within other crimes.

“We started some cases recognizing that they’re not just about acts of violence, as far as domestic violence. They weren’t just about drugs. They weren’t just about gangs. They were a combination of all those things, and human trafficking was at the heart of all of it,” Kimball said.

Yet Idaho had only one arrest for human trafficking under state law from 2019 to 2023, according to state police data. Instead, victims often pay the price, arrested for crimes that their traffickers force them to commit. Idaho’s had at least 34 arrests and 46 charges for prostitution since 2019, the data shows, though it’s unclear how many are directly related to trafficking.

Kimball acknowledged that trafficking victims in Nampa are sometimes arrested for drug possession and other crimes.

“Is that our intent? No. We don’t want to have that happen,” Kimball said. “Sometimes we do this to protect them. To get them off the streets and get them clean and sober, until the point they can make clear decisions and recognize that their lifestyle is not healthy.”

In one instance in 2023, a Nampa police officer, after searching and handcuffing a woman with a warrant, identified her as a potential trafficking victim, according to the police report. He brought her to the police department, where Barthelmess questioned her about the details of her exploitation and her history of drug use. A detective then delivered news to the woman: Her probation officer would allow her to go to a COBS safe house instead of jail.

The practice isn’t unique to Nampa. Research shows that police throughout the country use arrest as a tactic to keep trafficking victims safe and get them to cooperate with investigations. Various states also use criminal charges to compel trafficking survivors to get treatment, said Dank, the associate professor at NYU.

New York, for example, launched a statewide Human Trafficking Intervention Court initiative in 2013, which created criminal diversion courts for people charged with prostitution-related offenses. It aimed to link victims with services, and it did so through the arrest and prosecution of these victims.

Research led by Dank in 2017 found that victims in New York City frequently faced consequences as a result of arrest and incarceration, like barriers to employment and housing. “Entrenching anti-trafficking efforts in the policing of prostitution is harmful,” the study says.

Police in New York City have since largely stopped arresting people for providing sex work, Dank added.

“There isn’t evidence, necessarily, to show that if you court mandate somebody who’s potentially a victim of a crime, with the expectation that they’re going to be, like, ‘saved,’ that this is an effective way to identify trafficking victims and also put them in a better place,” she said. “I have yet to see any evidence to show that that works.”

To the rescue

In September 2022, the human trafficking task force launched by COBS coordinated a “victim-focused” sting operation. It involved law enforcement officers pretending to be buyers of sex and contacting women online to meet them in a hotel, according to police reports from the Nampa Police Department, Ada County Sheriff’s Office and Canyon County Sheriff’s Office.

When the women arrived at the hotel, officers detained them, police reports show. The women were then interviewed at the office that COBS shares with Advanced Clinical Trauma Services — a for-profit arm of COBS owned by Barthelmess’ son.

“If we save one female, if one female shows up and we’re able to love her and wrap around her, win-win. It’s a success,” Barthelmess told KTVB7 after the operation.

Idaho isn’t undertaking its crusade against human trafficking alone. Operation Underground Railroad, a controversial international nonprofit that helps law enforcement “rescue” human trafficking victims, provided training, mentorship and resources to Idaho law enforcement for the 2022 sting, according to the Idaho State Police.

The organization, now called OUR Rescue, raises tens of millions of dollars per year and claims to have supported more than 6,000 survivors since its founding in 2013, according to its website. It partnered with COBS for a community awareness event in 2020, according to COBS’ Facebook page, and has given COBS at least $6,000 since 2020, according to Cause IQ, a website that tracks nonprofit funding.

Tim Ballard, OUR’s founder, left the organization last year amid allegations that he sexually assaulted multiple employees and misled donors — but not before inspiring the 2023 movie “Sound of Freedom,” a box office hit about child sex trafficking that grossed over $250 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. The movie, popular among conservative Christian audiences and promoted by former President Donald Trump, inspired Republican lawmakers in Alabama and Florida to propose legislation that toughens criminal penalties for convicted sex traffickers. New Idaho legislation similarly imposes stricter consequences on convicted traffickers, including mandatory minimum sentences and hefty fines.

