The Texas Attorney General’s Office has asked the Legislative Budget Board to hike its funding to fight human trafficking in 2020-2021, saying that its current anti-trafficking team is overstretched with growing numbers of trials and numerous training requests from local partners.
“We have more requests for training than we can handle,” said Jeff Mateer, First Assistant Attorney General, at a hearing of the legislative board on Tuesday. According to Mateer, local prosecutors are not accustomed to handling trafficking cases and they benefit from trainings offered by prosecutors with the state-level anti-trafficking unit. The unit has also forged partnerships with Truckers Against Trafficking and the Texas Trucking Association.
The Attorney General’s Legislative Appropriations Request for fiscal years 2020 and 2021 asks for an additional $2.8 million to hire 13 additional employees in the AG’s Human Trafficking Section for both educational efforts and prosecutions – a major increase from the current staff level of only eight.
Now in its fourth year, the Human Trafficking Section has resolved 19 cases with pleas or trials while another 21 trafficking cases currently pending in seven different counties. “We have only touched the very tip of the iceberg in handling human trafficking cases,” Mateer said. “We need to dedicate more and more resources to combat this problem, that’s why we’ve dedicated it as an exceptional item.”
The majority of the requested budget hike, $847,000 annually, would go toward salaries and wages. “Current personnel levels are inadequate to take on all of the cases, collaboration, training, and other critical prosecutorial opportunities available,” Attorney General Paxton explains in his budget request.
Texas’ Human Trafficking Unit is divided into two sections, a Criminal Investigation Division (CID) and a Transnational/Organized Crime Section (HTTOC). Under the current budget proposal, the former section would get an additional two peace officers, an auditor, a criminal analyst, and an administrative assistant, while the latter section would get an additional three assistant attorney generals, two legal assistants, one criminal investigator, one administrative assistant, and one program specialist. Budget notes explain that this staff expansion would allow the transnational/organized crime unit to expand its operations beyond criminal prosecutions into civil enforcement proceedings.
The budget board, in its hearing Tuesday, did not raise any concerns about the Exceptional Item Request relating to the anti-trafficking unit.
Texas is currently ranked second in the nation in most reported human trafficking cases. Victims include both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. Houston is a particular hotspot for the problem, according to the assistant attorney general, but rural areas and other cities are also implicated.
