A 16-year old girl was lured away from her home through a promise that she would be offered a job cleaning houses in America for 10 times more than she earned in Thailand. She was handed a counterfeit passport and put on a plane to Los Angeles. When it landed, an airline official smuggled her out the back door and to a so-called "safe house," where she was told she was to work as a prostitute, which she did until she was freed.

A Filipina immigrant was found living in a closet in a Hollywood home owned by a wealthy couple. She had lived there for 10 years, working 18-hour days for no pay. She was beaten by both of her captors and threatened with worse if she attempted to escape into the city streets.

In Oakland, police have investigated 27 cases of human trafficking since 2006, mostly involving juveniles who were exploited by adults who had sexually, physically and emotionally abused them.

According to the Los Angeles Human Trafficking and Child Prostitution Report, revised in August 2005, every 10 minutes, a woman, child or man, is recruited, smuggled or brought into the United States to work as forced laborers on farms, as prostitutes, in sweatshops, or in domestic settings. They are treated harshly and often tortured. Many times, their (often false) passports or identification are taken away and they are told that they will never be able to leave until they have paid off exorbitant fees demanded by the traffickers.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has been a staunch opponent of slavery throughout its history. Before the Civil War, many Americans considered slavery a political or economic matter, not a moral issue. Those who opposed slavery were considered members of the radical left. Although the Methodist and Baptist denominations split on the issue, Adventists came together as abolitionists.

This abolitionism was more than just a philosophy. Early Adventists took action. In disobedience to the fugitive slave law, which ordered that escaped slaves be returned to their masters, John Preston Kellogg, father of John Harvey Kellogg and W.K. Kellogg and an early Adventist publisher, opened his Michigan farms to fleeing slaves. John Byington, who left the Methodist Episcopal Church because it opposed the abolitionist movement, had maintained a station of the Underground Railroad on his farm in Buck's Bridge, N.Y., before becoming the first General Conference president.

When United States government leaders simultaneously passed the fugitive slave law, which demanded that slaves be returned to their masters, and proclaimed a national day of prayer and fasting, Ellen White furiously responded, "[These leaders] have deprived [slaves] of their liberty and free air which heaven has never denied them, and then left them to suffer for food and clothing. In view of all of this, a national fast is proclaimed! Oh, what an insult to Jehovah!" (Ellen White, Testimonies, vol. 1, p. 257).

Today there are men, women and children living in the Pacific Union who have been deprived of their liberty and free air. They are suffering in deplorable conditions in sweat shops, brothels and farms. We have been called to help them.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council is supporting legislation (Assembly Bill 1278) authored by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D–San Francisco) that enhances the initial anti-trafficking legislation passed in 2005 by making it a crime for traffickers to demand that victims repay inflated transportation costs by working in these types of conditions, and increases the penalty for those who bring minors to the United States to work in slave-like conditions. The bill will also give law enforcement officials the ability to seize the assets of the crime syndicates that are often behind the practice. AB 1278 is a two-year bill that is currently traveling through committee and is expected to be voted on in 2008.

To learn more about AB 1278 and what you can do to help the victims of human trafficking, visit churchstate.org.