A 51-year-old Moorestown woman was sentenced to 45 months in prison for federal crimes related to a scheme in which she coerced two victims to come to the U.S. to perform domestic labor and child care in her home, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
Bolaji Bolarinwa was found guilty of two counts of forced labor, one count of alien harboring for financial gain and two counts of document servitude, following a two-week trial before U.S. District Judge Karen M. Williams in Camden federal court.
According to documents filed in the case and the evidence at trial, from December 2015 to October 2016, Bolarinwa – a native of Nigeria living in New Jersey as a U.S. citizen – recruited the two victims to come to the states, then coerced them to perform domestic labor and child-care services while enduring physical harm, isolation, constant surveillance and psychological abuse. The defendant engaged in the conduct knowing one of the victims was out of lawful status while working in her home.
Once the first victim arrived in the U.S. in December 2015, Bolarinwa confiscated her passport and coerced her through threats of harm to her and her daughter to compel her to work around the clock for nearly a year, the evidence showed. Bolarinwa then recruited a second victim who arrived in America on a student visa in April 2016. She took that person’s passport and coerced her to perform household work and child care, but relied more heavily on physical abuse, according to the evidence.
The two victims lived and worked in Bolarinwa’s home until October 2016, when the second one notified a professor at her college of the scheme, who then reported it to the FBI. In addition to the prison term, Williams sentenced Bolarinwa to three years of supervised release, imposed a $35,000 fine and ordered her to pay more than $87,000 in restitution to the victims.
Habba credited special agents of the FBI with the investigation and the case was prosecuted as part of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey’s Human Trafficking Task Force, formed in 2025 to partner federal and state agencies in prosecuting human trafficking offenders.
