From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the very few human rights issues that the Trump administration has shown an interest in is the issue of human trafficking.

The president has argued that building a wall,

the wall, would prevent kidnappers from taking people by force over the border, which is kind

of a Hollywood version of trafficking that, in fact, is very rare. And yet some of the policies

the Trump administration has put in place have made it harder, not easier, for victims of human trafficking to seek help.

That's according to Jenna Krojewski, who's been reporting for the New Yorker and for the Fuller project about trafficking.

Now, Jenna, you've written in depth about something called a T visa, which most of us probably aren't familiar with.

So what is that? A T visa is a specific kind of humanitarian visa for victims of human trafficking in the U.S.

who are not U.S. citizens. And what it does is offer them a way to stay in the country legally.

It offers them a path to citizenship, and it gives them a way to

have family members from their home country, possibly join them in the U.S.

And it's different from something like a refugee visa.

The T visa really recognizes the unique circumstances that a non-citizen victim of trafficking

might have in the U.S. So for instance,

it recognizes that a victim of trafficking may have been forced to commit crimes while they

were being trafficked, often related to their trafficking, like prostitution, for instance, and gives them a way to be pardoned by the government for those crimes.

T. Visa was intended for people precisely like this woman I met recently.

A couple months ago, I went to Washington, D.C., just outside of the city,

in one of these new sort of booming suburbs,

just block after block of office building and shops.

I'm there to meet someone I'm going to call Esperanza.

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