Mia had been a prostitute in Queens for about a year when a quick-thinking cop opened the door to freedom.

She’d argued with a john who didn’t want to wear a condom, and been badly beaten for her trouble.

When the NYPD’s Finest showed up, she lied, just like her pimps told her to.

“That’s my partner,” she told the officer.

But he didn’t buy it.

“A detective saved my life,” she recalled to The Post.

The officer pulled her aside.

“He said to me, ‘Take a business card,” she said. “And I said ‘I can’t take that, I can’t.’”

So he wrote the number of a hotline for her to call on the inside of her T-shirt.

“He said he had a daughter my age and that there was a whole world out there,” she recalled. “He said you look like a really, really good young woman.” 

She called the number.

“They helped me.”

Mia was 17, the oldest of nine children born and living in Mexico when she found out her boyfriend was a human trafficker.

“I didn’t know. Then when I found out it was really bad. I received threats from the people he worked with,” she said. “I basically came to the States because of a threat.”

The traffickers constantly promised to harm her family back home if she didn’t comply.

Mia, whose identity is being protected, was brought to Corona, Queens, and kept in an apartment with other women.

They were forbidden to talk about what they were doing or where they went, then delivered to men who had called a number and ordered them “for pleasure,” she said.

The women had no money, save $5 here and there, and were given only room and board.

“Sometimes you have no choice because you have family back home and they always use your family to intimidate you,” she said. “I’m not the only one. This is how this industry works.”

Some men would pay an extra $100 so they wouldn’t have to use a condom.

She was forced to have two abortions while she was working as a prostitute.

The people in charge told her what to say if she got caught.

“Do you do this by choice? Yes.”

“Someone forced you to do this? No.”

“Is someone behind this? No, I’m on my own.”

“But in reality, in the back of your head, it’s like, ‘I wish I can say the truth,” she recalled. “I wish I don’t have family back home. I wish that they don’t know where I live.”

Now 40, and long out of the sex trade, Mia works with women trapped in life.

But the traffickers are still around — and she’s still afraid.

The number of women being trafficked in Queens and areas of Brooklyn is on the rise, she insists.

“Now they’re taking advantage of the asylum seekers,” she said. “I talk to the women every single day.”

She said she tries to tell the young women, “There is something better for you out there.”