I would like to express my sincere appreciation for the Surface Transportation Board's (STB or Board) efforts over the past year.

So I cannot tell you how concerned I am about how many of those people, particularly the women and children, are enslaved today.

As Representative Smith indicated, there is this statistic that is either 80 or 85 percent of victims of human trafficking have contact with the medical field, in urgent care and in ER and in other locations.

In the coming days I plan on reintroducing the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Act which has been significantly informed by survivor input and includes a survivor empowerment approach to victim services.

Judge Lung, thank you for that excellent testimony. Your experience absolutely encourages all of us to do far more than we have done.

When the Republicans do not do it right, you know, we got to speak out. When the Democrats do not do it right, we need to speak out.

I say this as an invitation to anyone who has any information about anything relative to trafficking to let the TIP office know.

More than 20 years ago Congress approved and the President signed historic legislation that I authored known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

We must get the report right. No fudging, no favors to nations based on other agendas.

He did an unbelievably good job and then teed it up to the President of the United States, George W. Bush, and asked him to do an executive order that would make it very clear that complicity of any kind of trafficking is an actionable…

This is all about speaking truth to power in an absolutely honest way to the best of all of our abilities.

I am happy to say that all of this has been bipartisan.

We know that these child sex tourism trips are occurring.

Critics argue that the State Department should be capturing more through passport applications.

And so we have a bill that we are dropping next week.

Friends do not let friends commit human rights abuses. If our best friends in the world are doing it, we hold them to account.

But if we do not implement them, then we have just been sitting her wasting our time and words, right?

Forced labor is a huge issue.