Federal sex-trafficking prosecutions have stalled over the past six months despite the Trump administration’s repeated claims that fighting the crime remains a top priority, according to Reuters interviews with 25 former prosecutors, current agents and victims’ advocates, along with a review of federal court records.
Staffing shortages, funding cuts, immigration enforcement demands and growing distrust of the government among victims have combined to slow investigations and reduce prosecutions, the review found.
“You can’t say something is a priority and then not provide the resources to make that happen,” said Jacqueline Kelley, a former federal prosecutor in New York who led the prosecution of rapper and actor Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was convicted on two counts of transportation for prostitution.
Federal sex-trafficking charges have dropped to their slowest pace since 2010. The Justice Department charged 73 people through June, about 22% fewer than the average number charged during the first half of the past three years, according to court records.
Related crimes have seen similar declines. The department charged 1,230 people with child pornography violations through June, 3% below the three-year average for the same period. It charged 318 people under the Mann Act, which targets interstate prostitution, an 18% drop from average.
The declines reflect a broader shift in federal law enforcement priorities under President Donald Trump, who has cut agency budgets and directed resources toward deportations. Charges for crimes unrelated to immigration, ranging from tax evasion to drug trafficking, fell 7% through June to about 22,000, court records show.
Attorney general confirmation follows Epstein controversy
The findings arrive shortly after the Senate confirmed Trump nominee Todd Blanche as Attorney General in a 50-49 vote, with two Republicans breaking from the party. Blanche’s confirmation faced bipartisan criticism over his handling of documents tied to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his approval of a transfer to a minimum-security prison for Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, shortly after personally interviewing her.
Blanche told Congress that combating human trafficking “remains a Department priority given the gravity of the harm it causes.” The administration also named a new national coordinator for child exploitation and human trafficking, career prosecutor Alessandra Serano.
Serano told Reuters the department remains committed to fighting sex trafficking. She attributed the decline in new prosecutions to prosecutors and investigators spending time on a backlog of ongoing cases rather than opening new ones. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katherine Currie declined to comment on the Reuters review but said her agency remains committed to both immigration and sex-crimes enforcement.
Veteran prosecutors and agents leave their posts
Sex-trafficking cases rank among the most difficult to investigate and prosecute, requiring investigators to untangle patterns of psychological abuse, trace illicit finances and build trust with traumatized victims.
Dozens of experienced sex-trafficking prosecutors have left the Justice Department in recent months, according to seven former prosecutors who worked such cases. For part of last year, the majority of Homeland Security Investigations agents were assigned to immigration duties rather than trafficking cases, according to current agents and prior Reuters reporting.
In some U.S. attorney’s offices, the shortage of prosecutors has become so severe that agents working sex-trafficking cases cannot find anyone to pursue them, agents and former prosecutors said.
Serano said staff turnover is common in these roles because the work “takes a toll on people more than other types of cases.” Former prosecutors who spoke with Reuters said the recent departures exceeded typical attrition. Serano said the department is actively hiring to fill the vacancies.
To assess the department’s enforcement record, Reuters obtained dockets for every publicly filed federal criminal case over the past two decades from Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters legal research service, and used artificial intelligence to help classify some charges. A review of a random sample found the classifications were 98% accurate. The Justice Department said its internal data showed a smaller decline but declined to explain its methodology or provide case numbers, and Reuters could not replicate the department’s findings using a public version of its database.
Court records reviewed by Reuters show sex-trafficking prosecutions have declined gradually over the past decade, a trend that sources partly attributed to the department’s shift toward more time-consuming cases against higher-profile offenders. But under Trump, prosecutors say that work has been further hampered by the focus on immigration enforcement, the loss of experienced staff and cuts to victim-support grants.
One federal agent, speaking on condition of anonymity, said sex trafficking has not been a department priority since Trump took office and launched his mass-deportation campaign. Seven former prosecutors and three agents said that with fewer agents assigned to trafficking cases, many investigations have effectively frozen and new cases are rarely opened.
“The administration is throwing sand in the gears in 10,000 different ways,” said Martina Vandenburg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, which has worked with partner organizations to petition for the release of a cooperating trafficking victim from immigration detention.
One former prosecutor in the southern United States said her office’s trafficking investigations were crippled after several Homeland Security Investigations agents were reassigned to immigration raids. In other jurisdictions, officials said supervisors have had to compete for the small number of agents still available to work trafficking cases.
Reassigning agents, sometimes to new cities, can disrupt fragile relationships with victims and witnesses who often lack stable phones or housing, causing cases to collapse, one federal agent said. In New England, one trafficking survivor’s case stalled after agents told her they had been diverted to immigration enforcement, according to a staffer at a local advocacy organization who worked with the survivor.
The advocate, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the survivor’s identity, said such reassignments signal to victims that their safety is not a priority. The survivor was later forced back into sex work and no longer wants to work with federal authorities, the advocate said.
An FBI spokesperson said agents shifted to immigration duties had continued working on other cases, including sex trafficking, and that the transfers did not eliminate their responsibility to investigate such crimes. The spokesperson did not address whether the reassignments contributed to the decline in prosecutions.
Victim support grants delayed as trust erodes
As staffing has thinned, so has the financial support system meant to keep victims stable enough to testify. The Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs typically distributes about $90 million a year in grants to nonprofit organizations that provide emergency housing, food and mental health counseling to trafficking victims.
Grant recipients told Reuters that some funding has been delayed or frozen as part of the administration’s broader spending cuts. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement that most grants from last year have been awarded, though he did not provide specific figures, and said the department is reviewing remaining applications to ensure they align with administration priorities.
Alan Smyth, executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Saving Innocence, said two federal grants totaling $700,000 were delayed for nearly a year. His organization survived the delay, but other groups told Reuters they have had to end programs or stop services entirely because of lost funding.
Federal prosecutors have historically used T-visas, which grant legal immigration status to trafficking victims, as an incentive for victims to cooperate with investigations. The administration approved 354 T-visas in the first six months of the current fiscal year, about half the typical pace over the past decade, according to Department of Homeland Security data. More than 71,000 T-visa applications remain pending.
Two former prosecutors said their U.S. attorney’s offices stopped supporting T-visa applications altogether. Serano said prosecutors and paralegals nationwide continue working with DHS to verify victims’ cooperation, though DHS makes the final decisions on visa applications.
Several immigration attorneys told Reuters that clients actively cooperating in sex-trafficking investigations have been detained by immigration authorities, halting criminal cases. In Michigan, a Chinese woman who had been trafficked in California was detained by ICE despite having a T-visa application pending since 2022, said her attorney, Laura Berger.
“If I can’t guarantee a victim won’t be locked up, how can I ethically tell them to cooperate with federal agents?” Berger said.
The erosion of trust, combined with the loss of staffing, funding and institutional expertise, could have lasting consequences, said Jean Bruggeman, co-executive director of the anti-trafficking organization Freedom Network USA.
“It’s hitting that tipping point where important pillars are starting to fall, which will bring down the entire anti-trafficking structure,” she said. “Rebuilding it could take years.”
