Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we have a special responsibility to protect vulnerable children. This is bipartisan legislation that takes some important, though modest, steps toward meeting that responsibility by addressing three issues: combating the exploitation of at-risk children, promoting permanent homes for foster children, and strengthening international enforcement of child support obligations.

With a bipartisan, bicameral agreement between the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, this legislation combines modified versions of three bills that we previously passed here in the House earlier in the session. This measure has been endorsed by a number of important child advocacy groups, including the Children's Defense Fund, the Child Welfare League of America, and Voice for Adoptions.

I was pleased to work with Chairman Camp, Ranking Member Levin, and certainly Human Resources Subcommittee Chairman Reichert, as well as our colleagues in the Senate, as we came together with bipartisan agreement on this legislation.

There are still provisions in the bill that I think could use improvement, including the fact that an important program that helps link children in foster care to relatives, called Family Connection Grants, is extended only for a single year; but I think that even with some of its limitations, this legislation does make a positive difference in the lives of many children, particularly those who are vulnerable to sex trafficking.

When children come into foster care, they already have issues. They have suffered abuse or neglect. They have been exploited. They have suffered. They have a sense of isolation, and they often feel that they have been removed from one home and put out in a place with which they are not familiar. They are especially at prey for sex traffickers and are targets in that condition.

This bipartisan legislation attempts to combat trafficking in the foster care system by screening at-risk children and providing services, when necessary; by reporting the incidence of trafficking so we will have a clear indication of that among foster children; and by expediting the location of children who run away from foster care.

Additionally, this bill attempts to help children live more normal lives while in foster care by allowing them to more fully participate in the activities that most children enjoy, such as playing sports and an occasional sleepover at a friend's house.

This legislation also extends and adopts changes in the Adoption Incentives program to encourage States to find permanent homes for children in foster care, which is certainly the best approach. The bill increases the program's focus on promoting the adoption of older children in foster care.

It also, for the first time, provides an incentive for States to increase the number of children leaving foster care to live with a legal guardian. It includes a provision that I authored ensuring children won't lose their eligibility for Federal guardianship assistance if the guardian dies or becomes incapacitated.

Finally, the legislation would take necessary steps to implement a very important international treaty on enforcing child support obligations abroad so that leaving this country doesn't allow individuals to leave behind their responsibility for the children that they parented that are here in the United States.

Mr. Speaker, we still have much to do to ensure that the well-being of vulnerable children is receiving the attention that it deserves, but I think this is a good start with this bill. I urge its passage and swift action by the Senate in accord with our agreement to see that it gets to the President's desk soon for signature.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute to join in the accolades for our chairman, Dave Camp of Michigan, and to particularly recognize the key role he played in helping to create our child abuse commission, which is currently holding hearings. They had the first one down in San Antonio, in my district. They will be going to Michigan, and they have been in Florida. I think they are collecting data that will provide us another opportunity to act, to deal with some of the same issues that we are concerned with today. I appreciate the leadership that he has shown and, certainly, that Mr. Reichert has shown.

I am pleased that among those groups that we have heard from is the American Academy of Pediatrics, which plays such a leading role. They say that this legislation is an essential step in improving the health and well-being of foster youths and in expanding their access to appropriate permanency options. The Children's Defense Fund was important in this legislation. It emphasized the importance of permanent placements for children as they leave care and of empowering our older youth. I believe that this bipartisan legislation is a good step forward.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I am so pleased tonight to hear one colleague after another indicate that they are ready to act in a bipartisan way on this issue and that it should be a bipartisan commitment to addressing the vulnerability of our children. I think that needs to apply to all children. This legislation that we are considering at the moment is one of seven bills that we are going to approve here in the House today that deal with trafficking because trafficking remains a serious problem here and around the world.

Several of the bills that we are considering recognize that there is an international dimension to this problem. Therefore, I would particularly urge my Republican colleagues and all of our colleagues tonight to remember next week the statements that are being made this evening and to be as concerned about the vulnerability and the exposure to the trafficking of those children who have recently sought refuge in our country as we are about foster children or any other children in our country.

While the sex trafficking prevention in this bill addresses, specifically, problems within the foster care system, the scourge of youth sex trafficking extends far beyond this population. As we are all well aware, we have had a recent influx of children come across our southern border, many of whom have been abused at home, abused along the 1,000-plus-mile track, and could be subject to abuse or to being involved again in sex trafficking.

Polaris, a group that works to help end modern-day slavery, notes that undocumented immigrants are ``highly vulnerable'' to sex trafficking due to their ``lack of legal status and protections, language barriers, limited employment options, immigration-related debts, and social isolation.'' Most of these vulnerabilities are amplified when the immigrants are children. We have an obligation in this Congress to take their unique situation into account and provide them with the protection and the care that they deserve.

The steady drumbeat to remove the very protections that help vulnerable children from becoming sex slaves or remaining in slavery is wrong, and that is why 37 Latino organizations, including MALDEF, the National Council of La Raza, and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, among them, all have urged this Congress to assure due process for these kids rather than stripping away rights that this Congress provided in current United States law.

A diverse group of faith leaders, including the Southern Baptist Convention, the Sojourners, and the National Association of Evangelicals have joined with these Latino groups in calling to assure that these children are not denied their due process rights, and that they do not have rights guaranteed by American law today taken away next week.

Over 50 child development experts from around the country, many of the same people that supported our effort in today's legislation, wrote this Congress yesterday and urged that we change course before we put thousands of traumatized children into danger. They describe an expedited screening process that would leave children in danger. It is the expedited screening process that applies today to Mexican children, and it is flawed.

Children who fear trafficking, or were previously trafficked, can be returned to Mexico to reenter that trafficking trade and come back again. We shouldn't subject the Central American children to the same process, yet, that is what has been recommended today.

I am concerned about what happens to children along the Green River, about what happens along the Potomac River, about what happens along the Colorado River, but I am also concerned about what is happening to the many who have just crossed the Rio Grande River.

When children are asked about whether they have been trafficked by a police officer, who may not speak their native language, in a rushed interview in what may be a chaotic situation in a detention center that is much like a police station, where someone who just abused them or who may actually have been involved in the trafficking and smuggling process is nearby and can perhaps overhear these tales, they will be reluctant to articulate the sexual trauma, the very private trauma to which they have been subjected.

These children who have been traumatized, in some cases, multiple times, who may well have left their native country because of abuse, deserve to be interviewed and evaluated in an environment that takes into consideration their youth, their vulnerability, all of the factors that we have been talking about on this piece of legislation, and the other six pieces of legislation that the House is about to approve.

These children deserve the same type of protections, not an intimidating environment that is made all the more unfamiliar to them by virtue of the fact that they are in a land that they have never been to before.

This special treatment does not occur and happen if you have an expedited screening process. That is why we unanimously passed the guarantees that are in the 2008 law. If we want to protect these children, we should abandon a plan to throw out these children by the wayside by abandoning those protections.

I believe that we shouldn't let our desire, the fears of some, perhaps the hate of others, to result in the quick deportation of children and return them to a live of sex slavery. They are vulnerable children. We don't assure them amnesty. Certainly, we cannot accept every child that wants to enter this country.

I am not in favor of amnesty, but I do think we need a little humanity, a little human decency, and that those children deserve the same respect and due process as any child that we are talking about tonight.

So I am pleased that we are making progress on this piece of legislation and another six bills. I think they are an important step forward in dealing with a serious international problem. But it is critical that this interest in bipartisan concern for the vulnerability of children extend to those children who are now in my home State, and about whom we will be talking in the few days that remain in this Congress, and that we apply the same kind of standard then as we are applying tonight.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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