U.S. Dep't of State, 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Sint Maarten

SINT MAARTEN (Tier 3)* The Government of Sint Maarten does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so; therefore, Sint Maarten remained on Tier 3. Despite the lack of significant efforts, the government took some steps to address trafficking, including holding informal interagency meetings to promote coordinated anti-trafficking efforts, funding these efforts, and hiring an outside team to design a public awareness strategy. However, the government did not prosecute or convict any traffickers or identify any trafficking victims for the fifth consecutive year. The government could only provide limited services to trafficking victims; it did not have shelters or have formal arrangements with service providers.

The government did not formally adopt its draft NAP and did not have a protocol for the identification and referral of victims. Officials conflated human trafficking and migrant smuggling, hindering the effectiveness of the government’s limited anti-trafficking efforts. PRIORITIZED RECOMMENDATIONS: Significantly increase efforts to investigate, prosecute, and, as appropriate, convict human traffickers. Proactively identify trafficking victims, such as by screening foreign workers for trafficking indicators; provide adequate protection to identified trafficking victims; and ensure victims are not inappropriately penalized, including through deportation, solely for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked.

Establish an anti-trafficking task force to facilitate interagency coordination. Adopt and vigorously implement the draft NAP. Increase the availability of protection services, including shelters, in partnership with NGOs, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and international organizations. Provide the national coordinator with the resources and authority to coordinate anti-trafficking efforts effectively.

Adopt and implement formal SOPs for victim identification and referral and train officials, including healthcare workers, on their use. Improve coordination and information-sharing with anti-trafficking counterparts across the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Train law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges on victim-centered approaches to trafficking cases and the distinction between human trafficking and migrant smuggling. Fund and fully operationalize the reinstated National Reporting Center on Human Trafficking (NRC) to improve coordination of victim protection and prevention efforts.

Increase awareness of human trafficking, available services, and how to seek assistance among the general public and vulnerable groups, including incoming migrants.

PROSECUTION

The government maintained minimal prosecution efforts. Article 2:239 of the penal code criminalized sex trafficking and labor trafficking and prescribed penalties of up to nine years’ imprisonment or a fine for offenses involving a victim 16 years of age or older, and up to 12 years’ imprisonment or a fine for those involving a victim younger than the age of 16. These penalties were sufficiently stringent and, with respect to sex trafficking, commensurate with penalties prescribed for other grave crimes, such as kidnapping. The government did not report initiating any trafficking-related investigations in 2024, compared with one investigation in 2023.

The government did not report any new trafficking prosecutions or convictions for the fifth consecutive year. Conflation of human trafficking and migrant smuggling obstructed attempts to investigate, prosecute, or convict traffickers; promoted harmful misconceptions about trafficking; and limited law enforcement officials’ capacity to recognize trafficking indicators and identify trafficking victims. The Sint Maarten police force maintained a combined anti-human trafficking and anti-migrant smuggling unit (UMM) consisting of six officers, which worked closely with the public prosecutor’s office to investigate potential trafficking crimes. A designated prosecutor oversaw developing human trafficking and migrant smuggling cases.

UMM operated without a dedicated budget; the government reported Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (KMAR) embedded officers within UMM to mitigate staffing limitations. Observers reported the prioritization of anti-smuggling operations sometimes led to uneven resource allocations between the unit’s dual responsibilities to combat human trafficking and migrant smuggling. The government did not report any substantive collaboration with foreign governments on trafficking cases. UMM often worked with KMAR, the joint Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard, and other Kingdom entities; observers reported interagency communication was insufficient.

The government did not report any investigations, prosecutions, or convictions of government employees complicit in human trafficking crimes. The government trained law enforcement, prosecutors, and other officials on trafficking indicators in partnership with the Government of Aruba and other foreign governments. The Kingdom of the Netherlands funded a recurring annual training opportunity on border security for immigration officials, which sometimes included trafficking components.

PROTECTION

The government maintained inadequate protection efforts. Authorities did not identify any trafficking victims for the fifth consecutive year or provide any services to victims for the seventh consecutive year. The government did not have SOPs for the identification or referral of victims and relied instead on informal coordination between ministries. The Ministry of Justice continued to work on a draft identification and referral protocol and sought assistance from an international organization in completing the resource.

The government reported distributing an NGO-developed checklist of trafficking indicators to immigration officials and other government stakeholders who might encounter potential victims. However, the government did not report efforts to proactively screen vulnerable populations, such as individuals in commercial sex and undocumented migrants. Independent evaluators concluded officials did not routinely screen for trafficking indicators when processing detained migrants and temporarily limited workplace inspections to appease employers. The NRC was the lead agency responsible for trafficking victim protection, but it operated with insufficient funding and had not been recognized as an official government entity.

The NRC was a subunit of the border protection agency that assigned two staff to support NRC on a part-time basis. The government’s victim support agency, which aided victims of all crimes, could also support trafficking victims. The government had a limited capacity to arrange short-term shelter. The government did not provide shelter to any victims in 2024.

