US justice department halts funding for human-trafficking survivors

More than 100 organizations that support victims of human trafficking have lost funding since October, leaving thousands of survivors at risk, a Guardian investigation has found.

Anti-trafficking advocates say the US Department of Justice’s failure to spend nearly $90m appropriated by Congress is impeding law-enforcement investigations and exposing survivors to homelessness and the risk of deportation, jail time or re-exploitation.

This is the latest in a series of Guardian investigative reports, which in September revealed that the Trump administration had rolled back efforts to combat human trafficking across the federal government. That retreat has far-reaching implications beyond those related to the release of the investigative files related to the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“It’s extremely irresponsible, and maybe even immoral,” said Kristina Rose, who ran the justice department’s office for victims of crime under Joe Biden and served as its deputy director during the first Trump administration.

A justice department spokesperson told the Guardian: “The justice department can remain focused on two critical priorities at the same time: support victims of human trafficking and prosecute criminals who exploit children, and ensure the efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

The Guardian’s report struck a chord on Capitol Hill, where three US senators expressed outrage. Richard Durbin of Illinois said it fit a pattern by the Trump administration of “disregarding congressionally appropriated funds intended to target the most heinous crimes and national security threats–including human trafficking”.

“The Trump administration must be held accountable,” Ben Ray Luján, a Democratic senator from New Mexico, said. “Funding for these essential services must be fully restored immediately.”

Gary Peters of Michigan, who sits on a Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds the justice department, said the Trump administration was “illegally” withholding resources approved by lawmakers.

Jordann Hare would be “in prison, dead or strung out close to being dead,” she says, if it hadn’t been for the services she received from the Life Link.

Before she was found in an Albuquerque, New Mexico, hotel raid in 2013, Hare had lived through three years of terror – repeated assaults, and threats to kill her family. Her trafficker even introduced her to heroin in order to control her, she said.

The Life Link stepped in to provide Hare with everything from fully subsidized housing to legal advocacy, much of that support funded by US Department of Justice grants..

But on 30 September, the organization’s two grants, totaling $1.75m, ran out. Before that, the Life Link’s human-trafficking outreach and aftercare director, Lynn Sanchez, said she was able to provide intensive support to 40 to 50 survivors a year, offering a full complement of services and up to two years of housing. Now she estimates she can only keep 20 to 30 survivors housed for up to six months. Her team has shrunk from 11 staff members to only five. Of the six employees she had to lay off or support in finding jobs elsewhere, four were survivors of human trafficking, including Hare, who had gone through a state program to become a certified peer support worker.

Other organizations losing funding designated for human-trafficking survivors include Street Grace, a national non-profit that protects children from sexual exploitation; the YWCA in Kalamazoo, Michigan; and the Reformed Church of Highland Park Affordable Housing Corporation, New Jersey, which used federal funds to offer emergency housing to survivors seeking to escape.

Caseworkers at the Reformed Church’s anti-trafficking program said they have had to turn away dozens of trafficking survivors since its federal funding expired in September. Other clients have faced eviction and some – including a single mother with four children and a grandchild – clients with children are back in homeless shelters, – which makes them vulnerable to being trafficked again.

The Rev Seth Kaper-Dale, co-pastor of the Reformed Church, said his program has had to turn away dozens of trafficking survivors since its federal funding expired in September. Other clients have faced eviction and some clients with children are back in homeless shelters – which makes them vulnerable to being trafficked again.

“If we have concerns about people being trafficked, we need to give lavish support to prevent people from being double- or triple-trafficked,” said the Rev Seth Kaper-Dale, co-pastor of the Reformed Church and CEO of its affordable housing corporation. “We are setting people up for a really disastrous time.”

Current and former staff members at the justice department’s office for victims of crime told the Guardian that over the summer they had completed the bureaucratic steps necessary to make the funding available. But three months into the new fiscal year, funds still have not been allocated.

“I can’t remember a time when appropriated human-trafficking funding took this long to award,” said Rose, the former director. “It just doesn’t make any sense, because the money is there.”

The justice department told the Guardian that it would begin the public process of making the money available in the next few weeks. The department’s statement was identical to one provided to the Guardian in September, when last year’s grants were about to expire.

In October, 74 legal, religious and advocacy groups sent a letter to Congress warning of disastrous consequences from their defunding. “Many regions will lose their only service provider, leaving survivors with no safe emergency housing, case management or counseling,” they wrote.

Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, told the Guardian the Trump administration’s failure to release the funds fits a pattern of diverting “important resources from combating crimes”. Instead, the administration was using “that money for their single-minded immigration enforcement agenda, which has included arresting immigrant survivors attempting to report crimes to the police”.

For Hare, who is now pursuing an associate degree in human services at Santa Fe Community College, the Trump administration’s failure to spend the money represents “an abuse of power that mirrors what traffickers do”, putting survivors in a position where they have “nowhere to turn for help”.

“For some of these survivors, the only support they have is these non-profits,” she said. “You’re getting the same response from the government as you are from the person who exploited you: ‘You don’t matter, we don’t care about you.’”