In what Montana legislators are calling a blow to anti-human trafficking efforts, the FBI announced that their one full-time agent working human trafficking cases in the state of Montana will now be splitting his time between those cases and crimes in Indian Country. U.S. Senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines as well as U.S. Representative Greg Gianforte have all sent letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking him to reconsider this decision and assign someone full time to human trafficking cases and add an additional full-time agent to work cases on native land instead of dividing investigative efforts between the two. This comes at a time when cases of human trafficking are steadily increasing with 125 cases being reported in Montana since 2007 and 22 of those cases were from 2018 alone. “In light of this increase, the FBI should be dedicating more resources to both human trafficking and violence in Indian Country,” Tester wrote, “not cutting one to focus on the other.” Montana has had just one FBI agent investigating human trafficking, assigned in just 2016.