There were no dedicated shelters for trafficking victims and few non-specialized shelters options. An NGO-run shelter for victims of domestic violence could sometimes accommodate female trafficking victims. The government reported it could provide only limited services to trafficking victims, such as emergency medical attention. The government did not have a dedicated budget for services for trafficking victims, but it did allocate approximately 450,000 guilder ($252,800) to the victim support agency and provide some funding to civil society organizations to which it might refer trafficking victims.

However, it did not have formal agreements with these organizations to provide services, such as shelter, to victims. The government could grant foreign victims temporary residency status that would only be valid for the duration of criminal proceedings against the trafficker; this status would not grant victims the right to work, although victims could receive a work permit through a separate process. The government last reported granting a temporary residence permit to a trafficking victim in 2015. The government considered residency status a temporary measure to facilitate victim cooperation in trials against traffickers, rather than a means of ensuring victims had legal alternatives to removal to countries where they would face retribution or hardship.

Due to a lack of inadequate screening and widespread conflation of human trafficking and migrant smuggling, the government did not take effective measures to prevent the inappropriate penalization of potential victims solely for unlawful acts traffickers compelled them to commit. The anti-trafficking law allowed victims to request restitution as part of criminal cases or file a civil suit against traffickers to obtain compensation; however, no victims received restitution or filed civil suit in 2024. Observers expressed concern that the government did not address policy gaps identified in 2019, such as training inspectors to recognize signs of exploitation, which exacerbated the vulnerabilities of women in commercial sex.

PREVENTION

The government increased its efforts to prevent trafficking. The national prosecutor’s office and the national anti-trafficking coordinator jointly led efforts to combat human trafficking; the coordinator operated without limited funding or staff in this capacity and had other full-time duties. Independent evaluators assessed the government allocated the coordinator insufficient resources to properly execute the position’s responsibilities. The coordinator led bimonthly informal coordination meetings of the government’s anti-trafficking stakeholders.

Observers suggested the regular meetings contributed to improved interagency coordination on anti-trafficking efforts; the government reported the Ministry of Justice evaluated, but had not approved, a proposal to establish an interagency task force to formalize the meetings. The government continued to review its draft NAP, which it revised to apply to 2025-2027, but neither formally adopted nor implemented its objectives; the previous NAP expired in 2018. The government reported allocating approximately 150,000 guilder ($84,300) to support its anti-trafficking efforts, including victim protection and prevention campaigns; as in past reporting periods, multi-year funding from the Kingdom also supported ongoing projects to combat trafficking. The national coordinator collaborated with national anti-trafficking coordinators from Aruba, Curaçao, and the Netherlands under a 2023 MOU on the Kingdom’s coordinated anti-trafficking efforts.

In 2024, the government contracted an anti-trafficking communications consultant, launched a new NRC website, and developed a public communication strategy to raise awareness of human trafficking. Officials also distributed pamphlets outlining employment rights and common indicators of exploitation to migrant workers in at-risk sectors. The government continued to limit the issuance of visas to individuals seeking work in certain “vulnerable sectors.” By eliminating legal status for individuals in these sectors, the policy plausibly had the unintended effect of increasing their vulnerability to trafficking, although the government described it as an “anti-trafficking” measure. The government did not make efforts to reduce the demand for commercial sex acts.

The government did not have a trafficking-specific hotline to receive public reports of trafficking; however, it noted operators for other hotlines, such as the 911 emergency line, could refer callers to UMM. The government did not report receiving trafficking-related calls via any hotlines in 2024. TRAFFICKING PROFILE: Trafficking affects all communities. This section summarizes government and civil society reporting on the nature and scope of trafficking over the past five years.

Human traffickers exploit foreign victims in Sint Maarten and, to a lesser extent, Sint Maarteners are vulnerable to trafficking. Caribbean, Eastern European, and Latin American women working in bars, clubs, and brothels are vulnerable to sex trafficking. Brothel owners exploit women and girls from Latin America and the Caribbean in sex trafficking. Illicit recruiters reportedly target foreign women in commercial sex through debt-based coercion; women from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela are especially vulnerable to sex trafficking in Sint Maarten.

Government officials report a significant number of migrant workers are vulnerable to forced labor in domestic service and housekeeping, construction, neighborhood grocery markets, retail shops, food service, and landscaping. Authorities report employers sometimes coerce Asian and Caribbean workers in exploitative conditions indicative of forced labor. The government’s reduction of visas for foreign workers in certain sectors, including adult entertainment, increases their vulnerability to trafficking. Officials report migrants who transit Sint Maarten are vulnerable to human trafficking; criminal actors, including smugglers, sometimes exploit them in forced labor or sex trafficking en route to other countries.

There is limited research into trafficking modalities and vulnerabilities in Sint Maarten. * Sint Maarten is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. For the purpose of this report, Sint Maarten is not a “country” to which the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act apply. This narrative reflects how Sint Maarten would be assessed if it were a separate, independent country. However, the Kingdom is an important contributor to the Government of Sint Maarten’s anti-trafficking efforts.

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