Sen. Hawley: Legislation to fund federal agents to protect children from trafficking may pass ‘as early as today’

The largest effort against child trafficking in the history of the federal government may pass as the Senate considers a reconciliation bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Senator Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, told The Lion in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

“There are 10s of 1000s of children in the United States who are trapped in sex trafficking,” Hawley said. “Federal investigators have 90,000 images of kids who are being sexually exploited posted online. They don’t know where the kids are.”

In 2025, reports of child exploitation rose to 20.5 million in the United States alone. Social media has aided this massive increase in online crimes, bringing the threat “to the doorstep of every family in this country,” Hawley said on the Senate floor Wednesday.

“The truth is, while child abuse is sadly a longstanding phenomenon, child predation and child trafficking now are fed and nourished and nurtured by social media, by companies who know that these images are being posted and don’t do anything about it,” he said. “The purveyors of online platforms allow their entire platform to be taken over and essentially run as a child trafficking ring.”

Currently, only seven DHS agents are responsible for analyzing these images and locating the victims. Hawley’s legislation proposes $108.5 million to fund 200 federal agents and to coordinate local, state and federal law enforcement to rescue these children, according to his press release.

Hawley partnered with Tim Tebow, founder of the Tim Tebow Foundation – a national organization leading the effort against child-sex trafficking – to draft the legislation, and it passed out of the Senate Homeland Security Committee Wednesday.

In March, Tebow testified before the subcommittee and presented a U.S. map with 338,000 marked locations of child-exploitation images from the past six months.

“Right now, there are kids praying for a rescue—for someone to step up, step in, and do something,” he said on a post on X. “Are we actually going to protect these kids from further exploitation, or are we just going to keep talking about it?”