And like so many things in the Trump administration, the trafficking fight has largely been managed by his inner circle. The White House summit hosted by Ivanka Trump this year continued in the mode set at the administration’s first White House roundtable on human trafficking. That event was held shortly after Trump took office and was also led by his daughter. It marked the beginning of her nearly two-year service as de facto head of U.S. anti-trafficking efforts—only in late 2018 did someone finally fill the highest anti-trafficking position in federal government, the ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, which is mandated by the TVPA. (John Cotton Richmond, who won the post, was given no pride-of-place position on the agenda of this year’s summit—he simply moderated the event’s second panel. Ivanka gave the opening speech. And even with Richmond in the ambassador position, a “senior administration official” said a new position in the Domestic Policy Council “solely devoted to combat human trafficking” would be coordinating “very closely with Ivanka’s office.”)

At the summit, in the absence of major anti-trafficking groups, Ivanka Trump lent her spotlight to a stage where Mike Pence could liberally invoke a fight between “evil” and “innocence” and then thank the president for “empowering” faith-based groups. Callista Gingrich, ambassador to the Holy See (and wife of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich), applauded an American “training course” to mobilize thousands of Catholic sisters in nearly 100 countries, to serve as government partners “braving the omnipresent threat of criminal and terrorist operations that profit from this global crime.” Ann Wagner, a Republican representative from Ohio, followed this evangelizing by informing those assembled that “sex trafficking was hiding in plain sight in every community, in every faith organization, in every cul-de-sac, in every school district, all across our country”—all without the gentlest of fact checks.

Such a war on sex trafficking neatly advances the Trump administration’s broader goals: expanding the power and reach of law enforcement; enriching dubious private charities; and reasserting its dominance over the rights of women, immigrants, and workers.

But this fight against something that is apparently everywhere—an “evil” that exists outside history or material context—is itself a Washington creation, long preceding Trump. When the TVPA was crafted in the late 1990s, it was guided by institutions selected by conservatives like Michael Horowitz of the Hudson Institute and his allies. Chuck Colson—Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks” man, one of the few men to serve time for Watergate and who emerged born-again and devoted to prison ministry—and Gloria Steinem—the highly visible women’s rights leader and author, who began her writing career going undercover at a Playboy Club in the 1960s and who regards sex work as “the equivalent of commercial rape”—did not end up on the “same side” of the trafficking fight by coincidence. The groups Horowitz gathered, as chronicled by Allen D. Hertzke, a religion and politics scholar, in his book Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights, were far more invested in fighting prostitution than human trafficking. This was not a survivor-led movement at the beginning, said Christy Croft, who has lived experience in the sex trade (“some of that consensual, some of it by circumstance, and some of it was trafficked,” they told me), and who has worked in the anti–sexual violence movement for over a decade. Unlike that movement, Croft told The New Republic, which began with domestic violence and sexual assault survivors who weren’t being served by existing institutions, the anti-trafficking movement was top-down.

“The trafficking movement did not come out of survivors organizing to protect themselves and only recently started incorporating survivor input,” Croft said. Even when it did, they said, the movement excluded survivors who didn’t promote its particular narrative of sex trafficking. And if survivors challenged it, “they push back, they’re like, ‘you just don’t understand trafficking,’ especially around sex trafficking, as if it’s some elite, special harm, and not just sexual violence and violence against sex workers.” These anti-trafficking “experts” were defining away anything that didn’t fit their view of trafficking, even if it meant discounting the lived experience of survivors.