96 Percent of People Charged With Human Trafficking Are U.S. Citizens
Just 26 undocumented immigrants faced federal trafficking charges in 2023.
The vast majority of people charged with human trafficking in this country are U.S. citizens, according to the Department of Justice. In 2023, U.S. citizens accounted for 96 percent of people charged with a federal human trafficking offense. Additionally, 1.7 percent of those charged were non-citizens who were in the country legally.
Just 2.3 percent—26 people—were undocumented immigrants.
This runs somewhat counter to Trump administration narratives about undocumented immigrants. It routinely suggests that they're a major source of human trafficking and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been rounding up hordes of human traffickers in its deportation stings.
Most of the people charged with federal human trafficking offenses in 2023—92 percent—were men and 63 percent were white. Seventeen percent were black and 16 percent were Hispanic.
This data comes from a new report, "Human Trafficking Data Collection Activities, 2025," on arrests, prosecutions, and convictions for human trafficking offenses. It comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which is required to compile this information annually.
BJS defines human trafficking offenses broadly—though the category does not, as many imagine, include smuggling people across U.S. borders. It includes "peonage, slavery, forced labor, and sex trafficking," along with "sexual exploitation and other abuse of children" and "transportation for illegal sexual activity and related crimes."
The category with the fewest number of charges was peonage, slavery, forced labor, and sex trafficking, with 180 people charged across all four offenses. Just six of these people were undocumented.
Lest anyone think that this is just a matter of the Biden administration being soft on migrant crime, we can look to a previous BJS report and see similar statistics from President Donald Trump's first term. "Of the 1,169 defendants charged with any…human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2020," 94.6 percent were U.S. citizens and just 3.2 percent were undocumented immigrants, according to a BJS data collection report from 2022.
In the latest report, BJS admits that it has essentially no idea about the overall prevalence of human trafficking here. "BJS's current collections are unable to produce estimates for the prevalence of human trafficking in the United States," the report states. The best it can offer up is statistics based on various crime reporting databases.
Unsurprisingly, the most recent data show increases in referrals for prosecution, prosecutions, and convictions as attention around human trafficking skyrocketed in the 2010s.
"A total of 2,329 persons were referred to U.S. attorneys for human trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2023, a 23% increase from 1,893 in 2013," the latest report states. "The number of persons prosecuted for human trafficking increased by 73% from 2013 to 2023 (from 1,030 to 1,782)." And 1,008 people were convicted in human trafficking cases in 2023.
