Dear Future President:

My name is Angela Rooda, I am in 8th grade and attend a private Christian school in Oskaloosa, Iowa.

In the 13th Amendment it clearly says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”. If this is so, than why do we still have slavery present in America? According to the U.S. State Department, 600 to 800 thousand people are trafficked across international borders every year, of which eighty percent are women and half are children. 14,000-16,000 are Americans. These women and children are forced to perform sexual acts by the force by the man's command who chooses them, forced to be sold as a personal slave, or even set up as a porn figure for the owners to get money.

This is an important to me because in May of 2016. I received a text from my friend saying, “God's not dead” because at the end of the movie God's Not Dead, it says to text a lot of people God's Not Dead. My friend Samantha did this, and out of those many people she had texted, there was a guy whose phone number she got from instagram. When he received the text he chose ten random contacts who were me and nine other girls, who I had soon found out were from Pella Christian Middle School. He began to send very offensive texts demanding porn images and calling us very bad things . Thankfully no one sent anything, but on the other side no one told but one person. I wish I could say I was that one person, but I was not. The girl that did told her parents and they contacted the police, they traced his phone number and the 16 year old from a Oklahoma was visited by the police and got in a lot of trouble. The reason we didn't tell our parents was because we were afraid we did something wrong, even though we didn't.

You should care about this issue because Human trafficking has become the second biggest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world. It is linked to immigration because if someone's secret brothel gets found by the police they'll move to the USA.

What you can do to control this issue is to raise the urgency of police officers having more background checks because many police officers are underground resources to help protect those who run the many secret brothels. And when a child is missing or kidnapped there is a two day wait until a child is fully reported as missing. That gives The kidnapper enough time to move to be under the radar. But for those gone missing, if they were to have only ran away, they can still be kidnapped. So this has made so many things dangerous for a lot of people because slavery still is present in the U.S today.

As I said before I go to a Christian school, so therefore I am a Christian. This is even talked about in The Holy Bible. In Deuteronomy 24:7 it says, “If a man is found stealing one of his brothers of the people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.”

I suggested this so that things can change, women and girls should not have fear of going outside worried they may end up kidnapped.

Sincerely,

Angela Rooda