The Foster Care Pipeline: How America's Child Welfare System Feeds Child Sex Trafficking

America’s foster care system, intended to be a safe haven for abused and neglected children, has instead become one of the most notorious recruiting grounds for child sex traffickers. Every year, more than 20,000 children go missing from the roughly 360,000 in formal foster care, with potentially hundreds of thousands more unaccounted for when “hidden” foster care arrangements are included. Disturbingly, 60% of child sex trafficking victims rescued in the United States have a documented history in the child welfare system. This abuse is not a coincidence; it is the direct result of a broken, fragmented, and technologically obsolete system that loses track of the very children it is charged to protect. Along with the attention that has rightly been given to trafficking across the southern border, we cannot ignore the domestic pipeline that operates inside our own child welfare agencies.

The core of the problem lies in America’s patchwork child welfare infrastructure. Each state, and often each county, runs its own separate case-management system with little to no interoperability. When a child moves across county or state lines, critical information about prior abuse, trafficking risk flags, or medical needs frequently disappears, making the child appear “new” to the receiving jurisdiction. Caseworkers drown in redundant paperwork while traffickers exploit these blind spots. The result is a system where vulnerable children fall through the cracks and become invisible long enough to be groomed, moved, and sold.

Compounding the fragmentation is the shocking obsolescence of the data itself. Federal reporting systems like the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) are typically two years behind reality, meaning policymakers, law enforcement, and even frontline caseworkers are making life-or-death decisions with outdated or incomplete information. Without real-time tracking and a unified national database, no one can say with certainty where tens of thousands of foster children are at any given moment. This chronic delay does not just hinder oversight; it actively enables predators who know the system cannot respond quickly when a child goes missing.

The intersection of foster care and trafficking is one of America’s most underreported national scandals. A system designed to rescue children from harm has, through neglect, bureaucracy, and technological stagnation, been allowed to feed a criminal industry that preys on them. Until we demand a modern, interoperable, real-time child welfare data infrastructure and hold every level of government accountable for the children in its care, the pipeline from foster care to trafficking will remain open. Protecting America's children must mean protecting all of them—those lost at the border and those disappearing from within a system that was supposed to keep them safe.