Sheila Jackson Lee: “I thank Congresswoman Wagner for her continuing leadership. It has been a pleasure to work with her over the years in…”

“I thank Congresswoman Wagner for her continuing leadership. It has been a pleasure to work with her over the years in the House Committee on the Judiciary on the question of human trafficking and sex trafficking. I am delighted to join this amendment, along with Congresswoman Maloney from New York. We have a long history of working on the issues of human trafficking and sex trafficking. Madam Chair, the International Labor Organization estimates that there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking. Twenty-five percent of them are children; 75 percent of them are women and girls. It is a tragedy, but one out of seven endangered runaways reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were likely child sex trafficking victims. Of those, 88 percent were in the care of social services or foster care when they ran. From 2007 to 2017, the National Human Trafficking Hotline has received 34,700 sex trafficking cases inside the United States; and, in 2017, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children indicated that children continue in 2017, again, to be sex trafficked. The International Labor Organization, again, estimates that there are 4.8 million people trapped in forced sexual exploitation. {time} 1615 What is necessary to know is that sex trafficking can be a revolving door. It is income that sex traffickers and human traffickers use.…”