Strengthening Child Welfare Response to Trafficking Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding
time.
This bill, Strengthening Child Welfare Response to Trafficking Act,
H.R. 469, is an excellent piece of legislation. As mentioned, it is a
bipartisan piece of legislation.
I want to thank Karen Bass from California and Chairman Kline from
Minnesota for bringing this to the floor.
This is one of many, many pieces of legislation dealing with
trafficking that have come and will come to the House floor the rest of
today and tomorrow, bipartisan pieces of legislation.
In my short tenure of 10 years here in Congress, I have never seen a
subject that had so many people interested on both sides of the aisle
and so many pieces of legislation coming to the House floor, all with
the purpose of trying to rein in this scourge of human trafficking in
the United States.
The public seems to be a little more concerned about other matters
than the issue of trafficking, at least the media does. They spend a
lot of time talking about how much air is in footballs when we probably
should be dealing with how much criminal activity is taking place in
America where America's children are being kidnapped and put into
slavery.
One example of this is the bill that Ms. Bass has brought to us, and
that is the one regarding child welfare agencies in States.
I understand, Mr. Speaker, that 60 percent of American children
involved in human trafficking, somewhere in their background they were
in foster care. I am not saying foster care caused that. I am just
saying that somewhere they make the route through foster care. We are
not doing what we should do in dealing with our children to protect
them from this scourge of trafficking.
This legislation goes a long way to help people in States, State
government, to take care and make sure that children do not get taken
up in this human trafficking that is taking place in the United States.
I come from Houston. Unfortunately, Houston is one of the hubs in the
United States for human trafficking. Because of our location in the
United States--near an international border--we have not only domestic
trafficked victims go through our city but international trafficked
victims and their children, their young people.
I want to congratulate Ms. Bass and the House and the leadership of
the House for bringing this legislation and legislation like it up to
the floor to make sure that America understands and criminals
understand America's children are not for sale.
And that is just the way it is.
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