--- title: "A Gift to Traffickers: Sex Trafficking Cases Hit 16-Year Low" url: https://wearenotforsale.org/human-trafficking/a-gift-to-traffickers-sex-trafficking-cases-hit-16-year-low/ author: "Mark Wexler" published: 2026-08-15 updated: 2026-09-02 topic: "Human Trafficking" publisher: "Not For Sale" --- # A Gift to Traffickers: Sex Trafficking Cases Hit 16-Year Low Corruption is what lets modern-day slavery function. This week the US deleted its corporate ownership records as trafficking prosecutions hit a 16-year low. By Mark Wexler · August 15, 2026 · Human Trafficking Nearly every successful trafficker I’ve observed needed the same thing to survive. I’m not talking about violence, secrecy, or even demand. It needed somebody in a position of authority to *look away*. Oftentimes that person was either explicitly paid off, in some cases something was being held over their head, or both. That is corruption. Corruption is a key ingredient to allowing modern-day slavery to thrive today. It is the thing that makes modern-day slavery a functioning illicit business instead of a crime that is shut down. I have watched up close the coercive powers of corruption. ## **Two places, same mechanism** Where Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos meet is where Not For Sale started. Our long-time Country Director, Kru Nam, was helping stateless kids out of begging rings and karaoke bars with no house to put them in, and Dave and I went to help her build her community. Twenty years later that same border runs one of the largest forced-labor economies on earth: industrial scam compounds holding tens of thousands of trafficked people, generating just under $40 billion a year by the UN’s estimate. They are not hidden. They’re in plain sight, visible from Thailand across the Mekong River, with electricity, internet, and armed security, in territory where none of that arrives by accident. You do not build something that size in secret. *You build it with permission.* The other place is eastern DRC, with Uganda and Rwanda alongside it. Ntakamaze Nziyonvira, who directs our work there, is Congolese himself. Nothing about the two regions is alike except the part that matters. Minerals come out of pits worked by people who cannot leave. Somebody signs a paper saying the load is clean. Somebody at the border does not open the truck. By the time it reaches a smelter it is legal, and by the time it reaches our economy it is invisible. *Different commodity, same machine: a payment, and a person who agreed not to look.* ## **So here is the thing about corruption** If you want to end trafficking, this is where the *leverage* is. Not because rescue does not matter, it does, and we do it. But there are hundreds of thousands of traffickers scattered across every country on earth and we will never arrest our way through them. What we can reach is the machinery: the registry that will not say who owns a company, the official who signs, the bank that does not ask, the refiner that does not check. There are far fewer of those. And unlike a trafficker in a border town, they have addresses, licenses, and regulators. *That is the fight. And it’s also what makes what happened this past week so damaging.* ## **Two documents, two days apart** **Tuesday, August 11.** The U.S. Treasury announces a final rule permanently killing the requirement that American companies say who actually owns them. And it goes further. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will delete the ownership records of U.S. persons already filed. *Just straight up delete these files. * The Secretary of the Treasury called it a victory for common sense and American small businesses. The rule took effect yesterday. **Thursday, August 13.** Reuters drops an investigation: federal sex-trafficking charges have fallen to their slowest pace since 2010. Seventy-three people charged through June. About 22 percent below the average of the last three years. Court records, plus 25 former prosecutors, current agents, and victims’ advocates on the record. One of those prosecutors said something I cannot stop thinking about. You can’t say something is a priority and then not fund it. ## **What Reuters found** Not my spin. It is from court records. The decline runs across related offenses: 1,230 charged with child pornography violations, 3 percent under the three-year average. 318 under the Mann Act, down 18 percent. Federal charges unrelated to immigration fell about 7 percent overall, to roughly 22,000. Reuters names four pressures behind it: personnel shortages, agents reassigned to immigration enforcement, disrupted grants for victim services, and survivors who are now afraid of the federal government. That last one makes my back straighten up. T-visas give trafficking survivors legal status as an incentive to cooperate with investigators. The administration approved 354 in six months. Roughly half the usual pace. More than 71,000 applications are sitting in the pile. *And survivors who were actively cooperating have been detained by immigration authorities. * Reuters quotes an immigration attorney asking how she can ethically tell a client to cooperate when she cannot promise they will not be locked up. Come on, what is even going on here? The administration pushes back on all of this. They say trafficking is still a priority, and that the drop may partly reflect prosecutors tied up on complex ongoing cases.They say they are hiring. They say attrition is normal in this work, because of what these cases do to the people who work them (which, for what it is worth, is true). The FBI says agents moved to immigration still carry these cases. Even if taken at face value it does not change the argument, because the argument does not run on anybody’s intent. ## **Two ways to build a case** Nearly 20 years in, here is what I know about how a trafficking case actually gets made. You build it on people, or you build it on money. Building it on people means a person sits in a courtroom and describes the worst thing that ever happened to themselves, in front of the person who did it. Sometimes more than once. Sometimes after years of abuse. Sometimes while their family back home is getting threatening phone calls. For that person to do that, they need housing, counseling, and a reason to believe the government is on their side. Every one of those things just got harder. That is what the frozen grants and the T-visa slowdown mean on the ground, to a real person. Building it on money is different. Bank records do not get scared. They do not recant. They do not vanish when a witness gets relocated. And money is the only thread that explains an entire illicit operation. ***Two paths. This week one got narrower and the other got closed.