Federal sex-trafficking prosecutions have fallen sharply under President Donald Trump despite his administration's pledge to make combating trafficking a major law-enforcement priority, with Justice Department charges dropping to their lowest pace in more than 15 years, according to a Reuters review of federal court records.
The Justice Department charged 73 defendants with sex-trafficking offenses during the first six months of 2026, Reuters found. That was about 22% below the average for the same period over the previous three years and represented the slowest pace of federal sex-trafficking charges since 2010.
Reuters based its analysis on two decades of publicly filed federal criminal cases obtained through Westlaw, the Thomson Reuters legal-research service. The news organization said it used artificial intelligence in some instances to classify charges and found the methodology was about 98% accurate when tested against a random sample.
The decline is broader than sex-trafficking prosecutions, though the drop in trafficking cases was considerably steeper. Through June, federal prosecutors charged about 22,000 defendants with nonimmigration crimes ranging from drug trafficking to tax evasion, a decline of roughly 7% from the three-year average.
Child-pornography prosecutions also slipped. The Justice Department charged 1,230 defendants with those offenses through June, down about 3% compared with the average for the corresponding six-month periods during the previous three years.
Reuters interviewed 25 current federal agents, former prosecutors and victims' advocates who pointed to several factors behind the trafficking decline, including personnel departures, funding reductions, delayed grants and the reassignment of federal resources toward the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
Some of those pressures, the sources said, have reduced agencies' ability to open new trafficking investigations even as prosecutors continue handling complicated cases already in the federal court system.
"You can't say something is a priority and then not provide the resources to make that happen," Jacqueline Kelly, a former federal prosecutor in New York, told Reuters.
Kelly led the federal prosecution of Sean "Diddy" Combs, who was convicted last year on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. Combs was acquitted of more serious sex-trafficking and racketeering-conspiracy charges, illustrating the difficulty and resources involved in bringing complex federal cases centered on alleged sexual exploitation.
The decline didn't begin with Trump. Reuters found that federal sex-trafficking prosecutions had already been trending downward for much of the past decade, in part because prosecutors increasingly focused on larger and more complicated investigations rather than pursuing greater numbers of smaller cases.
What has changed, according to people interviewed by Reuters, is the intensity of the pressure on federal resources. Experienced agents and prosecutors have left government service, while personnel and investigative capacity have increasingly been directed toward immigration enforcement.
Victims' advocates also identified another obstacle: fear of federal immigration authorities among trafficking victims without legal status. Cooperation from victims is often critical to building trafficking prosecutions, and advocates said some are increasingly reluctant to approach federal authorities amid the administration's immigration crackdown.
The backlog for T visas underscores the problem. More than 71,000 applications were pending for the visas, which can provide immigration protections to certain victims of human trafficking who meet eligibility requirements.
The Justice Department disputed Reuters' characterization of the decline, saying its own figures showed a smaller decrease. The department, however, didn't provide detailed case numbers explaining the difference or describe how it calculated its total, and Reuters said it couldn't reproduce the government's result using a public version of the same database.
Officials have also suggested that prosecutors may be spending substantial time litigating existing cases, reducing their capacity to file new ones. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Katherine Currie declined to address Reuters' findings specifically but said DHS remained committed to both immigration enforcement and combating sex crimes, including dismantling human-trafficking organizations.
