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MONROE COUNTY, PA (WNEP ) — One-hundred million dollars from the federal government is on the way for anti-trafficking programs.
Federal officials have promised the money to help victims of human trafficking: to provide them services and housing.
“We constantly find ourselves in situations where we have women who need help and resources and don’t have anything for them,” said Detective Kim Lippincott of the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office
In the Poconos there is a task force aimed at finding and helping those kinds of victims and prosecuting those kinds of crimes.
Detective Kim Lippincott has worked on the trafficking problem in Monroe County for years.
“Pimps and true traffickers are going to easy places. Know what I mean? They start right up the highway….They start in Florida and they land in Baltimore…and they land in the Poconos,” she said.
Detective Lippincott said the good news is that here in the Poconos, the number of human trafficking cases has been going down.
Still, money to help victims is always needed.
“Things have kind of slowed down for us a little bit, I think we have driven a lot of it out of Monroe county, we made such an impact that people kind of know ‘I’m not doing that in that county,’ because they’ll get in trouble, but they’re always one step ahead of us and we’re always one step behind.”
The U.S. attorney general said battling human trafficking is a top priority.
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