Jeannie Mai Quotes

January is National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, a time to recognize that this evil affects communities all over the world, including here in Nevada.

We tend to think of human trafficking as a foreign issue, not something that could happen here in our own back yards. But it's a fast-growing problem in the United States, in every area, with no real defined demographic.

We all have our own narrative of what human trafficking is supposed to be, but if you do a little research, human trafficking happens, in many different forms and shapes, right in our backyard.

I think the United States has to take the leadership for the entire world [on human trafficking].

We should all be neo-abolitionists here to make sure that there is no right in America to enslave others using the Internet.

Modern day slavery is the great tragedy of our time and the U.S. cannot turn a blind eye to it on our soil or another nation's.

Human trafficking robs victims of their basic human rights, and it occurs right under our noses. Many efforts have been focused in other regions of the world, but this is a major problem here at home.

The swelling epidemic of human trafficking makes a mockery of the law and its protections.

Unfortunately, in Nevada - and more specifically, in Las Vegas and Reno - we've experienced incidents of human trafficking. In Las Vegas, the average trafficking victim is as young as 14. We must act to prevent this disturbing criminal activity from occurring in our communities.

More than 150 years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, slavery is illegal almost everywhere. But it is still not abolished - not even here, in the land of the free. On the contrary, there is a cancer of violence, a modern-day slavery growing in America by the day, in the very places where we live and work. It's called human trafficking.

To protect our kids, we've given law enforcement new tools to fight human trafficking.

When people think of slavery, they think of an era from the distant past. Grainy photographs from Civil War times. And yet it goes on.

The slave trade must be suppressed.

We believe slavery was abolished with Abraham Lincoln; unfortunately, human slavery is alive and well.

In our fields, on our fishing vessels, in our factories and our homes, there are people deprived of their freedom and trapped in a life of unimaginable suffering.

Modern slavery is a barbaric crime. Each and every case is a both a tragedy and an affront to our values of decency and kindness.

Selling the commodity of humans has to be the biggest business out there, as it is the most lucrative. I cannot go to sleep at night, unless I know that I am using all of my platforms to fight human trafficking.

I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.

You cannot afford a world with slavery, which literally takes someone and turns them into a machine.

I found a correlation between the spreading of democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise in slavery. Now, as countries, former Communist countries, became so-called democratic, people started to be enslaved by their own countrymen.

In 2009, at the Vancouver Peace Summit, I met a supporter of Free the Slaves, an NGO dedicated to eradicating modern-day slavery; weeks later, I flew down to Los Angeles and met with the director of Free the Slaves; thus began my journey into exploring modern-day slavery.

Slavery is illegal everywhere, but it exists all over the world.

Economic growth will not stop slavery, at least not anytime soon.

The traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam ... up to this day. I am not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect, and no one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.

In the 19th century, the chains [of slavery] were metal. Today, the chains are debt—the worker has to repay his transportation, his tools, his food.