Introduction
Many people have made a comparison between Donald Trump and Barack Obama, in terms of human trafficking arrests. The most common claim is that Donald Trump is arresting unprecedented numbers of traffickers... some claiming more than all other presidents combined.
Several charts are circulated in support of this claim. Here is one version:
This claim is not true, in fact, the data shows that yearly trafficking arrests have declined since Donald Trump began his presidency.
In this article I will provide the official data, discuss the problems with the most commonly cited articles/graphs, and explain some of the details of the trafficking/pedophile statistics.
I'm writing this not to diminish the achievements of Donald Trump, but to correct the false claims being made, and to explain the statistics. In my opinion, they have both made good progress in the fight against trafficking.
Human Trafficking Statistics
Federal trafficking stats:
There are three main agencies that deal with trafficking on the Federal level: DOJ, DHS (ICE), and FBI. These two charts show the human trafficking arrest and conviction totals reported by each agency, from 2016 - 2018. Sources below.
There are two primary publications that report trafficking stats each year... the DOJ Attorney General's Trafficking In Persons report, and the DOS Trafficking In Persons report.
To source the data used in the charts above, I've linked to each year's AG TIP report, along with the page numbers where each agency's data is listed.
(The 2018 AG TIP report is not out at this time, but the numbers have been disclosed in other press releases.)
State/local trafficking stats:
At the state/local level, the government monitors trafficking arrests through the FBI UCR program. However, it should be noted that not all states report criminal activity to the UCR program... it's currently at about 78% participation. Because of this, the report adds the caveat that it shouldn't be used to represent trafficking as a whole.
That being said, the number of state/local trafficking arrests reported to the UCR program was 654 for 2016, and 545 for 2017. The 2018 report has not been released at this time.
UPDATE:
The 2018 UCR report has now been released, reporting 548 trafficking arrests in 2018.
This is pretty much the entirety of the currently available (January 2020) trafficking arrest/conviction statistics, both at the federal and state level. The difference between the administrations is not massive, but the data does show that Obama had higher rates of human trafficking arrests and convictions.
Clarification On Federal Trafficking Prosecutions
Recently a report came out stating that federal prosecutions for trafficking have declined under Trump, and it included this chart:
This chart only represents the federal prosecutions of a single trafficking statute... the one used in the case of Jefferey Epstein (18 USC 1591). So in case anyone was wondering why the number of cases here differs from the numbers reported by the agencies above, this is why.
Both sets of data have declined, but this chart only deals with DOJ prosecutions of that single statute.
Here is a list of the additional federal statutes related to human trafficking, provided by The Trafficking Institute:
Since 2016, The Trafficking Institute has monitored DOJ prosecutions for all cases involving those statutes listed above, and they publish their results in an annual report.
These are the amounts of criminal cases initiated, and defendants convicted, since 2016:
Again, these numbers are only the cases handled by the DOJ... they do not include the state/local prosecutions reported by ICE/FBI, which are included in the numbers referenced at the beginning of this article.
Predator Statistics (pedophiles/child porn/etc.)
Separate from trafficking are the rest of the sex offense crimes, and here the data becomes much more difficult to analyze, due to procedural and terminology variances between agencies, conflation with prostitution charges, and lack of consistent published data.
Federal sex offense statistics:
One metric that can be easily analyzed and compared, are the sex offense prosecutions carried out by the DOJ.
Here again we see that prosecutions have declined since 2016, and that there are currently no records being set, in any category.
State/local predator statistics:
Beyond the DOJ sex offense prosecutions, it's very difficult to accurately compare predator statistics.
Several operations are performed every year by federal/state/local agencies, often working together. I'm not aware of any databases that consistently track state/local predator statistics, and it's difficult to find historical records of even the largest and well-known operations.
Below I've linked the arrest numbers from a few of the more well known operations/efforts. This is not a complete list, or really even meant to be a comparison... it's just a broad overview. If there are no stats listed for certain years, it's because that data was not able to be located.
