The Department of Justice quietly removed significant portions of its page on child sex trafficking, including information on “International Sex Trafficking of Minors,” “Domestic Sex Trafficking of Minors,” and “Child Victims of Prostitution.”
While it is unclear what prompted the revisions, conservatives pointed to the changes as a sign the Biden administration is not taking crimes surrounding child exploitation seriously.
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“For some reason, people on the Left get really uncomfortable and defensive talking about child sexual exploitation,” said Heritage Foundation Vice President of Domestic Policy Roger Severino, who called the move typical of Democratic administrations.
“Republican administrations direct more resources to child and human sex trafficking, and then Democratic administrations pull that back,” Severino, who also served in the Trump administration and in the DOJ during the transition from the Bush to Obama administrations, continued. “They treat it almost as a distraction from some things they consider to be more important.”
“The fact that these issues get pulled back under Democratic administrations is contemptible,” he added.
Another section scrubbed by the department after May 12 is one on domestic trafficking, which said, “Pimps and traffickers sexually exploit children through street prostitution, and in adult night clubs, illegal brothels, sex parties, motel rooms, hotel rooms, and other locations throughout the United States.”
According to Severino, the process to change information that appears on a DOJ site is an arduous one, “so this clearly had to go through several layers of review.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) tied the Justice Department’s website change to the Department of Health and Human Services losing track of 85,000 migrant children who were released from government custody, including some forced into child labor, per a New York Times investigation.
“DOJ’s blatant move to distance Joe Biden’s harmful policies from the global crime of sex trafficking should be no surprise to any of us who have seen the blatant sexualization and abuse of children this administration is comfortable with promoting,” Luna said in a statement.
Amid the immigration crisis at the southern border, some information removed included cross-border trafficking that “implicated the Biden Administration’s open-border policies in correlation to the sex trafficking of children,” according to Luna.
Zack Smith, Heritage Foundation legal fellow, told the Washington Examiner that Biden’s border policies create the “perfect conditions to allow human trafficking to flourish, to allow sex trafficking, child exploitation to flourish.”
The move from DOJ is in line with the ideology of progressive prosecutors who refuse to enforce the law in many sex-related cases, Smith explained.
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“Many of these progressive prosecutors say it’s a victimless crime, so-called quality of life crimes,” he said. “Policies that the Biden administration are pushing from a criminal justice perspective under the guise of supposedly reforming the criminal justice system are actually creating the conditions again for all kinds of human suffering, including human trafficking.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
