One Woman's War

Written by Charles Agar

At just over 5-feet tall and quick with her ready smile, Dottie Laster of New Braunfels is disarming. But you don’t want to cross her.

Laster, 46, lives on the frontlines of the global fight against human trafficking, and her weapons are persistence, fearlessness and savvy. “I’m hard-headed and I’m a smart-ass,” Laster said in a recent interview.

Her clients, whether prostituted children or indentured kitchen workers, are without identification, stripped of rights and trapped in a web of deceit and exploitation.

“I don’t know that I’ve met anyone with her passion for serving the trafficking issue,” said David Walding, an immigration expert with the Bernardo Kohler Center in Austin who works with Laster on cases. “Once she gets rolling in a certain direction, she’s like a force of nature. She’s unstoppable at that point.”

Laster’s efforts have gained her a lot of attention, including a feature in a 2010 issue of Texas Monthly and interest from Hollywood. But for her it’s not about personal gain. She is motivated by the people she helps, like the young Liberian girl she met in 2004.

At home, the girl had been through her own hell under the brutal dictatorship of Charles Taylor; then she was trafficked by a United Nations soldier and her trouble multiplied when she arrived in the United States, undocumented and unprotected.

After being forced into prostitution and then pregnant, the girl was abandoned in the waiting area of a New York airport.
“This girl is alone in the world,” Laster remembers saying. “There’s nobody for her.”

The girl lost her baby and was sent to an aunt’s house in the U.S., the sister of the mother who sold her into prostitution. She ran away only to find more trouble in the margins, with no ID and no place to stay.

The problem, according to Laster, was that the girl was never identified as a victim of trafficking. “She was missed in every gap,” Laster said.
Today, with Laster’s help, the girl has finished college, found work and an apartment, and is a mother. But for all the people Laster has been able to reach, most suffer in silence.

And that’s what keeps her fighting.

A “farm girl” from Katy, Texas, Laster trained and showed horses and worked cattle with her dad as a child. She did everything from heavy lifting to castrating calves, something that steeled her for the real world, she said.

“No boy is going to push me around,” Laster remembers telling herself.

Then came her parents’ bitter divorce and four moves to four different high schools, including a year at a rough school north of Houston where she learned survival skills.

At 19, she married John, a long-haul trucker, and raised two children: Blake, 23, now entering the Air Force, and Stephanie, 26, who suffered a serious head injury at age 9 and has required special care ever since.

Laster spread an undergraduate degree across 20 years of child care and horse training before finishing with a bachelor’s in sociology from the University of Texas — San Antonio.

While earning her master’s in international relations from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Laster found her calling during a lecture on human trafficking by a U.S. State Department official.

“That’s it. That’s what I’m going to do. I got it,” Laster remembers saying.

From then on, she has been on fire.

Laster joined a San Antonio coalition on trafficking, where she worked alongside city leaders and law enforcement. After graduate school, she worked for the YMCA in Houston on a Department of Justice grant. She trained police officers there and was hired as part of a trafficking coalition in Orange County, California.

Laster’s work has attracted attention of documentary filmmakers. In 2006, she was a coordinating producer on a trafficking documentary, “Cargo: Innocence Lost.”

She was invited to the White House in 2008 and she’s met actors and actresses, including Darryl Hannah, who attended one of Laster’s trainings. In May 2008, Laster left L.A. for a new life in New Braunfels, closer to her Texas roots. But trafficking cases “found her” and she was also energized by meeting Paul Rusesabagina of “Hotel Rwanda” fame, as well as the Krueger family who helped bring him to the U.S.

Kathleen Krueger, New Braunfels Mayor Pro-Tem and wife of former U.S. Senator and Ambassador Bob Krueger, had experienced trafficking and genocide first-hand in her time in Burundi and took to Laster’s cause right away.

“When you first meet Dottie, you maybe think she’s an average housewife and then you get to know her and you realize that she is a person of profound courage and dogged determination,” Krueger said, adding that the unassuming Laster is “assertive but not rude,” approaching victims and traffickers alike with an easy equanimity.

Laster and Krueger have been spending nights shooting infrared video of what they believe is a trafficking situation at a local restaurant.
Despite being a “very unlikely looking set of spies,” Krueger said, the two are determined to get local victims the help they need, and show others that oppression can happen “in plain sight” in any town.

Traffickers isolate and strip their victims of rights, but all it takes is knowledge of the trafficker’s tactics and a response to red flags, Laster said.
“Any minor in prostitution is a red flag,” Laster said, as are the “dead eyes” of a person who has lost all hope.

The problem is big, according to Laster, but one solution is cutting the demand for commercial sex and non-paid labor by prosecuting the people who benefit and support it, including men who frequent prostitutes and business owners who hire illegal workers kept against their will.

In 2008, Laster opened Laster Global, a consulting and training company. She travels across the U.S., and over the years she has written for more than $6 million in grants to help trafficking victims. Laster has a popular online-radio talk show called “Trafficked” and hopes to do more film and TV work, more projects, more consulting. She earns money by training police departments but works for clients pro bono, reaching out to help one person at a time.

Laster’s husband of 26 years and her children are very supportive, she said, even if work means patrolling restaurant parking lots late at night or lots of travel.

Laster is easily frustrated by the barrier of ignorance or when law enforcement and immigration officials quickly deport someone in trouble instead of offering the help victims need after they’ve been enslaved.

The greed of traffickers always set her off, but when she does what she can to help, Laster said she sleeps well at night.

For more information about Dottie, visit her Web site: www.lasterglobal.com.

Charles Agar is a freelance writer and videographer in New Braunfels. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it