Transportation Leaders Against Human Trafficking

The Department of Transportation’s Transportation Leaders Against Human Trafficking (TLAHT) initiative is comprised of transportation and travel industry stakeholders working jointly to maximize their collective impact in combating human trafficking. To date, TLAHT has engaged with hundreds of organizations from across the transportation industry.

As many as 27.6 million men, women, and children are held against their will and trafficked into forced labor and prostitution.  According to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, human trafficking is defined as:

(A) sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or

(B) the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

TLAHT focuses on five key areas and connects transportation stakeholders to available resources on: industry leadership, industry training and education, policy development, public awareness, and information sharing and analysis.  

Leadership

• Increase the number of transportation industry leaders and influencers engaged on the human trafficking issue
• Increase the number of public, private and cross-modal transportation industry partnerships addressing human trafficking

Industry Education and Training

• Create and implement training protocol with industry specific materials for each transportation mode
• Develop the internal, cross-modal and inter-agency systems that allows each industry to be saturated with counter-trafficking materials and assist them in creating specific goals to combat trafficking
• Form partnerships with law enforcement, NGOs, and other government agencies in order to identify and fix vulnerabilities that traffickers exploit to transport victims

Policy Development

• Increase the number of transportation organizations that have established working groups and integrated human trafficking into their policy initiatives
• Increase the number of transportation organizations that have adopted a policy on human trafficking in their supply chain

Public Awareness and Outreach

• Develop core transportation messaging on trafficking awareness that can be adapted readily for specific modes
• Develop a publicly available transportation toolkit that includes resources such as:
  • Transportation leader statement template
  • Talking points and presentation materials
  • Consumer awareness posters and literature for the traveling public
  • Training videos and programs for transportation industry partners
  • Template article for transportation trade publications
  • Transportation-specific survivor stories
  • Available statistics
  • Hotline information

Information Sharing and Analysis

• Foster a collaborative online workspace for transportation stakeholders that includes shared data, strengthens communication and facilitates mutually reinforcing activities
• Analyze human trafficking incidents to identify and describe indicators in trafficking behaviors and actions

• Highlight incidents of human trafficking that were detected, investigated, and disrupted as a result of reporting by the traveling public or transportation employees.

TLAHT offers a variety of resources, including:

• Leadership Pledge
• Ways to Take Action
• Resources