What the plan covers
By the numbers
Where she starts
This was my work for more than twenty years, and it taught me the thing most people get wrong about this crime: it is a business. Forced labor and trafficking pull in an estimated 236 billion dollars a year worldwide, off the backs of nearly 28 million people. It is not only something that happens overseas or in a movie. It happens on our own interstates, in fields and hotels and homes, and to our own neighbors, and Native women in Montana pay a price far beyond their share. I have sat with survivors, and I have followed the money that traffickers were sure no one would trace. I know how you stop this, and it starts with treating it like the business it is.
Call it what it is
Trafficking hides behind our assumptions about it. We picture a kidnapping in some far-off place, and we miss what’s right in front of us. Most of it is labor: people trapped in work they can’t walk away from, in agriculture, construction, cleaning, care work, and domestic service. Sex trafficking is part of this, and it is every bit as horrific as you think, but if we only look there we miss most of the victims. It falls hardest on Native women, and it runs through the same gaps as the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis: jurisdiction, distance, and a system that looked away too long. You cannot fight a crime you refuse to see clearly, and the first step is honesty about who this happens to, and where.
Follow the money
If you want to stop trafficking, go after the profit. That is not a slogan for me; it is how I did the job. You can lie about a lot of things, but you cannot argue with the money, and the financial-crimes angle, the bank records, the shell companies, the laundering, was the single most effective way I found to take down the people who traffic and abuse, because it is the part they cannot fake.
Protect the survivor, don't punish them
A trafficking victim is not a criminal, and treating them like one is how we lose the case and the person both. The T visa was built so a survivor can come forward and not be deported for the crime done to them, and the tell is that we’ve never once hit its cap, because the problem was never too many victims asking for help. It’s that the applications now sit in a backlog of nearly sixty thousand, with survivors waiting years. A protection that shows up three years late is not much of a protection.
End the slavery in what we buy
Modern slavery isn’t only on a street corner. Sometimes it’s stitched into the things on our shelves. We’ve had a law on the books since 1930 that says goods made with forced labor aren’t allowed into this country, and for most of a century we barely enforced it. That has finally started to change, with real bipartisan agreement behind it. Doing the right thing and standing up for honest producers are the same thing here: a Montana rancher or manufacturer who plays by the rules shouldn’t be undercut by an overseas operation running on forced labor.
Go after the demand and the platforms
Trafficking exists because someone is buying. For too long we’ve come down hard on the person being sold and looked right past the person doing the buying. Someone who purchases sex from a trafficking victim or a child isn’t a customer, they’re the reason the market exists, and I’d aim enforcement squarely at that demand. And the market runs online now. Victims get recruited on the same apps our kids use and advertised on platforms that look away because looking away is profitable. We tried to hold those platforms accountable once and mostly missed, so this time we write a law that actually reaches the sites that knowingly host it, aimed hard at the recruitment and sale of children.
Reauthorize the anchor law
None of this holds without the law behind it. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act is the backbone of how this country fights this crime, and Congress let its full reauthorization lapse and keeps letting it stall. That’s a choice, and it’s the wrong one. I’ve seen the worst of this up close, and I’m not going to the Senate to be quiet about it.
Sources: International Labour Organization, “Profits and Poverty” (2024); Walk Free, Global Slavery Index (2023); Montana Department of Justice and Daily Montanan (Montana cases and the Missing Indigenous Persons Task Force); USCIS, Congressional Research Service, and the State Department (the T visa cap and backlog); DHS / CBP and congress.gov (Tariff Act §307 and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act); GAO and congress.gov (the 2018 FOSTA-SESTA platform law and its limits); congress.gov and Shared Hope International (the Trafficking Victims Protection Act). Bills are named as introduced; status shifts each Congress.