Immigration rights activist protest on Pennsylvania Avenue in 2014. Cynthia Rucker/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
Last April, a Nepali domestic worker named Karmo was rescued from the Virginia home of her World Bank employer after more than a decade of captivity. Karmo’s employer withheld her legal documents, stole her wages, and permitted no time-off apart from visa-related trips back to Nepal.
The rescue plan was led by Karmo’s relative, Sirmaya, who was also a trafficking survivor. But she was not alone that day: she had full support of two domestic worker organisations, Adhikaar and CASA de Maryland. Members of the organisations, including Latina, Asian and African immigrant women, some who themselves had recently survived labour trafficking, joined Sirmaya’s rescue mission to help Karmo escape captivity.
