With human trafficking on the rise, Congress must act to end this modern-day slave trade

(July 22, 2024) - For years, we have heard troubling reports about migrant children in our country who are trafficked into sexual exploitation, forced labor, and criminal gangs.

This ongoing tragedy is the direct result of President Biden’s open border agenda—which has seen more than 400,000 unaccompanied minors released into our country since January 2021, including 85,000 missing children with whom the Biden administration lost contact. To this day, we do not know where these children are or whether they are being trafficked, and the administration has repeatedly failed to provide an accounting for them.

This tragedy should have never happened: According to U.S. immigration law, President Biden is required to place unaccompanied minors with vetted sponsors, such as close family members. Yet evidence continues to emerge showing that the administration—after causing the worst border crisis in our nation’s history—weakened its vetting standards to remove vulnerable children from federal custody as quickly as possible.

In fact, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration “repeatedly overrode the concerns of lower-level workers who warned about placing [migrant children] in certain households.” In many cases, caseworkers warned that the homes receiving migrant children were tied to criminal activity, including forced labor, but the administration overruled them, releasing the children to potential traffickers.

In one instance, a “hostel-like home” in Florida, where at least three adults lived, was set to receive a migrant child. At the time, the assigned caseworker wrote in a recommendation that the home was unsafe for the child, especially because it was “not fully assessed.” But, according to the Journal, administration officials rejected the recommendation.

In another case, a migrant child was set to live with at least two men in a home in South Texas. One of the men, who was the sponsor, claimed to be the child’s uncle, but in other government records, the man said he was unrelated to the child. To make matters worse, the second man at the residence was charged with a felony three months prior for abusing his girlfriend. Understandably, the caseworker denied the sponsor’s request, but two days later, administration officials overrode the caseworker’s decision, releasing the child to the men’s home.

This troubling information follows the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General report in February, which documented the administration’s widespread failure to protect vulnerable migrant children. Among its startling findings: In early 2021, the Biden administration failed to conduct a safety check on 16 percent of sponsors, and in one-third of children’s case files, the sponsor submitted IDs with illegible information.

To hold the Biden administration accountable for this gross dereliction of duty, I recently joined Senator Grassley’s bipartisan resolution that would end the Biden administration’s lax vetting of child sponsors.

Still, there is so much more we need to do to combat the modern-day slave trade of human trafficking, which is now a $150 billion a year global industry. In Tennessee alone, authorities received more than 1,300 tips about suspected human trafficking in 2023, up from 245 in 2016. This increase has been led by a surge in minor sex trafficking, with reports up from 66 in 2016 to more than 600 last year.

Tragically, the horrors of human trafficking are impacting every community in our country.

Recently, U.S. Marshals and the New York Police Department rescued 41 missing children, including some forced into sex trafficking, following a five-week operation that resulted in the arrests of three people, including a sex offender. Earlier this month, police in a town outside Dallas announced that they arrested four human traffickers after discovering 15 of their victims, who are all women, sleeping on the floor of a residential home. According to police, more than 100 people are potentially involved in the trafficking operation.

One thing should be clear: This horrific practice has no place in our country, and Congress must do everything in its power to end it and help trafficking victims.

That’s why I introduced—alongside Senator Ossoff (D-Ga.)—the bipartisan Supporting Victims of Human Trafficking Act, which would strengthen efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime to support anti-trafficking organizations. Among its important provisions, this bill would make it easier for programs that serve victims of human trafficking to receive federal assistance and provide training to groups to better serve survivors.

The bipartisan National Human Trafficking Database Act, which I introduced last month alongside Senator Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would strengthen this work by establishing a national human trafficking database and incentivizing certain state law enforcement agencies to report data, including the names of all anti-trafficking organizations operating in each county in America.

As President Biden continues to push open-border policies that enable human trafficking, it is essential that Congress take action to support trafficking victims. With the Supporting Victims of Human Trafficking Act and National Human Trafficking Database Act, we have an opportunity to help make that happen.