Helen Tarokic, a longtime immigration attorney in Wilmington, was already involved in victim visa work when nonprofits began referring T visa-related cases they couldn’t handle to her law office more than 15 years ago.
A T visa, or T nonimmigrant status, is a temporary immigration benefit, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as of March 31.
The USCIS website states that the visa “enables certain victims of a severe form of trafficking in persons to remain in the United States for an initial period of up to 4 years if they complied with any reasonable request for assistance from law enforcement in the detection, investigation, or prosecution of human trafficking or qualify for an exemption or exception.”
When those referrals came to Tarokic all those years ago, “I reached out to mentors from our national lawyer’s association for help, but as I learned more and more, I realized that the law on T visas was largely underdeveloped,” she said.
She began to create continuing legal education programs to try to bring professionals together to teach and learn about T visas.
“The fundamental reason I do T visa work is because it helps survivors of labor and sex trafficking legalize their immigration status, which often is the most justice a person can get when years have gone by and they have not been previously helped by other firms or law enforcement,” Tarokic said.
Tarokic’s parents were immigrants who moved to the U.S. from the part of Yugoslavia that is now Croatia. She graduated from Wake Forest University School of Law in 2006.
In recent years, her firm has worked on hundreds of T visa cases for men, women and children who have been victims of trafficking or attempted trafficking.
“Without giving an exact number, I can say that I believe there are millions of people in the U.S. who are qualified,” she said. “For this reason, we have been working hard to ask other organizations and law firms to take on this work and to begin teaching others as well how to help survivors of trafficking.”
Tarokic believes exploiting immigrants “hurts America.”
She said, “The T visa program helps protect our U.S. borders by encouraging immigrants to cooperate with law enforcement to end transnational crime.”
It also helps stop sexual harassment and trafficking in the workplace, helps protect worker wages and helps improve safety, according to Tarokic.
“If, for example, a construction business in Wilmington doesn’t follow wage and hour law, it hurts the wages of everyone, not just immigrants. And, if a business doesn’t follow safety rules at a restaurant because they are trafficking immigrants, it creates a food safety and personal safety issue for workers and customers of the business. The T visa program helps address visa fraud and scams against investors and can help prevent or stop domestic violence used in the context of trafficking victims,” Tarokic said.
In recent years, officials have been aiming to ramp up prosecution of human traffickers, including local law enforcement.
“In 2023, 12 defendants received sentences averaging 98 months, with one defendant receiving a sentence of more than 32 years in prison,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s office in January 2024.
In the release, Michael Easley, then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, announced efforts to combat human trafficking, including expansion of a Southeastern North Carolina task force that would cover Wilmington and Jacksonville.
“Our unique task force model is dismantling networks in North Carolina. Today we are expanding upon the work already underway in Southeastern North Carolina, bringing together our law enforcement and community partners to rescue victims and prosecute those who are exploiting vulnerable individuals for labor, services, or commercial sex,” Easley stated in the release.
Tarokic said she considers trafficking of all kinds, not just sex trafficking, to be a significant problem in New Hanover County.
“The lack of education on the subject is the No. 1 impediment to helping victims get relief. Also, Wilmington is a labor-intensive town. We see labor trafficking coming up in the context of industries like construction, landscaping, restaurant work, cleaning, hotel/motel work, painting, concrete work and even professional services like IT consulting,” she said.
Uncovering trafficking takes work.
“If you don’t take the time to build trust and ask questions in a safe way, people will never tell you what has happened to them,” she said.
Tarokic has worked with the University of North Carolina Wilmington to spread the word about T visas and tap into critical resources.
“We were able to coordinate Continuing Legal Education Seminars on T visas held at UNCW in 2017 and 2018,” she said. “Since then, we’ve been fortunate that their Spanish Service Learning program at UNCW has allowed volunteers who are bilingual to help us help victims. The Faith Action ID program at UNCW, which is a collaboration with the sheriff’s office of New Hanover County, has been another way to help inform community members about the dangers of trafficking, how to spot it and how to help report to law enforcement.”
Those are just a few of the programs Tarokic credits with tackling the problem. Another is the placement of social workers at her firm.
“It’s been the honor of my life to find such caring professionals in so many cross-sections of Wilmington wanting to collaborate,” Tarokic said. “I can’t imagine doing any other kind of law and very much feel that these interdisciplinary, trauma-informed approaches are the best way to help people.”
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