Heidi Heitkamp
The Public Record
Heidi Heitkamp is an American politician and attorney who served as the United States Senator from North Dakota from 2013 to 2019. A member of the Democratic-NPL Party, she was the first woman elected to the Senate from North Dakota. During her tenure, Heitkamp focused on issues such as agriculture, energy, and rural development, advocating for policies that benefited her state's economy and communities.
Somehow we have to reduce the demand and the sense that it is OK to do this.
I am trying to get at what is going to stop people from demanding these services or using the services of human beings who are trafficks.
We have learned from our work in domestic violence that there is a way to begin to have deterrence against those people who would participate on either end.
This is, in fact, human slavery. There is no other way to, I think, identify it.
We could use five FBI agents in Fort Berthold right now. We have 3,000 pending criminal cases in tribal court.
One of the things that we did in domestic violence is we began to prosecute cases without victim testimony.
It is not just these victims. It is crime against every person in this country.
If we are just always going to rely on repairing a victim, you are going to miss the statute.
Because it would seem to me that if people knew that there was a path forward for coming out of the shadows, there would be less of this kind of activity.





