The Trump administration has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking, according to a series of investigations in The Guardian, produced with support from Type Investigations, Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley Journalism.

The government’s sweeping retreat threatens to negate decades of progress in the drive to prevent sexual slavery, forced labor and child sexual exploitation, according to legal experts, former government officials and anti-trafficking advocates. They say the administration’s moves are impeding efforts to prosecute perpetrators and protect survivors in the United States and around the world.

“It’s been a widespread and multi-pronged attack on survivors that leaves all of us less safe and leaves survivors with few options,” said Jean Bruggeman, executive director of Freedom Network USA, a national coalition of service providers, researchers and trafficking survivors.

More than a million Americans and nearly 30 million people around the world are survivors of human trafficking. The National Human Trafficking Hotline received reports on 21,865 victims in the United States in 2024 alone. Even amid the ongoing revelations involving deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, however, the Trump administration cut back key initiatives for fighting human trafficking at the Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Senior officials and other staffers were forced out, workers were shifted to other priorities, and grants were delayed or cancelled.

At DHS, Trump ordered agents formerly dedicated to investigating and arresting human traffickers to focus on deporting immigrants, the investigation found. At the State Department, the Trump administration slashed more than 70% of the anti-trafficking office’s workforce and withheld a congressionally mandated report that documents the scale of human trafficking in 185 countries. At the Justice Department, the administration failed to distribute nearly $90 million appropriated to the Office for Victims of Crime, forcing cutbacks at more than 100 organizations that support human trafficking survivors.

The series of articles produced immediate impact following their publication:

In September, the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed an amendment to the State Department’s budget requiring additional congressional oversight of the government’s efforts to combat human trafficking in the United States and around the world. “This is a bipartisan instance of accountability over the administration that we see far too rarely in this Congress,” the measure’s sponsor, Representative Sarah McBride, said.

Two weeks later, on September 30, the State Department finally released the Trafficking in Persons report it had withheld from Congress. The report, which details conditions in the United States and more than 185 countries, was initially scheduled for release at an event in June featuring Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but the event was cancelled at the last minute.

On December 18, Senator John Ossoff announced he was launching an inquiry into reports that the Trump administration had “rolled back child protection programs,” citing the team’s reporting. “My concerns have grown in light of recent reports of additional staffing and program cuts at FBI and other agencies across the federal government,” he wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other cabinet-level officials.

Finally, the revelation that the Trump administration had failed to spend nearly $90 million in congressionally mandated human trafficking funds elicited outrage from three U.S. senators, who accused the Trump administration of “disregarding” the legislative body and “illegally” withholding funds, while putting survivors at risk of homelessness, jail time or re-exploitation. 

One week after publishing our findings, the Department of Justice began the public process of making the funds available.