The State Department's flagship annual assessment of global human trafficking efforts has been drastically weakened, with the 2026 edition stripping out nearly 40% of its previous content and eliminating all of its roughly 2,000 prioritized recommendations across 188 countries. The move has alarmed anti-trafficking advocates, who say the report has lost its teeth just as the U.S. government's own anti-trafficking infrastructure is being dismantled.
Since 2000, the Trafficking in Persons Report has served as the U.S. government's primary diplomatic tool to pressure other nations into improving their responses to modern slavery. But this year's edition, released more than three months late, follows a wave of layoffs and early retirements that shrank the State Department's trafficking office to barely a quarter of its former size.
The report's prioritized recommendations had been its core engine—telling governments what to fix and providing a yardstick to measure progress. Without them, the report is a shell of itself, critics say. The 2026 version also cut coverage of extraterritorial child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse material, male sex trafficking victims, the LGBTQ community, non-governmental organizations, and—most shockingly—trafficking survivors themselves.
U.S. section slashed, key cases omitted
The report also evaluates U.S. efforts, but this year's U.S. section is roughly one-third the length of last year's. It no longer includes any recommendations—last year there were 14. The critical findings of NGOs and survivors are gone, and the Jeffrey Epstein case, which galvanized public opinion on child sex trafficking, is omitted entirely, including the virtually unanimous enactment of the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025 and the Justice Department's botched partial disclosure of trafficking evidence.
Instead, the first accomplishment the new report cites for the U.S. is “strengthened immigration enforcement at the border.” Numerous organizations, including Protect All Children from Trafficking, have underscored how mass-deportation efforts have put child trafficking survivors at risk.
Last year's U.S. narrative acknowledged anti-trafficking experts' concerns about trafficking victims facing deportation without being identified. It noted that the government had canceled the contract providing legal services to unaccompanied children and that processing times for T-visas—which offer trafficking victims a chance to stay temporarily in the U.S.—had grown to nearly 15 months. This year, those alarms have disappeared, along with statistics on T-visas and continued presence temporary designations, protections that encourage foreign-national trafficking victims to come forward.
Funding cuts ignored, enforcement celebrated
The report accurately notes that federal funding for victim services provided by NGOs fell from $82.3 million to $18.9 million, a 77% cut, and that funding for youth trafficking prevention education dropped by nearly a quarter. But it fails to describe the impact of those cuts on survivors' lives.
There is genuine progress worth recognizing: federal trafficking convictions rose from 210 to 293, and the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act became law, giving survivors a federal path to clear convictions for crimes they were forced to commit. But a report that celebrates enforcement while staying silent on collapsing victim services is not an honest assessment, advocates argue.
In February, Protect All Children from Trafficking submitted recommendations to the State Department for this year's U.S. narrative. They urged treating prevention education as a pillar, recognizing the transportation sector as a front line for prevention, addressing the vulnerability of boys (who are routinely undercounted), requiring real survivor leadership in designing prevention programs, and reckoning honestly with how immigration enforcement undermines victim identification.
Little of this made it into the report. On the bright side, prevention education earned a few sentences in a state-level sidebar focusing on Florida's HB 1237, which mandates human trafficking awareness training across the public school system. But boys got only one sentence, transportation workers appear only in a list of people who received training, and survivor involvement was reduced to the fact that an advisory council met. On immigration, the report did not merely ignore concerns—it perversely reframed harsh enforcement as a signature anti-trafficking achievement.
Next year, the State Department should ensure that the Trafficking in Persons Office's size and stature are restored so it can produce a candid and thorough report, including prioritized recommendations, and support those recommendations with robust diplomatic and foreign-assistance engagement. Congress has a role, too: through oversight hearings and the next reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, lawmakers can insist that the report remain the rigorous, evidence-based assessment they intended. The stakes are too high for the report to become a political document that hides the truth about trafficking—both at home and abroad.
