Anthony Mangione, a 27-year veteran of ICE, has not been charged formally with any crime, but according to the Orlando Sentinel, at least four images of child pornography have been found on his computer.

The Orlando Sentinel story, an updated version of a Monday Miami Herald article, reports that the FBI and the Broward County Sheriff’s Department have seized Mangione’s computer and are in the midst of a forensic investigation. Law enforcement was originally alerted to the downloads by AOL, Mangione’s Internet Service Provider. He received the images via email.

Mangione began his career with the U.S. Customs Service as a typist and eventually became an agent. He was promoted to head of ICE for South Florida in 2007. Mangione’s focus was largely on high-profile drug busts in a region known to be the principal corridor for cocaine smuggled into the U.S. from South America. However, in his capacity as a human trafficking watchdog, he has also spoken out against child pornography in the past. The Miami Herald reports:

“Too many children are victimized by predators that target the most vulnerable among us — our children,” Mangione said in a 2009 press release announcing that a 20-year-old Palm Beach County man was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on child porn charges.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, sources close to the case say that the images do not appear to have any possible connection to any ICE cases. Neither Mangione nor any ICE officials have commented on the investigation.

The Government Accountability Office went undercover to investigate how 18 recruiters would respond to questions about how to hire foreign workers, who can be less expensive than native-born workers. Three of them took the bait, recommending the fictional landscape employer dissuade Americans from applying by scheduling job interviews before 7 a.m., requiring drug tests and making applicants “run around the shop carrying a 50-pound bag to determine [if] they were fit for the work.”

For the foreign workers who eventually get jobs under H-2B visas, the GAO found employers sometimes underpay or charge visa workers excessive fees for visa processing, housing or transportation. More than half of the cases reviewed by government investigators involved fees that drastically reduced paychecks for workers, sometimes to as low as $48 in a two-week period.

Labor rights groups say that foreign-born workers are often exploited by employers who rely on their lack of connections or access to resources in the United States. This can be even worse for undocumented workers, who rights groups say suffer frequent wage theft and other workplace abuses because they fear being turned over to immigration authorities.Workers on H-2B visas are in the country legally, but at times it’s through employers who are cheating the system by skipping over qualified American applicants.

For more on workplace exploitation, it’s worth re-reading the Star’s series on trafficking from last year. After the series ended in December, Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said she would begin more work on ending human trafficking, including a campaign launched in July to improve trafficking assistance and awareness programs.

The Labor Department, which also handles the issue, has added investigators to its Wage and Hour Division to audit seasonal H-2B visa workers. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has argued for fair wages for all workers — even undocumented ones — and appeared in advertising this summer telling workers “every worker in America has the right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.”

Reeducation through labor, primarily through sentences at forced labor camps, was a common punishment and consisted of tasks such as logging, mining, or tending crops under harsh conditions. Reeducation involved memorizing speeches by Kim Jong-il. …

NGO, refugee, and press reports indicated that there were several types of prisons, detention centers, and camps, including forced labor camps and separate camps for political prisoners. Defectors claimed the camps covered areas as large as 200 square miles. The camps appeared to contain mass graves, barracks, worksites, and other prison facilities.

Conditions in camps for political prisoners are even harsher and feature such pleasantries as “prolonged periods of exposure to the elements; humiliations such as public nakedness; confinement for up to several weeks in small ‘punishment cells’ in which prisoners were unable to stand upright or lie down; being forced to kneel or sit immobilized for long periods; being hung by the wrists; being forced to stand up and sit down to the point of collapse.” Variations on these themes occurred at CIA secret detention facilities, Guantanamo Bay, and, in certain cases, in Afghanistan and Iraq as the result of the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention programs — which, at their root, were modeled on methods taught to U.S. troops to resist torture of the sort practiced by, among others, the North Koreans. So former Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, can’t call what Euna Lee and Laura Ling may face “torture” on pains of inconsistency. Moral clarity in action.

It’s unclear to me if the distinction between conditions in forced-labor camps and conditions in political reeducation camps is an ironclad one.

Meanwhile, what’s gotten somewhat lost in the justified outrage over Lee and Ling’s conviction is the story that took them to the Chinese border with North Korea in the first place: the plight of North Korean women trafficked into China. This is from that same State Department report, and it hints at the importance of Ling and Lee’s reporting:

There were no known laws specifically addressing the problem of trafficking in persons, and trafficking of women and young girls into and within China continued to be widely reported. Some North Korean women and girls who voluntarily crossed into China were picked up by trafficking rings and sold as brides to Chinese nationals or placed in forced labor. In other cases, North Korean women and girls were lured out of North Korea by the promise of food, jobs, and freedom, only to be forced into prostitution, marriage, or exploitive labor arrangements. A network of smugglers facilitated this trafficking. Many victims of trafficking, unable to speak Chinese, were held as virtual prisoners, and some were forced to work as prostitutes. Traffickers sometimes abused or physically scarred the victims to prevent them from escaping. Officials facilitated trafficking by accepting bribes to allow individuals to cross the border into China.

A different State Department report, this one about human trafficking, found that when the Chinese government obtains women smuggled into the country from North Korea, it treats them “solely as economic migrants” and routinely repatriates them “back to horrendous conditions.”

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The enormous human trafficking ring allegedly lured hundreds of foreign workers into the United States illegally to work for less than minimum wage and live in substandard conditions, reports The Kansas City Star.

The employment agencies then farmed out the workers to construction companies and hotels, resorts and casinos in 14 different states, according to the indictment. The workers were not only stripped of most of their wages, but forced to pay huge fees to the employment firm, making it impossible for them to leave or buy a ticket to fly home.

“The indictment alleges that this criminal enterprise lured victims to the United States under the guise of legitimate jobs and a better life, only to treat them as modern-day slaves under the threat of deportation,” said James Gibbons, acting special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a written statement.

Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano vowed to shift the focus away from undocumented employees caught during workplace raids to the employers that knowingly hire and abuse illegal workers. But because the Department of Homeland Security still has authority to arrest and deport the workers, the promise elicited some skepticism.

Yesterday’s indictment suggests that Napolitano may be keeping her word.