A broad coalition of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, in both the U.S. Senate and House, said Thursday their proposed Visa Transparency Anti-Trafficking Act would help solve the problem by providing much more information to law enforcement and victim advocates.

“Human trafficking is our society’s modern-day slavery, and unfortunately is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world,” said U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, a Palm Beach County Democrat. She described South Florida as a trafficking “hotspot.”

Of the 38,304 cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline since 2007 and assessed as “high” probability of actual trafficking, 4,548 came from Florida.

Hotline data from Polaris, an organization that combats modern slavery and is named after the North Star that guided slaves to freedom in the U.S., shows a steady increase in Florida reports. 

For the first six months of 2017, the hotline received reports of 329 Florida trafficking cases and a total of 878 phone calls, emails and online reports referencing Florida. In all of 2016, there were 556 Florida cases reported and 1,623 calls. In 2014, there were 360 cases and 1,428 calls. In 2012, there were 237 cases and 883 calls.

Increased awareness has gone in recent years to American children, who run away or are lured from home, and end up trafficked into sexual or domestic slavery.

But, said several experts on a telephone news conference with Frankel on Thursday, it’s a major problem among foreign workers who get temporary work visas to work in the country.

U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat who represents Broward and Palm Beach counties, who also was on the call, said it could involve “hundreds of thousands” of people who come to the country for work and then are forced into slavery.

Contributing to the problem involving guest workers from other countries is the way the government handles information about the people who get visas to come to work in the United States, Deutch said.

“The process for issuing visas across the government is messy. And because of that, right under our noses, human traffickers are able to exploit major gaps in our visa program,” Deutch said. “We’re failing to detect human traffickers who are abusing the system.”

That’s not just the view from South Florida Democrats. “Human trafficking is the face of evil. Across the globe far too many are trapped in modern-day slavery and all of us should be coming together to stop this grotesque abuse,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the most conservative lawmakers in Washington.

Cruz said the proposed new law is designed to “shine a light on the practices of these slave traders and human traffickers.

The proposal would take information the government now collects about the temporary work visa applicants, the people who help them apply, and their employers, and make it much more widely available. Right now, Cruz and Deutch said, the information is tightly held, and not even law enforcement can comb through the data to figure out patterns: who’s disappearing, which unscrupulous employment services brought them to the country, which employers were involved.

They want to the data published so law enforcement and victim advocacy organizations can identify and stop problems at the sources — and prosecute people responsible for human trafficking.

“Transparency is long overdue for a system that issues millions of temporary work visas a year,” Deutch said. “Let’s open up the data, so we can learn what visas are being misused for human trafficking and where the victims are coming from.”

Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that focuses on low- and middle-income workers, and other victim advocates and researchers, said this is what happens:

People apply for temporary work permits in the United States, often paying thousands of dollars to agencies to assist them. They expect legitimate jobs. Once in the U.S. with the work visas, they are forced into sexual or domestic servitude by unscrupulous employers. Often they feel trapped: If they complain, they will lose their jobs; if they lose their jobs, they’ll be deported, and they’d return home without the money they paid to get the visa assistance.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said that’s what leads to cases like that of Shandra Woworuntu, a victim he asked to speak briefly on the conference call.

Woworuntu came to the U.S. to work legally in the hospitality industry after paying $3,000 to an employment agency to help her get here — and wound up abused physically, verbally and sexually for months in New York and Connecticut.