Department of Justice renews Lake County Human Trafficking Task Force grant

WAUKEGAN – The U.S. Department of Justice recently awarded the Lake County Human Trafficking Task Force an additional $700,000 in grant funding as a renewal of a previous grant.

The funding will be allocated over the next three years to strengthen the task force’s work in investigating and prosecuting human traffickers while also providing critical services to the survivors of labor and sex trafficking.

Co-led by the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office and A Safe Place, the task force is a collaborative effort between prosecutors, police and community-based social service providers to support survivors, increase community awareness and hold traffickers criminally responsible through aggressive prosecutions.

Within the State’s Attorney’s Office, the grant funds are used for a prosecutor, an investigator and a task force coordinator.

“The Department of Justice and its subject-matter experts recognize the work we are doing in Lake County and our office greatly appreciates their confidence as shown by this renewal,” Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said in a news release.

Before the formation of the task force in 2022, A Safe Place identified dozens of survivors of human trafficking yet there were no active investigations or charged cases in Lake County in 2020 or 2021.

The task force is investigating more than 20 cases and there are five pending cases against defendants in Lake County courts. The Department of Justice National Incident Based Reporting System showed that only 30 sex trafficking cases and 17 labor trafficking cases were formally reported to Illinois law enforcement between 2021 and 2023.

“The data shows that trafficking is a vastly under-reported crime and that it is one of the reasons why it so dangerous,” Rinehart said in the release. “Such exploitation of the individual is one of the most damaging and calculated crimes in our system. These renewed grant funds give us the resources we need to conduct these intensive investigations and to build prosecutions in complex cases. Make no mistake, traffickers in Lake County will be investigated and incarcerated for these crimes that exploit others.”