Tebow urges Congress to fight child trafficking, abuse in emotional plea

Former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow appeared on Capitol Hill last week to urge lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee to pass legislation to better combat child abuse, trafficking and exploitation, describing the effort as a fight “for people who can’t fight for themselves” and “in their darkest hours of need.”

Tebow, founder and president of the eponymous Tim Tebow Foundation, used the impassioned testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to rally support for the Renewed Hope Act of 2026, or bipartisan legislation aimed at increasing federal resources to combat child abuse and exploitation.

Framing the crisis as “a fight for people who are unable to fight for themselves in their darkest hour of need,” Tebow said his foundation is working “imperfectly, but in every way we can, to support the fight against child exploitation, including providing additional support to law enforcement and funding long-term restoration efforts to support victims.”

Her foundation currently supports approximately 52 safe homes and is in the process of expanding support to a further 19 homes.

“There’s a fine line between being tortured and being valued,” Tebow told lawmakers Tuesday. “And you are that fine line,” he said, urging the legislature to act quickly to approve the bill.

“I spent most of my life chasing a much less important MVP,” Tebow added. “I want to spend the rest of my life chasing the most vulnerable people.”

The Renewed Hope Act of 2026, which cleared the House committee mark earlier this year, aims to create a dedicated workforce of more than 200 analysts, investigators, and forensic experts working within DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to “analyze, coordinate, and synchronize child sexual abuse investigations.”

The bill would equip and specifically train officers in victim identification, location, and rescue operations for unknown children or children identified in sexual abuse databases.

Support for the legislation comes as the number of unidentified child victims in abuse databases has increased in recent years. There are an estimated 57,000 unidentified child trafficking victims, according to the Tim Tebow Foundation. The foundation emphasizes that, as others who testified at Tuesday’s emotional hearing noted, these children remain hidden from official statistics and protection systems.

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Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri speaks at the hearing. (Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tebow noted that in the last six months alone, more than 338,000 unique U.S.-based IP addresses have been identified as trading child sexual abuse images on so-called “peer-to-peer” networks.

“Every day, [these children] “They’re praying for us to respond,” Tebow said in his deposition. “But how do we respond?”

“I am deeply grateful to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who came together to support the Renewed Hope Act of 2026. This legislation gives our nation the opportunity to build a stronger recovery team of analysts and investigators so that suffering children can be identified and protected. This is a problem we can solve.”

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, has long prioritized child trafficking issues, which he calls a “scourge” on our society.

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“I am holding this subcommittee hearing to expose how our young people are being groomed, exploited and ignored by the current system,” he said this week. “Congress must dismantle child trafficking and dismantle criminal networks that profit from exploiting the most vulnerable among us.”

Fox News Digital’s Scott Thompson contributed to this report.

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