RESOLVING THE LEDGER
This is one outlet's own report from The Straits Times — the article as it was filed. Other outlets are covering the same event; open the full story to compare every source side by side.
See the full story · 2 sourcesListen WASHINGTON, Aug 13 - The Trump administration has repeatedly said the fight against sex trafficking is one of its top priorities.
But investigations have stalled and prosecutions declined in the past six months because of staffing shortages, funding cuts, immigration enforcement and growing distrust of the government among victims, according to Reuters interviews with 25 former prosecutors, current agents and victims’ advocates, and a review of federal court records.
"You can't say something is a priority and then not provide the resources to make that happen,” said Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in New York who led the prosecution of rapper and actor Sean "Diddy" Combs, who was accused of sex trafficking and was convicted last year on two counts of transportation for prostitution.
Federal sex-trafficking charges have dropped this year to the slowest pace since 2010. The Justice Department charged 73 people through June, about 22% lower than the number of people charged during the first half of the past three years, court records show.
Charges for related crimes also declined. The DOJ charged 1,230 people child pornography violations through June, 3% less than average for the same months over the past three years. It charged 318 people with violating the Mann Act, which targets interstate prostitution, 18% less than average.
These drops reflect a larger shift in federal law enforcement priorities under President Donald Trump, who has slashed agency budgets and mandated a focus on deportations. People charged with crimes unrelated to immigration – everything from tax evasion to drug trafficking – dropped 7% through June to about 22,000, according to the court records.
The findings come just as Congress has confirmed Trump nominee Todd Blanche as Attorney General in a 50-to-49 vote with two Republicans defecting. His candidacy faced a bipartisan backlash over the handling of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and a transfer to a minimum-security prison granted to his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, shortly after Blanche personally interviewed her.
Blanche recently told Congress combating human trafficking "remains a Department priority given the gravity of the harm it causes." The administration also appointed a new national coordinator for child exploitation and human trafficking, Alessandra Serano, a career prosecutor.
Serano said in statements to Reuters that the department was committed to combating sex trafficking. She said the drop in prosecutions might have resulted from prosecutors and investigators spending time litigating a large number of ongoing cases that have pulled those officials away from opening new ones.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katherine Currie declined to comment on the Reuters review of sex-trafficking cases. She said in a statement that the department is committed to both immigration and sex-crimes enforcement and touted its “unwavering dedication to dismantling human-trafficking networks."
AGENTS PULLED AWAY, SEASONED PROSECUTORS GONE
Sex-trafficking cases are among the toughest to investigate and prosecute, requiring the untangling of psychological abuse, tracking illicit finances and securing the trust of traumatized victims.
Dozens of veterans with experience prosecuting sex-trafficking cases have recently left the department, according to seven former prosecutors who have worked such cases. During part of last year, the majority of all HSI agents were assigned to immigration, according to current agents and previous Reuters reporting.
In some U.S. attorney’s offices, the shortage is so acute that the remaining agents working sex-trafficking cases can’t find prosecutors to pursue their cases, agents and former prosecutors say.
Serano said attrition is normal in these jobs because working sex-trafficking cases “takes a toll on people more than other types of cases,” though the recently departed prosecutors said more people had left than is typical. Serano added that the department is actively hiring to fill these roles.
To measure the department's sex-crimes enforcement effort, Reuters obtained the dockets of every publicly-filed federal criminal case over the past two decades from Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters legal research service. In some cases, Reuters used artificial intelligence to help classify charges. A review of a random set of records showed its assessments to be 98% accurate.
The Justice Department said its own data showed a smaller decrease, but it declined to explain how it reached those conclusions or to provide case numbers correlating to the prosecutions it counted. Reuters could not replicate the DOJ's results using a public version of its database.
The data examined by Reuters, from court records, showed a long-term trend of declining sex-trafficking cases over the past decade. Sources attributed the trend in part to the Justice Department’s increased focus on more time-consuming cases against higher-profile offenders.
But under Trump, such prosecutions have been hampered by the focus on immigration, the departure of agents and prosecutors and cuts to grants to groups supporting sex-trafficking victims. One veteran federal agent, speaking on condition of anonymity, said sex-trafficking has not been a priority since Trump took office and launched his mass-deportations campaign. With fewer agents dedicated to sex-trafficking, many active investigations are essentially frozen and new files are rarely opened, seven former prosecutors and three agents told Reuters.
"The administration is throwing sand in the gears in 10,000 different ways," said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, whose organization worked with partners to file a petition for the release of a cooperating trafficking victim from detention.
One former prosecutor in the southern United States said her office’s sex-trafficking investigations were crippled when several Ho...
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.