Note that many of these arrests are run of the mill prostitution arrests, and it's possible that some of the numbers overlap with each other.
Operation Broken Heart:
Coordinated investigation between the DOJ, and federal/state/local agencies, to arrest online child sex offenders.
Operation Cross Country:
Annual FBI operation, with the goal of recovering underage victims of prostitution.
Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC):
Network of task forces that assist federal/state/local agencies in combating child abuse and exploitation over the internet.
(Operation Broken Heart is associated with ICAC, and those numbers may be included in these totals.)
Operation Predator:
HSI's international initiative to protect children from sexual predators.
Operation Reclaim and Rebuild:
Focuses on rescuing victims of sexual slavery and human trafficking. Started out as a Los Angeles county operation, and expanded to the entire state of CA in 2017.
Violent Crimes Against Children (VCAC):
FBI program that provides a rapid investigative response to federal crimes involving the victimization of children.
Conflation Of Prostitution and Trafficking Arrests
Briefly, I wanted to touch on the association of prostitution and trafficking. Nearly every time you see a headline that says 'X number of people arrested in trafficking sting', the truth is that only a tiny percentage are traffickers, if any.
Some people believe agencies use the term 'trafficking' to qualify for special funding programs, others believe it is just a clickbait strategy to attract attention. While an argument can be made that trafficking and prostitution are related, many people strongly disagree with such a liberal use of the term.
Here are a few examples... I've put the exact headline for each article in bold (which links to the article), with the arrest details below:
- 260 prostitutes/johns, 17 other, 0 trafficking listed
- 1 trafficking arrest listed
- 144 prostitutes/johns, 8 pimps, 2 traveling to meet minor, 0 trafficking listed
- 1 trafficking arrest listed
This is just something to keep in mind, when you see articles talking about large trafficking stings, or even trafficking statistics in general. Often prostitution arrests are included in the mix, and most of the false comparisons I discuss in the next section involve comparing prostitution arrests to trafficking arrests.
Article/Chart Debunks
There are several articles/charts that have fueled the false claim about Donald Trump setting records with trafficking arrests, and they all revolve around making false comparisons with the data. Here are a few of the most commonly cited:
Townhall & The Daily Wire - Liz Crokin
The most popular, and probably the first, is this piece written by Liz Crokin, in February 2017. It was written for Townhall.com and was the source for several other articles, the most popular of those being an article for The Daily Wire.
In it, she compares 1500 Trump arrests to 400 Obama arrests. The problem here is that the 1500 is a random selection of mostly prostitution arrests from 2017, while the 400 is from the state/local UCR trafficking report from 2014. Also, the 1500 is only partially sourced.
This is obviously not a proper comparison, and as I pointed out earlier, the UCR report even says it shouldn't be used to represent trafficking.
The Political Insider - Matt Palumbo
In this article, the author cites one of the false comparison charts, where the ICE report is used for the Obama years, and the Trump years are unsourced:
He also says this:
This isn't true... we can see from the data provided at the beginning of this article that the human trafficking arrests exceeded 2000 in 2016.
An interesting tidbit here, is that the author of this article has a new book about to come out, titled "Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies"... with a forward by Dan Bongino.
I contacted Palumbo on Twitter (@MattPalumbo12) about the issues with his article, and asked if he would correct or retract, since it gets cited constantly. He blocked me without a response.
World Net Daily - PhD Judith Reismann
In this article, Dr. Reismann falsely compares Obama's ICE numbers to unsourced Trump numbers. She also incorrectly claims that Trump made a 743% increase over Obama's first two years, and arrested as many in 18 months as Obama did in 8 years:
Zerohedge - William Craddick
Another false comparison. In this article, Craddick compares 400 trafficking arrests from the 2014 UCR report (same one that is used in Liz C's article), to ~800 arrests from 2017, that were mostly for prostitution.
