Fact check: False claim Biden rescinded Trump order on child sex trafficking

Nate Trela, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Biden rescinded a Trump executive order targeting child sex trafficking on his second day in office

A Feb. 26 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) claims President Joe Biden reversed an effort by President Donald Trump to combat child sex trafficking.

“Trump was the 1st President in U.S. History to acknowledge that children are being sold for sex in the U.S., and the 1st President to open a White House office to form coalitions with law enforcement to save America’s children,” reads the post. “On his 2nd day in office, Biden rescinded Trump’s Executive Order that helped combat child sex trafficking.”

The post was liked more than 2,000 times in less than two weeks.

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Our rating: False

Biden did not rescind Trump’s orders on child sex trafficking. He introduced an updated plan for fighting child trafficking in December 2021. The post is also wrong about Trump being the first president to acknowledge child sex trafficking.

Early Biden actions did not change Trump orders

The social media post does not specify what order was supposedly rescinded, but Trump did issue at least two that directly addressed human trafficking. He signed an executive order in 2017, titled “Enforcing Federal Law With Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking," and another in 2020, titled “Combating Human Trafficking and Online Child Exploitation in the United States.”

The president can rescind a predecessor’s executive orders by issuing new ones, but none of Biden’s 19 orders issued through Jan. 22, 2021 – his third day in office – touched on Trump’s trafficking orders.

One of Biden’s 77 published orders in 2021 did alter the 2017 Trump order on trafficking. But it didn't "rescind" anything, it just assigned the same work to a new, similar group.

Trump's order tasked the existing Threat Mitigation Working Group with coordinating the government's response to transnational organized crime, a category that includes human trafficking. Biden's Dec. 15, 2021, order replaced that working group with the United States Council on Transnational Organized Crime.

Both the working group and the Biden council included the secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of homeland security and director of national intelligence. Biden's group added the secretaries of defense and treasury to the list as well.

Biden also released an updated National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking in December 2021.

The social media post's claim that Trump was the first president to acknowledge sex trafficking in the U.S. is also false. In fact, his immediate predecessors gave speeches highlighting the issue.

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In a September 2012 speech to the Clinton Global Initiative, former President Barack Obama spoke about human trafficking in the U.S.

"The bitter truth is that trafficking also goes on right here, in the United States,” he said. “It’s the migrant worker unable to pay off the debt to his trafficker. The man, lured here with the promise of a job, his documents then taken, and forced to work endless hours in a kitchen. The teenage girl, beaten, forced to walk the streets.”

In July 2004, former President George W. Bush announced several initiatives to combat human trafficking.

“U.S. law enforcement has documented cases of Latvian girls trafficked into sexual slavery in Chicago, or Ukrainian girls trafficked in Los Angeles, and Maryland, or Thai, Korean, Malaysian and Vietnamese girls trafficked in Georgia, or and Mexican girls trafficked in California, New Jersey and here in Florida,” Bush said at the time. “Many of the victims are teenagers, some as young as 12 years old.”

It is unclear what the social media post is referring to when it says Trump created the first “White House office to form coalitions with law enforcement to save America’s children.” Obama, Bush and Clinton each launched initiatives during their terms to fight human trafficking that included focus on child trafficking.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment.

PolitiFact and the Associated Press also debunked versions of the claim.

Our fact-check sources:

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Biden updated approach to fighting child trafficking