Human trafficking for the purposes of forced labor is a pressing transnational human rights and human security issue. In addition to garnering considerable local, regional, and international attention, increased awareness of the issue has also fostered multi-professional collaborations between a diverse set of state and nonstate actors ranging from law enforcement agents to non-governmental professionals and service providers. This dissertation project traces the emergence of human trafficking in the Netherlands and the United States, two leading countries of destination for the phenomenon. In this study, I comparatively investigate Dutch and U.S. efforts to identify and protect persons trafficked. I additionally examine the effects of these collaborative interventions on trafficked persons. Drawing upon extensive archival research, sustained fieldwork activities in both countries, and fifty in-depth interviews, I propose that advocacy efforts to promote the protection and human rights of trafficked persons have been increasingly wedded to and appropriated by the dominant law enforcement paradigm of anti-trafficking interventions. Here the promotion of trafficked persons' protection and human rights—efforts historically conceptualized as fulfilling disparate and in fact antithetical ends to that of the criminal justice system—have been harnessed to support rather than upend the security, anti-immigrant, and restrictive prostitution agendas of both states. While the United States and the Netherlands employ seemingly disparate policy positions regarding the regulation and management of commercial sex, where the former criminalizes prostitution and the latter regulates it through a legalized, administrative approach, I argue that both state's multi-professional anti-trafficking interventions 1) similarly merge NGO-law enforcement responses, 2) promote the marginalization of irregular migrants, undocumented prostituting migrant women, and voluntary sex workers, 3) reinforce the exceptional, immoral, and psychologically harmful nature of forced as well as voluntary prostitution and 4) dampen alternative, non-professionalized social justice responses and interventions to address the issue. I additionally propose that the invention of the human-rights-violated victim of human trafficking has simultaneously given rise to the invention and maintenance of a specific brand of anti-trafficking protection—what I call carceral protectionism —a process that melds the logics of law enforcement and advocacy efforts, and where justice for trafficked persons is organized via intersecting criminal justice and social service interventions. This study draws scholarly attention to the possibilities and limitations of anti-trafficking interventions imagined via the criminal justice system and invites feminist, legal, and social science scholars to assess the critical import of criminal-justice-oriented efforts to protect individuals deemed to be the most exploited, coerced, and vulnerable in this globalizing economy.