Preventing Sex Trafficking and Improving Opportunities for Youth in Foster Care Act

Floor Speech

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Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I join in supporting this bill to combat sex trafficking of children that are in the foster care system. When children come into foster care, they are at risk for exploitation because of the abuse and neglect that they have already suffered in their original family and because of the sense of isolation that they often feel when they have suddenly been removed from their home. Those who prey on children, especially sex traffickers, know this and they take advantage of these youth.

Children are removed from their home; they are bounced around from one place to another often; and then, in my State, when they reach 18, they are told they are on their own. That is a situation that invites, especially for young women, the dangerous sex trafficking in which they are exploited.

There is bipartisan support for this bill. It originated from a thoughtful hearing, with some very strong witnesses describing the problem. It is bipartisan. It is also a modest step forward. It is redirecting our welfare agencies, our child welfare agencies around the country, in what they do. I think that it will provide some modest help in saving lives.

It would do even more if, instead of just new requirements for these States, it were adding new resources. It adds very little in the way of resources, but I think it will be helpful in directing the attention of each of these agencies in the various States to focus on this very serious problem, to give us the data to make the argument to do more in the future.

Because so many of these young people will eventually age out of the system after having been moved around from one home to another, it is important that we help them be able to move into the workforce. In that regard, there was a problem with the bill when one particular provision was removed from the bill because it cost about a million dollars in additional administrative expenses and there was apparently no way found to cover that cost.

I believe that providing a young person who ages out at age 18 from the foster care system with a birth certificate and a Social Security card is a worthwhile thing to do. Chairman Reichert promised to work with us on this in committee. He has. That provision has fortunately been restored here in this bill. It has been restored, however, in a way that really borrows from another provision that is also important to our foster youth, and that is a provision called Family Connections.

The Family Connection grants program is designed to try to connect children with grandparents, with other family members to help in the search for relatives of the foster children who might provide them a home. It provides only about $15 million a year, which is hardly enough to cover the need across the entire United States to provide better connection. If this measure were fully adopted, there would no longer, under the Republican budget rules, be a way to pay for the Family Connections program, which is another vital way that we protect these foster youth.

The Children's Defense Fund, which does support the bill, wrote to us in committee to find a way to restore the provision that cost about a million dollars a year and pointed out that the same day that the committee would not provide a million dollars extra per year, it did find a way under the same budget rules to find not a million, but $310 billion to cover corporate tax breaks.

I believe that this measure is helpful. It is a good step forward. It is a modest step forward that would have benefited from not taking from one in order to help the other when it comes to foster children. We need to be doing more for our foster youth, not only on sex trafficking, but in other ways, more than we are able to accomplish under the strict budget rules today. There is a real inconsistency in saying we cannot find additional revenues to pay for something as serious as this when we can afford to borrow up to $310 billion for various corporate tax breaks, the first of which has already been approved here in the House in our last week.
With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I want to thank Chairman Reichert for his leadership on this measure.

In this place, we need to make what progress we can under the conditions that exist and make as much of it as possible. I hope that the Senate will respond to this measure. But in order to provide an effective response, we need to have the revenues to provide the resources along with the requirements to meet the needs of our foster youth.

A few weeks ago, I met with a number of attorneys in San Antonio who work with foster youth, particularly those who are aging out, as well as a number of community service groups, religious and nonreligious in their orientation. They describe immense problems that our foster youth face. When they age out at age 18, only about 2 percent of those young people in the San Antonio area ever end up in college.

Many of them do get a substantial taxpayer subsidy over their lives. Unfortunately, it is a subsidy in our jails and in our penal system after they are engaged in some harmful conduct.

This bill is one step that we can take to address the exploitation of these young people, particularly of young women. There are broader problems out there that need our attention, but I favor moving forward with the progress that we can make today to address this one critical problem.

I yield back the balance of my time.

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