The Trump administration has repeatedly named the fight against sex trafficking as one of its top priorities, but federal prosecutions of the crime have fallen sharply during the first half of 2026.
The Justice Department charged 73 people with sex-trafficking offences through June, about 22% fewer than the average number charged during the first half of the previous three years, according to a Reuters review of federal court records.
The decline, which put the pace of federal sex-trafficking charges at its lowest level since 2010, is the central finding of an investigation Reuters based on court dockets and interviews with 25 former prosecutors, current federal agents and victims' advocates.
Those sources attributed the slowdown to staffing shortages, funding cuts, the diversion of resources to immigration enforcement and a growing reluctance among victims to come forward.
The Numbers Behind the Decline
To measure enforcement, Reuters obtained records for publicly filed federal criminal cases spanning two decades from Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters legal research service, and in some instances used artificial intelligence to help classify the charges, a method it said was about 98% accurate when tested against a random sample.
The resulting analysis found that the 73 sex-trafficking defendants charged through June represented a 22% fall from the recent three-year average for the same six-month period.
Related categories showed declines as well. The department charged 1,230 people with child-pornography offences through June, down 3% compared with the average for the same period during the previous three years, while prosecutions for crimes unrelated to immigration, spanning everything from tax evasion to drug trafficking, fell 7% to roughly 22,000 over the same period.
The sex-trafficking figures sit within a longer pattern that predates the current administration. Reuters found that federal cases of this kind have been declining for much of the past decade, a trend sources attributed partly to prosecutors increasingly pursuing complex, time-consuming cases against major offenders rather than a larger volume of smaller ones.
What Reuters' sources describe as new under Trump is an acceleration of that decline driven by specific choices about where the department puts its people and money.
What Former Prosecutors and Advocates Describe
The people interviewed traced the slowdown to concrete pressures rather than any single decision. They cited the departure of experienced agents and prosecutors, cuts and delays affecting grants for organisations that support trafficking victims, and the reassignment of investigative resources towards the administration's immigration priorities, which they said pulled attention away from opening new trafficking cases.
Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in New York who led the case against the musician Sean 'Diddy' Combs, put the criticism directly. 'You can't say something is a priority and then not provide the resources to make that happen,' she said.
Combs was convicted last year on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution after being acquitted of sex-trafficking and racketeering-conspiracy charges, in a case that illustrates the scale and complexity of some federal prosecutions involving alleged sexual exploitation.
Victims' advocates pointed to a further problem that does not show up directly in charging data: a growing distrust of the federal government among the people on whose cooperation trafficking cases depend.
As immigration enforcement has intensified, some victims, particularly those without legal status, have become less willing to approach authorities, making the cases that remain harder to build. Reuters also reported that more than 71,000 applications for T visas, which can provide immigration protection to certain trafficking victims, were pending.
The Justice Department's Rebuttal
The department rejected the picture the review paints. It said its own data showed a smaller decrease than Reuters reported, but declined to explain how it had reached that figure or to provide case numbers matching the prosecutions it counted. Reuters said it could not replicate the department's results using a public version of the same database.
A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, Katherine Currie, declined to comment specifically on the review but said the department was committed to both immigration and sex-crimes enforcement, citing the administration's commitment to dismantling human-trafficking networks.
Officials have also suggested the drop may partly reflect prosecutors being tied up litigating a large number of existing cases, which would leave less time to bring new ones.
The findings came days after the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general by a vote of 50-49, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining Democrats in opposition.
Blanche's confirmation had drawn concerns over his independence from Trump, including scrutiny surrounding his handling of records related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while serving as acting attorney general.
Those controversies are separate from Reuters' findings on declining sex-trafficking prosecutions, and the investigation does not establish that Blanche's handling of Epstein-related matters caused the drop. However, his confirmation places him at the head of a Justice Department now facing questions over whether its resources match the administration's stated commitment to combating sex trafficking.
