Promised an education in America, Nicole (not her real name) left her West African home—only to become a slave in Newark, N.J. Along with a group of about 20 other girls, she was forced to work 12-hour days braiding hair for unsuspecting customers, always under the watchful eye of her captors.

“I wish one of my customers … would have gone to the police,” Nicole told CNN. “I wish they would have helped me.”

Nicole was barely 12 when she left Ghana with her soon-to-be captors. In most cases the human trafficker had a connection to the family and would offer to take the girls to the United States for school. The family would gladly send the girls, but upon arriving in America it’d be a different story.

“It was like being trapped, like being in a cage,” Nicole said. “I always have to behave, behave, behave, behave. No freedom at all.”

The girls were beaten, starved, isolated and sexually abused. They lived in filthy conditions, but always in homes or apartments in the middle of residential neighborhoods in Newark and East Orange, N.J. Life went on like normal all around them, nobody suspecting there was human trafficking happening in America.

“We were there for so long,” Nicole told CNN’s AC360. “It [took] forever for us to be rescued.”

Their captors would control every area of their lives and keep them in fear—too afraid to reach out for help. Phone calls to their family were monitored and they were told to lie about their age to their customers.

“I wished I could go with them,” said Nicole, now 19, recalling her teenage customers. “Most of the time, I’d end up just breaking down later crying … because when I see teenagers going around, going to the movies and just being a teen … I just couldn’t understand why my life has to be this way.”

This went on for five years until a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in 2007 freed the girls. Two years later the girls testified in court against the captors.

“I remember crying. All I did was cry. It was overwhelming,” Nicole said, recalling the experience in court. “I told myself, ‘She finally got what she deserved’ … she did really, really wrong. She treated us bad. And she was heartless … and I’m happy she was caught.”

In September of 2010 the captors were convicted and sentenced to jail, the ringleader for 27 years.

“The traffickers, they took my childhood from me, my teen-hood. They took it from me,” Nicole said. “They took everything away from me.”

Today Nicole and many of the other girls are being helped by a clinic run by University of Michigan professor and human trafficking expert Bridgette Carr. Nicole now has her own job and is planning to attend college.

“Sadly, the work of our clinic is necessary in every community in America,” Carr told CNN. “Human trafficking, also known as modern-day slavery, exists in big cities, in small towns, in rural areas with no towns, exists in restaurants, in hair salons, in hotels and in farmwork. Almost every industry you can think of, there is an opportunity there for someone to be exploited. This is everywhere in the U.S.”

Nicole had apprehensions about appearing on camera with CNN and at one point backed out. But she ultimately decided to tell her story, realizing that there were others like her out there who needed to be rescued, and there were so many more like her customers who didn’t even realize slavery was happening.

“I want to tell people that slavery exists,” Nicole said. “It’s huge, and it’s really happening here.”

Watch the premiere of “Tainted Love” – a Halogen TV original series about human trafficking during a special night of anti-slavery programming, coming in January 2011.