San Diego is arguably one of the most beautiful cities in the nation, if not the world. It’s an ideal location, a vacation destination with Mediterranean climates and eternal sunshine. However, lurking beyond the façade of pristine perfection is a dark underground system of trade and trafficking. The abduction and exploitation of human beings, mainly women, for the purpose of labor and sexual services is so prominent in our region, that human trafficking is considered “San Diego’s 2nd largest underground economy after drug trafficking” where “the underground sex economy represents an estimated $810 million in annual revenue”. The statistics are shocking and should elicit concern from citizens on both a national and local level. The FBI ranks San Diego as one of the top 13 highest sex trafficking areas in the country. According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, California reported more human trafficking cases than any other state in 2019 – over 1,500 in the total of 11,500 for the nation. In San Diego County, according to a study conducted by the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene on human trafficking, of the 1,200 individuals who were interviewed, 80% of the facilitators were affiliated with gangs and significant recruitment was found on high school and middle school campuses, as well as through the use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, comprehensive data is hard to collect because of the hidden nature of trafficking activities, however there has been research that has linked a correlation between race, economic disparities and intersectional oppression fueled by the persistence of myths about minority teen sexuality to the proliferation of sex trafficking among mainly people of color. According to Rights4Girls, an advocacy organization working to protect marginalized girls, “black children account for 57% of all juvenile prostitution arrests. A UCLA Law Review Article also states, “While Black children are more likely to experience some form of sex trafficking, other children of color are similarly at a higher risk than their white counterparts. Native Americans in particular argue that a strong connection exists between colonization and a persistent targeting of native people for prostitution.” Experts fear that the issue of human trafficking is not given enough attention because the victims are more often than not women of color, and because of implicit biases that assume minorities to be criminals, the ability to recognize when girls have not given consent to prostitution is hindered. Further complicating a lack of attention on the subject is that in the cases of labor trafficking, 55.7% of victims are Hispanic, most of whom are undocumented, and therefore largely ignored. However, the majority of sex trafficking victims in the U.S. are U.S. citizens. Sex and labor traffickers take advantage of economically disadvantaged people, and the intersection of race, gender, class, and age make this a largely overlooked issue, even though it affects millions of people worldwide. Thousands of cases are either unreported or unnoticed, creating greater opportunity for perpetrators and proliferators of the crimes to continue.