Response to Senator Schultz: What We’re Missing in the Human Trafficking Conversation

There’s something deeply uncomfortable about reading a conversation about human trafficking reduced to numbers.

• 121 tips.

• 10,462 tips.

• Vacancies. Budgets. Allocation.

  
  

I understand why Senator Schultz is asking hard questions about duplication, cost, and whether a new task force is necessary. Those are valid concerns, and they deserve thoughtful consideration. His recent piece raises that exact issue, questioning whether Iowa’s proposed task force would create redundancy rather than solutions.

But the problem is this: trafficking does not show up cleanly in data.

It doesn’t call in tips the way other crimes do. It doesn’t present itself in ways that are easy to count, categorize, or assign to a single jurisdiction. It hides in plain sight, buried inside other charges, dismissed down to something easier to prove, or never identified at all.

What looks like “121 tips” is not the scope of the problem. It’s the fraction that made it to the surface.

And what we are left with is a system that is working hard, but not always working together.

Because the issue isn’t whether Iowa is doing nothing. Clearly, it is not. As outlined in Senator Schultz’s article, there are already agencies in place, including the Office to Combat Human Trafficking, and ongoing collaboration across departments.

That part matters, but so does what comes next.

Representative Thompson responded publicly, emphasizing that trafficking is not just a statistic or a budget line, but a lived and ongoing reality that requires more than isolated efforts. His response reframes the issue not as duplication, but as a failure to fully connect the systems already in place.

And that is where this conversation needs to stay.

Because trafficking does not move in straight lines. It moves along highways, across jurisdictions, between industries, and through systems that were never designed to connect. Law enforcement may see one piece. Labor violations show another. Financial patterns tell a different story. Victim services carry a reality that never makes it into a report.

Without structure, those pieces stay separate.

And when they stay separate, cases weaken. Charges shift. Patterns disappear.

Mayor Bower added to this conversation in his public response, reinforcing something that often gets overlooked: communities are seeing the impact, even when systems struggle to fully capture it.

I have worked through cases where what initially appeared to be something else entirely had underlying indicators of trafficking. Not because it was hidden well, but because no single entity had the full picture. In one instance, what began as a straightforward charge was ultimately reduced to something easier to prosecute, even though the underlying pattern never actually changed.

The facts existed. The connections did not. That is the gap.

This is where the conversation about a task force becomes less about creating something new, and more about finally connecting what already exists.

A task force, if done correctly, is not about replacing current efforts. It is about alignment. It is about creating a place where information flows instead of stalls, where patterns are tracked instead of missed, and where the burden is not placed on a single officer, agency, or victim to piece everything together.

Because right now, too often, that is exactly what is happening.

There is also a human side to this that gets lost in policy discussions.

Victims do not experience systems the way we describe them on paper. They experience confusion. Gaps. Repetition. Being asked the same questions by different people who don’t share information with each other.

They experience slipping through cracks that technically should not exist.

And the truth is, those cracks aren’t failures of effort.

They are failures of coordination.

That is why this matters.

Not because Iowa isn’t trying. But because the way trafficking operates requires something more intentional than effort alone.

The concern about cost is real. The concern about staffing is real. The concern about redundancy is real.

But the absence of a coordinated structure has a cost too. It just doesn’t show up in a budget line.

It shows up in cases that never fully form. In victims who never get identified. In patterns we miss until they’ve already repeated.

This is not about doing more for the sake of doing more.

It is about doing it in a way that actually connects.

Iowa has the foundation. The people doing this work are not the problem. The effort is not the problem. The commitment is not the problem.

The question in front of us is whether we are willing to build something that allows all of that to function as one system instead of many separate parts.

Because trafficking is not a single-agency problem. It never has been, and it will not be solved that way.

There is also quiet work happening in this space. I am developing a framework focused on making these gaps visible across systems, not to replace what exists, but to help it connect. If forward movement feels limited by resources, then supporting solutions like this may be part of how we move anyway.

Moving forward, even if HF 2565 does not advance this session, the conversation should not stop here. There is still room to strengthen coordination, whether through formal structures, pilot programs, or expanded collaboration across existing agencies.

What matters is that we keep moving. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But intentionally.

Because the reality is simple, even if the solution is not. This is happening. It is more connected than it looks, and it requires a response that is just as connected in return.