*** Because you cannot follow money through a company whose owner is legally unknown to you. That is not rhetorical. That is what a shell company is *for*. The Financial Action Task Force has been documenting the pattern for years: front companies mixing dirty money with clean early in the chain, then corruption, trade-based fraud, and offshore structures stacked on top to bury whoever is actually collecting. This list also describes the mine in the DRC or the slavery scam compound on the Mekong River. The ownership registry existed to put a name inside that box. As of yesterday, the names are being erased. ## **Now, the other side** The Justice Department shut down its kleptocracy task forces in February 2025, stating the reason was to move those resources toward the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations. I have zero quarrel with that goal. Cartels traffic people. Transnational criminal organizations traffic people. Go get them. But if you read the Department’s own memo, it says eliminating those networks will require dismantling the financing mechanisms and shell companies they use. *Their words.* Seventeen months later we deleted the file that says who owns the shell companies. ***Why announce a hunt and then burn the map?*** ## **Which brings it back to corruption** None of this is happening in a vacuum, and this is the part that actually worries me. Transparency International’s 2025 index, out in February, put the United States at 64 out of 100. Lowest score it has ever had. Twenty-ninth of 182 countries. Lowest rank it has ever had. Down twelve points in a decade. The global average hit a record low of 42, and more than two thirds of countries now score under 50. This is a worldwide retreat, and the United States is not the worst of it. But it is the country that spent fifty years pushing everyone else to do better, through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, through the Trafficking in Persons rankings, through the Financial Action Task Force. When the U.S. steps back, the effect does not stop at the border. **I have been in rooms on three continents this year where somebody said, more or less: *well, the Americans have stopped caring.*** Think about what that sentence is worth to the person who runs the compound. Or to the official at the crossing who decides whether to open the truck or look the other way. Look at what those people were gifted this week by the U.S. government: Fewer agents. Survivors fearful of the U.S. government, leading to less prosecutions. And literally deleting the data sets and tools needed to understand the flow of money that traffickers use to perpetrate their crimes. Every one of those changes lowers a trafficker’s cost of doing business. Corruption is a key underpinning to human trafficking. We just made it cheaper, and easier for criminals to enslave people here in the U.S. and around the world. ## **What I am asking for** Not a return to any administration’s policy. Six things that outlast whoever is in office. - **Transparency.** We should be able to find out who owns an American corporation. That was bipartisan law. - **The same standard for nonprofits.** In 2020 the IRS stopped requiring most tax-exempt groups outside of charities (trade associations, social welfare groups, think tanks) to name their large donors. Organizations should not be able to hide where its money comes from. - **Resourcing.** If trafficking is a priority, staff it, move the grants on time, and let the agents assigned to it stay assigned to it. - **Protection for survivors.** A cooperating witness in a trafficking case should not be at risk of detention. Every hour that stays true, cases die. - **Financial investigation.** A raid without a financial case is a temporary interruption in somebody’s quarterly earnings. - **Recovered assets.** They should be routed back to survivors**,** by statute, to fund housing, counseling, job placement and more. Five of those six existed previously. ## **Where you come in** I have watched this field survive four administrations. It survives because when the government’s financial support contracts, private citizens like you step up. Not For Sale works on both ends of this. We stand with survivors. Kru Nam is still there. Ntakamaze Nziyonvira is still there. [**Give**](https://wearenotforsale.org/donate/) , and fund survivor programs and the businesses that compete directly against traffickers, at a moment when other funding is disappearing. [**Speak**](https://wearenotforsale.org/speak/) , and connect these two stories for people who are only seeing one of them, because ownership transparency is currently being debated as a paperwork question by people who have never met a survivor. Or [**convene**](https://wearenotforsale.org/montara-circle/) , and put your company’s compliance, procurement, and finance people in a room with us, because that leverage is now one of the few that is still fully intact. Two documents, two days apart. Defunded on one page, deleted on the other. The people who traffic other people read the news too. They are not confused about what happened this week. Collectively, we can make things better for enslaved people, even when our government is choosing to do the opposite. *Mark Wexler is Co-Founder and CEO of Not For Sale. He writes about modern-day slavery, ecocide, and social innovation.* ## **Sources** - Reuters, “ [Trump promised a sex-trafficking crackdown. His Justice Department hasn’t delivered](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-promised-sex-trafficking-crackdown-his-justice-department-hasnt-delivered-2026-08-13/) ,” by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Brad Heath and Kristina Cooke, August 13, 2026 - US Department of the Treasury, “ [FinCEN Permanently Ends Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Millions of Small Business Owners](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0603) ,” August 11, 2026 - Federal Register, “ [Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirement Revision](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/14/2026-16576/beneficial-ownership-information-reporting-requirement-revision) ,” effective August 14, 2026 - Transparency International, [*Corruption Perceptions Index 2025*](https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025) , February 10, 2026 - International Labour Organization, *Profits and Poverty:* [*The Economics of Forced Labour*, 2024](https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/annual-profits-forced-labour-amount-us-236-billion-ilo-report-finds) - Financial Action Task Force / Asia-Pacific Group, [*Financial Flows from Human Trafficking*](https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/Methodsandtrends/Human-trafficking.html) , July 2018 - DOJ memorandum, “ Total Elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations ,” February 5, 2025