Airport Experience® News - Leadership & Culture Issue 2023

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BLUE LIGHTNING STRIKES DHS’s Bynum Shares Details Of Aviation-Focused Anti-Human Trafficking Campaign

BY SALLY KRAL

ditor’s Note: Brandi Bynum is section chief of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign, a national leader in raising public awareness of human trafficking. AXN Contributing Writer Sally Kral recently spoke with Bynum to learn more about Blue Campaign’s mission and how airports and their employees can help the cause. Interested parties can connect at bluecampaign@hq.dhs.gov. E

KRAL: What is Blue Campaign’s mission and how does it accomplish that mission? BYNUM: We are the Department of Homeland Security’s national human trafficking awareness program. We’ve been around since 2010 and started out as a small initiative with no staff and no money. We’ve grown so much over the last 13 years:. We have written legislation, we’re now within the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking, we have a full staff and we’re funded. Our bread and butter is public awareness, outreach and training, and we like to focus on law enforcement with federal, state, local, tribal or even public safety officials, different frontline industry organizations, non-governmental organizations, and communities that are more susceptible to human trafficking. And what we want to do over the life of the campaign is educate those various

audiences on what human trafficking is, what the indicators of the crime are, and how to appropriately respond to possible cases. That could be educating the general public to properly report to a tip line, or for law enforcement to engage in a victim centered approach, which means placing equal emphasis on getting that victim out of that trafficking situation as well as investigating the crime, or for industry and non-governmental organizations to learn the indicators of the crime and how to properly respond to possible cases. When it comes to aviation, in 2012 we created the Blue Lightning Initiative (BLI), which is an element of our overarching Blue Campaign that’s in partnership with the U.S. Department of Transportation as well as Customs and Border Protection. Through BLI we’re able to provide free training and resources to the aviation community.

Above: Brandi Bynum, section chief of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign

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AX NEWS LEADERSHIP ISSUE 2023