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No women were arrested the night of the 2022 sting operation, even though prostitution is a crime in Idaho, said Idaho State Police Detective Vickie Gooch, who co-chaired the operation. “Our goal wasn’t, in that particular operation, to arrest them. It was to offer them victim services, to recognize that they are victims of this industry,” she said.

Yet none of the women that night connected with the programs offered to them either, Gooch said. For Gooch, this is a common challenge that law enforcement faces with trafficking victims. “They don’t trust us yet. It takes awhile to establish that relationship,” she said.

Some survivors say recent criminal charges involving Idaho police have made establishing trust more difficult. In November, former Caldwell Police Department Sgt. Ryan Bendawald pleaded not guilty to eight federal charges, including accusations that he exchanged sexual favors with women instead of arresting them between 2017 and 2021. And in May, a man who served as an Idaho Falls Police Department officer in the 1990s, Gordon Dennis Shaw, was charged with human trafficking in Bonneville County after allegedly luring a victim from California to Idaho Falls to engage in commercial sexual activity.

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Since the 2022 sting, several of the victims identified through the operation have faced more criminal charges, Gooch added. “Some of them actually, later on we learned — because of drug-related reasons — were back in the system.”

For Amy Farrell, director and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, arresting people who have already been identified as trafficking victims isn’t an effective way to help them.

“We either see people as victims of crime, or we don’t,” Farrell said. “If people are concerned about them because they’re being victimized, it does really beg the question, ‘Why did they get arrested if everyone saw them as a victim?’”

Doubling down

Human trafficking didn’t become a standalone crime in Idaho until 2019, nearly two decades after Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, the first comprehensive federal human trafficking law. To date, Idaho still has not convicted anyone of human trafficking under its state law.

Police point to the state’s low rates of arrest and prosecutions for human trafficking as evidence that new laws are needed. In response, Idaho policymakers are doubling down on the tough-on-crime approach to human trafficking that critics say is catching victims in the crossfire.

In 2023, Idaho passed House Bill 341, which Jeff Nye, the Attorney General’s Office’s criminal law division chief, described to InvestigateWest as the state’s “first step” toward addressing human trafficking.

The bill expands courts’ ability to prosecute people benefiting from illegal sexual activity. But it did so through changes to Idaho’s prostitution laws — a tactic that Zielinski, the Idaho Anti-Trafficking Coalition director, argues is ultimately harmful for victims.

“There are significant risks to using the prostitution statute,” Zielinski wrote to Idaho legislators in opposition to the bill. “H341 fails to protect victims from being convicted of prostitution.”

The bill passed the Idaho House and Senate unanimously.

The bill also directed the attorney general to write a report about human trafficking in Idaho. Nye, with the Attorney General’s Office, helped put together a 51-page report recommending specific changes to the state’s prostitution and human trafficking statutes, crafted with input from law enforcement — and without direct input from trafficking survivors, according to Nye.

It copied language from Texas, a state that Nye said does the best job of having a “straightforward, easy-to-understand” human trafficking crime.

“We followed what I call the Texas model,” he said. “The idea is this: You connect the human trafficking to crimes that already exist in Idaho law, that law enforcement and prosecutors are already investigating and prosecuting.”

Yet while research shows that harsher criminal penalties are tied to more arrests and prosecutions of human traffickers, it also shows that services for victims, like housing, medical care and mental health treatment, are crucial to addressing the roots of trafficking. In contrast to neighboring Washington, which allocated nearly $3 million for supporting adult sex trafficking survivors in the 2023-2024 legislative session, Idaho doesn’t set aside any state funding specifically for human trafficking victim services.

“We’re not going to prosecute our way out of trafficking,” said Sidney McCoy, advocacy director at Shared Hope International, a nonprofit that advocates for policies to eradicate child trafficking. “If we’re not addressing those underlying vulnerabilities, this issue is going to continue to happen.”

The attorney general’s report became House Bill 494, which passed the Idaho House and Senate unanimously in March and took effect July 1. Barthelmess testified in support of it, and the bill’s sponsor, Jaron Crane, R-Nampa, wrote a Facebook post thanking COBS as the bill made its way through the House.

