Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is catching heat for declining to issue fines after 14,000 violations of a sex trafficking law by hotels in the state.
An investigation published by the South Florida Sun Sentinel found that 6,669 hotels and other lodging establishments had received 14,279 citations since a 2019 sex trafficking law required them to make changes to protect victims.
Under the anti-trafficking law, violators are supposed to receive fines of up to $2,000 a day.
However, the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation says not a single fine has been issued because the law allows hotels a 90-day period to fix violations, and so far all have done so.
"The division's main goal is to focus on educating licensees and assisting them as they strive to come into compliance with the law. Division inspectors address violations by diligently educating operators on the requirements and penalties for noncompliance," the department told the Sun Sentinel in a statement. "By performing follow-up inspections at 60 days and then again at the 90-day deadline, division inspectors have been successful in compelling establishments to comply prior to the issuance of an administrative complaint."
State Senator Lauren Book, who passed the law, says she was shocked to hear the news.
"The reason that we had the cure period was that you fix the problem, not that you fall back on your laurels because the department then gives you another 90 days after some time," she told the newspaper. "That's not the intention, that's not the spirit of the law or the intention. So it's my intention to go back and change that and not allow for that."
It's not clear why DeSantis isn't using the law to enforce fines and crack down on sex trafficking. When he signed the law, he stated that "Florida has zero tolerance for human trafficking and those who allow it to thrive in the shadows." The Sun Sentinel investigation shows the opposite -- that the sex business continues to flourish at Florida hotels.
Izzy Fintz, a manager at Quality Inn & Suites of Hollywood -- which avoided fines after being cited twice for violating the law, told the newspaper that he takes human trafficking seriously, but he can't control what guests do in the privacy of their rooms.
"Some idiot that puts an ad that I have nothing to do with, and it's not in my control, not my ad," he said. "It's not like we advertise, 'Hey, hookers, come home. We have a special. We have clean beds.'"
That sentiment is shared by the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, which stressed that the law's focus is on educating hotel managers and staff, not treating hotel operators like criminals.
"(To) punish a business for crimes it has no part in, will not reduce trafficking. If a business is complicit in trafficking, this is a crime with criminal statutes already in place to address it," spokeswoman Ashley Chambers said in statement to the Sun Sentinel. "We support efforts that ensure the provision of the resources needed to effectively prevent, investigate, and punish the criminals that perpetrate these crimes — not the businesses that are also unwitting victims of the criminals."
Steven Babin, whose law firm is handling several trafficking cases against major hotel chains, said suspicious activity is "not as hard to spot or identify as the hotels would have you believe."
"If a guy in his 40s takes five girls in their 20s to a hotel, buys rooms for cash for a week at a time, asks for rooms by exit doors and then you see 20 or 30 men go in and out of each room every single day, it looks a little weird," Babin told the newspaper.
Savannah Parvu, a sex trafficking victim who testified during state Senate committee in 2018 that she walked through a hotel hallway "barefoot, bloody, beaten and alone" and no one helped or asked her questions, told the Sun Sentential that actually fining the hotels would make them "more proactive to get their employees trained, rather than just waiting until they get a citation and are forced to do it."
DeSantis has not commented on the newspaper's investigation.
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