Every year, in the lead up to the Super Bowl, the anti-trafficking cottage industry polishes the old turd: “Sporting events cause sex trafficking!”
In reality, millions of dollars in anti-trafficking funds have empowered law enforcement and fake Christian nonprofits to harass, exploit, and arrest sex workers. The Super Bowl sex trafficking narrative is just their annual…well, Super Bowl—for spreading the myth.
A two-year public records investigation by an SF sex worker advocacy nonprofit found that despite millions spent on ‘trafficking’ stings, arrests overwhelmingly targeted adult consensual sex workers. You heard right: Not a lot of pimps arrested.
The Super Bowl trafficking panic doesn’t reduce exploitation—it legitimizes policing that harms sex workers and immigrants while doing little to stop real trafficking.
Stop The Raids, a sex worker led movement that counters the sporting event sex trafficking myth, has educated the media, cops, elected officials, and the public in advance of five Super Bowl events in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and now Santa Clara.
The movement is effective. By year three, when Stop The Raids’ press juggernaut arrived in Las Vegas, the cops stopped holding self-congratulatory press conferences about the number of trafficking victims they saved.
The stings continue, though. Just as Congress continues to fund ICE, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors has generously funded its human trafficking operations for Super Bowl LX, culminating on Sunday, February 8, 2026, at Levi Stadium. These stings collapse three separate issues—sex work, human trafficking, and immigration status—into one policing operation.
Lieutenant Josh Singleton of the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office described the Super Bowl LX trafficking sting team as “diverse” and including “local, state, and federal law enforcement from the FBI, HSI, and the Department of State.” Oh, but not ICE, the feds have said. Right.
These days, cops like Singleton who run trafficking stings, aka prostitution stings, describe themselves as “victim centered.” If that claim gives you the ick, you’re not wrong. It’s obvious double speak.
In 2025, the State Legislature passed Assembly Bill 379, which took effect in 2026. The new law’s many harmful statutes include a new offense—to “loiter in any public place with the intent to purchase commercial sex.” Note that “commercial sex” is often consensual adult sex work, not human trafficking.
The term “intent,” written into law, is straight out of Minority Report. The broad language of “commercial sex act” can be used against almost anyone, based on a police officer’s determination of their “intent.”
Who could have foreseen how queer people, immigrants, and communities of color are disproportionately and violently policed under a loitering law? Oh that’s right: California repealed its old loitering law two years ago for just that reason.
By recriminalizing loitering, this new law puts California’s immigrants at grave risk in the cop’s game of renaming sex work as human trafficking.
Championed by California Democrats, AB 379 almost certainly violates the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Why are Democrats undermining the Fourth Amendment while the country is overrun by a murderous kidnapping military force?
AB 379 was described by Governor Gavin Newsom as an “anti-trafficking bill.” Sorry, babe. Your understanding of trafficking is based on phony narratives and inflated numbers produced by folks who are famous for lying, namely cops and fake Christians.
Want more evidence? A report titled Prostitution as Terrorism documents not only how the anti-trafficking cottage industry routinely renames arrested sex workers as trafficking victims—it also redefines consent as self-trafficking, aka trafficking, aka terrorism. I wish I was joking.
The report also details how cops have sexually exploited sex workers during “rescues” and assaulted them in custody while ignoring calls and reports from actual victims of trafficking.
Super Bowl LX trafficking stings have been underway across the SF Bay Area for the past year—putting immigrants, sex workers, and trafficking victims in harm’s way. For immigrants, in 2026, AB 379 can escalate a sting into a death sentence.
Feel free to drop your State representative a line. Tell them to repeal AB 379. If you want to know how your rep voted on the bill, the receipts are here.
With a day job in nonprofit strategy consultation, Megan Hobza has reported on culture and regional news in Southern California for more than three decades. She is the former executive editor of hyper-local Sustainable City News in Whittier.