Charts
All of the charts used to support this claim are making the same false comparison with the data... the Obama years are only from ICE, while the Trump years are unsourced.
These are the most commonly circulated charts:
(There are links for the Trump numbers on the last two charts, but neither link works. Even if they were working, it wouldn't be a valid comparison, because the Obama years are only from ICE.)
Reports Of Trafficking
It's difficult to accurately measure the number of victims of human trafficking, or the rate at which it is occurring. There are many unknown factors at play, and a lower number of reports in the past could mean that the problem was less pervasive, or it could just mean that monitoring efforts weren't able to get a true count at the time.
With that in mind, the National Trafficking Hotline shows that reports of trafficking have increased over the past few years, with 2018 on track to set a record:
Again, this information doesn't necessarily correlate to arrests or a lack of effort, but it indicates the situation is not improving, and is worth mentioning.
Global Trafficking Statistics
The DOS Trafficking In Persons report attempts to take a global tally of the efforts being made to combat trafficking each year. Their most recent report also shows that no prosecution or conviction records have been set under Trump.
(Note that these numbers are only estimates.)
Rebuttals
Here are a few of the more common rebuttals that are sometimes made, when the initial claim is debunked.
High Profile arrests:
One rebuttal is that even if arrests were higher under Obama, high profile arrests are taking place under Trump. It's true that there have been some high profile arrests made under Trump (NXIVM, Epstein, Backpage), but big player busts happened under Obama as well.
Here are some of the more notable busts that happened during Obama's administration:
Executive Orders / Legislation:
Often people will point to the two anti-trafficking executive orders Trump has signed, as proof that Trump is taking more legislative action than previous presidents. Obama also signed an executive order against trafficking, and oversaw many pieces of anti-trafficking legislation.
Here are the anti-trafficking EO's signed by each president:
Trump:
Obama:
Here are a few of the many pieces of anti-trafficking legislation passed by each president:
Additional anti-trafficking laws, along with details of each, can be found by searching the database at Congress.gov.
In terms of numbers, Trump has signed an additional executive order, and may end up overseeing a larger amount of legislation by the end of his term, but the important point here is that Obama employed similar legislative actions to combat trafficking.
Proclamations:
The White House has released several statements regarding trafficking, and many point to those statements as proof that no other president has made trafficking such a high priority. That claim isn't accurate... these proclamations are a White House tradition, released every year, usually around January, to coincide with National Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
In fact, Barack Obama is the president that established January as National Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
Comparisons to Obama's first two years:
Finally, some people will compare the first two years of Obama's term to Trump's first two years, pointing out that Trump arrested more in that comparison. This isn't really an appropriate comparison, however, as trafficking efforts/awareness has only recently become a priority. The landscape in 2009 was much different than it was in 2017.
Unlike issues such as homicide or theft, which have been studied/fought for many decades, the fight against human trafficking is a relatively new endeavor. While the fight didn't start with Obama, I think it's safe to say that efforts ramped up considerably under his administration, and will likely continue to improve under Trump.
Here are just a few of the additional achievements Obama oversaw during his time in office
Conclusion
In regards to the the specific claim that Trump is setting unprecedented records with human trafficking/predator arrests, the data is clear... not only is Trump not setting 'unprecedented' records, he basically isn't setting records at all.
That being said, there is more to the fight than just arrests. Yes the rate of arrests and convictions has declined under Trump, but Trump may end up passing more legislation by the end of his term.
In other words, based solely on an objective review of the data I just discussed, and without speculating about other things, I feel that they have both made good progress in the fight, and each deserve credit where it's due.
Like everyone else, I hope the efforts continue to increase, so that all who are guilty are held accountable, and that we do our best to rid the world of this despicable behavior.
These statistics can be quite confusing, even without all of the false information that is circulating... I hope this article has helped make a bit more sense of it all.
Feel free to leave a message here, at wmerthon@mail.com, or on twitter @wmerthon, with any feedback or corrections.
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