Continued from October 2026 blog
Agents pulled away, seasoned prosecutors now gone.
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.
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.
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 Homeland Security Investigations agents working them were reassigned to other priorities, including immigration raids. In other jurisdictions, people familiar with federal enforcement operations said supervisors were forced to bargain for the few remaining agents available for sex-trafficking probes.
When agents get reassigned, sometimes to new cities, it disrupts fragile relationships with sex-trafficking victims and witnesses, who often don’t have phones or stable housing. That means cases can fall apart, said one federal agent.
One trafficking survivor in New England saw her case languish after agents said they’d been diverted to immigration enforcement, according to a staffer at a local advocacy organization who had been working with the survivor.
Such reassignments send the message to victims that their cases and their safety are not a priority, said the advocate, who spoke on condition of anonymity to ensure confidentiality for the sex-trafficking survivor the advocate had been helping. The survivor was subsequently forced back into sex work but no longer wants to involve federal authorities, the advocate said.
Grants disappear, trust erodes.
As personnel have vanished, so has the financial safety net designed to keep victims stable enough to testify.
The Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs typically distributes roughly $90 million annually in grants to support trafficking victims. These funds flow to nonprofit organizations providing emergency housing, food and mental health counseling.
But grantees said some of these grants have been delayed or frozen in Trump’s efforts to cut federal spending. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement that most grants from last year have been awarded, without providing figures, and the department is reviewing the remaining applications to ensure they align with administration priorities.
Alan Smyth, the executive director of Los Angeles-based Saving Innocence, saw two federal grants totaling $700,000 delayed for nearly a year. While the organization survived, other groups told Reuters they have been forced to end some programs or stop providing services because of lost grants.
Historically, federal prosecutors have offered so-called T-visas, granting legal immigration status to trafficking victims as an incentive to cooperate with law enforcement.
The administration approved 354 T-visas in the first six months of the current fiscal year that ends in September – or about half the typical pace over the past decade, according to Department of Homeland Security data. More than 71,000 T visa applications are pending.
Two former prosecutors told Reuters their respective U.S. Attorney’s offices halted the practice of supporting T-visa applications. Serano said prosecutors and paralegals across the country still work with DHS to verify victims’ cooperation but that DHS ultimately decides on their visa applications.
Several immigration attorneys also said that clients actively cooperating on sex-trafficking probes had been detained by immigration authorities, halting criminal investigations. In Michigan last year, a Chinese woman who had been sex-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 asked.
The loss of that trust, as well as staffing, funding and expertise, could have long-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.”