The legislation includes several revisions that the Attorney General’s Office says are victim-centered, including replacing the word “prostitution” with “commercial sexual activity” and adding a provision that allows people charged with commercial sexual activity to have those charges dropped if they’re victims of trafficking.

Shared Hope supported the legislation, primarily because it prevents minors from being criminalized under Idaho’s prostitution laws, McCoy said. But McCoy and Zielinski remain skeptical that Idaho’s changes will prevent victims from being charged as perpetrators.

“We felt that the pros definitely outweigh the cons, but of course, there’s definitely still a need for Idaho to increase protections for victims who could be unjustly criminalized,” McCoy said.

Nye acknowledges these concerns. Protecting victims from criminal charges relating to their traffickers is an area that the Attorney General’s Office aims to address in its next human trafficking report, due in two years, he said.

Jail and judgment

Although Idaho police argue that arrest is sometimes necessary to protect victims who are under the control of their traffickers, survivors say arrest doesn’t necessarily keep them safe. Jail is a perfect breeding ground for exploitation. Traffickers often prey on incarcerated people, promising money, a home, drugs or whatever else inmates might need when they’re released, according to the Arizona State University Office of Sex Traffic Intervention Research.

While Jay was in Ada County Jail last summer, serving time for the probation violation and felony charge for drugs that she said were planted by her trafficker, she knew she had to watch her back. There are recruiters in Idaho’s jails and prisons, known as “bottoms,” she said — women at the top of traffickers’ victim hierarchy who monitor other victims and help lure more people into the life.

Jay managed to avoid the recruiters in jail. But one summer day when jail staff told her she had a visitor, she unexpectedly found herself face to face with Barthelmess.

“She didn’t show me a card. She just told me her name and told me she’s with an organization that saves women who were trafficked,” Jay said.

Barthelmess told InvestigateWest she and her team visit detention centers every week. She has connections within Idaho’s jails and prisons — prosecutors, public defenders, judges, detectives — who call her when they think an inmate could be a victim of trafficking. Through conversations with the women, Barthelmess determines whether they have in fact been trafficked and whether they’re a good fit for her program, she said.

“We just have a conversation. So like, ‘What are you doing here? What happened? How’d you end up here?’” Barthelmess said. “I don’t say, ‘Have you been trafficked?’ First of all, that’s not trauma-informed.”

When Jay met Barthelmess for the first time, Jay was more than skeptical. She’d never heard of COBS before. She didn’t know how Barthelmess had learned about her situation. “She’s asking me when’s the last time I’ve been pimped out, how many tricks that I turn, what types of sexual acts that I do, how much drugs I’ve used, all types of stuff,” Jay recalled.

At the end of their meeting, she remembers Barthelmess’ final words to her. “Don’t worry. I’m going to come get you. Do you believe me?”

“I looked her dead in the eye, and I told her no,” Jay said. She’d heard those types of promises before. They never ended well.

When she went to court a few weeks later, a judge reinstated her probation for another seven years with a new requirement to complete the COBS program. But after a few months at COBS, Jay started voicing her discontent with the program to other survivors. Then Barthelmess kicked her out.

Jay, believing she’d be locked up again for violating her probation, pleaded with Barthelmess to let her stay. Barthelmess wasn’t swayed, Jay said.

"I’ve been saved because I saved myself."

“The reality is, sometimes their probation officers just make them go back to jail. I mean, that’s nothing we can control,” Barthelmess told InvestigateWest.

This time, Jay managed to avoid another prison sentence, instead being ordered to comply with a new set of probation conditions. She’s now staying clean and avoiding traffickers — a sign to Barthelmess and Idaho law enforcement that she’s been saved.

“That’s a success to us,” Barthelmess said.

Jay disagrees. Her progress occurred despite Idaho’s efforts to save her, not because of them, she said. She still lives in fear that traffickers will find her. Her criminal charges make it hard to find a safe place to rent. And her probation is a constant reminder that one wrong move could put her behind bars once again.

“They didn’t do s**t but make me more scared and make me do everything out of fear,” Jay said. “I’ve been saved because I saved myself.”

InvestigateWest is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reach news and investigations editor Wilson Criscione at wilson@invw.org. Reach investigative reporter Kelsey Turner at kelsey@invw.org.