The Department of Homeland Security is surging resources across its agencies to stomp out human trafficking in the United States, giving the issue a stature similar to that of immigration and border security.
“DHS has developed a first-of-its-kind strategy to leverage all of our authority and resources in this fight,” said acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf. “Let me be clear: The strategy isn’t just about leveraging resources. It’s about ending human trafficking and child sexual exploitation.” Wolf, who spoke Wednesday in Washington, said the new effort would likely require additional funding.
The “Strategy to Combat Human Trafficking, the Importation of Goods Produced with Forced Labor, and Child Sexual Exploitation” lists 40 steps the department intends to take in the next five years to stomp out human trafficking, which it defines as the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act. Sex trafficking can include escort services, pornography, illegal massage parlors, brothels, and prostitution. In the labor market, victims may be working in the agriculture or retail industries, restaurants, homes, and traveling shows, such as carnivals.
Kim Holmes, executive vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, said nearly 25 million people have been identified as human trafficking victims. “It affects every region of the world, and it even takes place, of course, in our own backyard. It does not require the crossing of a border to be considered trafficking. It merely requires that one person exploit another for the purpose of profit.”
Human trafficking has been at the center of several major headlines in recent months, including allegations that deceased billionaire Jeffrey Epstein trafficked underage girls to have sex with famous male celebrities and politicians.
The DHS plan is broken into five goals: preventing crime, protecting victims, investigating and prosecuting perpetrators, partnering with other law enforcement, and enabling DHS through organizational improvements.
Samantha Vardaman, vice president of Shared Hope International, a Washington nonprofit organization focused on helping sex-trafficking victims, said DHS was right to focus on helping victims.
“Too often, trafficking victims are perceived as criminals and, as a result, they are denied access to services needed to restore their lives,” Vardaman wrote in an email. “Shared Hope is especially pleased to see the Strategy emphasize the importance of victim-centered policies and programs and expanding access to victim assistance.”
The plan has been in the works for two years, and the idea came out of former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s tenure at DHS, Wolf said. The announcement was made in the middle of National Slavery and Human Trafficking Month and weeks ahead of the Super Bowl LIV in Miami, an event that historically sees an influx of arrests for prostitution and similar incidents.
“The timing of this conversation is important. This year, we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which made human trafficking a federal crime,” said Wolf. But some Trump administration officials called for major changes to it during the migrant surge at the southern border last year, saying it gave unaccompanied children who showed up at the border protection from being immediately deported because they may be trafficking victims. The law was never amended, despite demands from some Republicans.
“Human trafficking and child sexual exploitation are not something we often talk about,” Wolf said. “We, as a nation, don’t talk about this enough.”
The National Human Trafficking Hotline reported more than 41,000 reports of potential cases in 2018, more than one-quarter of which were confirmed. The hotline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said it received more than 18.4 million tips of exploited child incidents in 2019, the most in one year.
Wolf said even with 10% of agents at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations branch investigating these types of incidents, they must choose the most egregious cases to pursue due to the overwhelming number of incidents. “Sometimes, we’re the only agents. We’re the only ones civilly and criminally enforcing a prohibition on the importation of goods with forced labor. We are at a point now that we need to prioritize these issues within the department so that future budgets will provide for top-of-the-line law enforcement and state-of-the-art resources in this fight.”
The department will release a plan for how to implement the strategy in July.
