The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report is an annual publication of the Human Trafficking Institute that provides comprehensive data from every federal criminal and civil human trafficking case that United States courts handle each year. For the first time, the 2020 Report compiles data from every federal human trafficking prosecution since 2000, the year the Trafficking Victim’s Protection Act was passed into law.

A team of seven attorneys and eight law school students reviewed every human trafficking case in the federal court system in 2020. Court documents, press releases, and news sources were reviewed, and prosecutors across the country were consulted, to gather a comprehensive set of data that includes: type of trafficking case, profile of the trafficker, details about the trafficking scheme, demographics of the victim, and district where the case took place, among others.

The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report’s findings are not a prevalence estimate of trafficking in the United States, but instead serve as an objective summary of how the federal system holds traffickers accountable for their exploitative conduct. The Report does not capture data from state prosecutions, state civil suits, or human trafficking cases that are not prosecuted.

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