On the 28th episode of Immigration Today! Angeline Chen welcomes Erika Gonzalez. Erika Gonzalez is a Training and Technical Assistance Managing Attorney at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking (CAST), in Los Angeles CA. Erika is a national expert in legal remedies access for survivors of all forms of human trafficking. She is proud to be the daughter of Mexican and Salvadoran immigrants whose work focuses on approaching the legal representation of trafficking survivors from a trauma-informed, victim-centered, and race equity lens.
Erika co-founded and continues to lead the Office for Victims of Crime’s first training and technical assistance program dedicated to legal remedies for trafficking survivors at CAST. Through this program, she trains attorneys and social service providers across the U.S. on issues of immigration, victims’ rights, criminal record relief and ethical considerations. Erika has devoted her career to working with survivors of human trafficking, sexual assault, and domestic violence. At Opening Doors, Inc. in Sacramento, CA, Erika assumed the low-bono immigration program focused on assisting victims of crime with immigration relief. As a staff attorney at CAST and Opening Doors, she represented crime victims in immigration, criminal victims’ rights, and criminal record relief matters.
Erika is the co-author of several advisories on T visas and other forms of relief. She is a member of the Freedom Network, a network of over 60 individual and member agencies representing trafficking survivors and is an active participant of their Steering and Racial Equity Committees. She graduated from the University of Pacific, McGeorge School of Law and the University of California, Berkeley. Erika is currently a fellow for the New Leaders Council, Class of 2021. She was raised in South Lake Tahoe.
CAST is one of the pioneers of the US anti-trafficking movement. CAST’s immeasurable contribution to survivors of human trafficking has been recognized by President Obama, who honored CAST with the Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons in 2014. Erika has been doing anti-trafficking work since 2011 and has specifically been with CAST since 2014. She began as a Staff Attorney and eventually transitioned to the Technical Assistance role.
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“Anybody could be a victim of trafficking. All people of all ages, race, genders, identities, and education backgrounds. What generally makes someone more vulnerable to traffic, though, are people who are already disproportionately more vulnerable by society. For example, people who tend to be marginalized by structural racism, by homophobia, transphobia people with disabilities, people with unstable immigration status, people who are poor, and who have a history of abuse. All of those things tend to impact the vulnerabilities and make someone generally more vulnerable to trafficking as a whole.”
You can learn about CAST by visiting their website online. Here is a link to the Training and Technical Assistance Program to learn about the free support to attorneys and social service providers assisting trafficking survivors. For our attorney and legal providers that listen, here is a link for trauma-informed lawyering resources. You can make a donation to CAST and follow them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
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