Human Trafficking

Attorney General Garland Announces Justice Department Strategy to Combat Human Trafficking

Human Trafficking is a crime involving the exploitation of a person for labor, services, or commercial sex.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and its subsequent reauthorizations recognize and define two primary forms of human trafficking:

• Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age. (22 U.S.C. § 7102(11)(A)).
• Forced labor is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. (22 U.S.C. § 7102(11)(B)).

Additional legal definitions are contained in 18 U.S.C. Chapter 77 (criminal definitions) and 19 U.S.C. § 1307 (includes definition of “forced labor” for purposes of implementing the federal prohibition on importation of goods produced with forced labor).

SAN DIEGO – Clifford Stokes Jr. of Tempe, Arizona, was sentenced in federal court today to 10 years in prison for transporting a 19-year-old woman and two 16-year-old.

SAN DIEGO – Marcus Ray Chavez of Bonita pleaded guilty in federal court today, admitting that he provided fentanyl pills to a 15-year-old girl in exchange for sex.

DES MOINES, Iowa – An Ottumwa man was sentenced on September 6, 2024, to 40 years in federal prison for sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion of.

A U.S. District Judge sentenced Xavier Latrell Smith, 34, to 360 months’ imprisonment and his co-defendant Jayla Denice Welch, 22, to 170 months’ imprisonment, for sex trafficking a.

Federal and local law enforcement officials today announced a significant collaborative effort aimed at combatting human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of minors on the Figueroa Corridor in.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Terrael A. Alls, 29, of Columbus, was sentenced in federal court here today to 300 months in prison for sex trafficking and use of a.