Local leaders travel the globe to combat human trafficking

WACO, Texas (KWTX) – A McLennan County judge and a prosecutor traveled the globe recently to join forces with Asian officials in the worldwide battle to curtail human trafficking.

Judge Gary Coley Jr. of Waco’s 74th State District Court, McLennan County Assistant District Attorney Liz Buice, Unbound Now founder Susan Peters and others returned recently from Indonesia and Nepal, where they helped train officials in those countries to work together to combat trafficking.

Coley is McLennan County’s former juvenile court judge and formerly handled most of the Child Protective Services cases involving abused or neglected kids. He also co-founded the Heart of Texas Human Trafficking Coalition with Peters and served on the Human Trafficking Subcommittee for the Texas Supreme Court’s Children’s Commission.

Buice is a prosecutor in the DA’s office Crimes Against Children Unit and helped lead seminars and training sessions on the weeklong trip along with Lindy Borchardt, an assistant district attorney in the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office Human Trafficking Unit.

Coley and Buice also conducted human trafficking training seminars in Poland in June 2023 and in Paris in March. Their expenses for the trips to Indonesia and Nepal were covered by Operation Underground Railroad, which like Unbound Now, is a nonprofit organization that combats human trafficking.

The trip kicked off with workshops in Jakarta, Indonesia, and included judges, prosecutors, lawyers, law enforcement officers and members of various nonprofit groups in that area.

In Kathmandu, Nepal, Coley and Buice spoke to a group that included 27 judges from all levels of the judiciary. They urged collaboration and cooperation among all phases of the system to better address the problem.

Coley said officials from the two countries asked Unbound leaders if they knew someone who could lead the training seminars, and Unbound officials told them about the group’s trip to Poland last year.

“They said, ‘OK, can you get them here?’” Coley said. “I think what is interesting is how you have folks all over the world who are trying to get better at doing this sort of work and addressing human trafficking, even though they may have different structures and different laws.

“Our child welfare systems are different, our juvenile justice systems are different, criminal justice systems are different. All of those structures are really different. But all these countries are wanting to do a better job in this arena because it is such a horrifying crime. You have got these kids and women in trafficking situations, and they are preying on the most vulnerable folks in the community or the state or the country.”

A major difference in the justice systems, Coley said, is that there are no jury trials in either Nepal or Indonesia. The judges are in charge and cases move swiftly through the system.

“So, judges play a big role as being the fact-finder in terms of Nepal and Indonesia,” Coley said. “So, both of those systems move really quickly, not at all like it is here. Liz (Buice) would tell stories about trying cases that are three years old and you would have thought she was talking about a mummy. They thought, ‘Three years?’

The time element was astonishing to them. Not having a jury trial is huge, because that means the judge is involved from day one.”

At first, Buice said she wondered how she and her American colleagues could help their counterparts in South and Southeast Asia because the criminal justice system and law enforcement investigations are very different.

“But really, the dynamics of trafficking are the same everywhere,” Buice said. “It’s humanity, it’s desperation, it’s trying to get away from a situation, the psychological effects of trauma and trauma bonding, how that presents in humans later, what it takes to heal from that, resilience in a victim being impacted by whether or not they have a village.

“All these things that we have seen that contribute to the suffering that we have here have been present everywhere we have been. It just highlights the necessity of bringing all those organizations together on the same page, because everybody is used to staying in their own lanes. The judges have their lane, the prosecutors have their roles, the detectives have their roles and the nonprofits are sort of over there,” she said.

Another element stressed in the training sessions was to never lose sight of the victims, Buice said.

“If you are not fixing the whole person, if you are not rectifying the damage, the trauma that is done, addressing the concerns that brought those people into that situation in the first place, you are not really fixing the problem, even if you get a conviction,” Buice said. “Looking at the whole child or victim and getting everybody together to help the victim being just as important as prosecuting the trafficker is something that can apply in any culture.”

Coley said human trafficking is such a complex problem driven by so many variables that officials must devise inventive ways to fight it.

“This is not easy stuff to figure out because, really, you are trying to figure out new ways to do things,” Coley said. “Let’s face it. The legal system is still doing things the old way. We have always done things the same old way. But to address human trafficking, you have got to be innovative and do things differently than you have done them in the past to really attack the issue. You have to have a new perspective on things to really make inroads in the fight against this.”

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