OVC Is Picking Two National Trainers for the Entire Anti-Trafficking Field. The $5M TTA Competition Ties Task Forces to Homeland Security Task Forces

On October 6, 2026, the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) released the FY 2026 Specialized Human Trafficking Assistance: Task Forces and Legal Services notice of funding opportunity, O-OVC-2026-172790.

This is not a direct-service grant. OVC is selecting the national training and technical assistance (TTA) providers that support its own anti-trafficking grantees. There are exactly two awards:

Total funding is $5,000,000, with no match required. Deadlines:

• SAM.gov: begin by October 30, and no later than November 16, 2026
• Step 1, Grants.gov SF-424: 11:59 p.m. ET, December 1, 2026
• Step 2, JustGrants full application: 8:59 p.m. ET, December 8, 2026

Each category has one winner. Whoever wins Category 1 will shape the training received by every OVC-funded anti-trafficking task force in the country from 2027 to 2030. Whoever wins Category 2 will do the same for every OVC-funded trafficking legal services grantee.

The program behind the NOFO

Starting around 2010, OVC and BJA jointly funded the Enhanced Collaborative Model (ECM) to combat human trafficking. Each ECM site pairs a law enforcement agency, which receives BJA funding for investigators, with a victim service provider, which receives OVC funding for comprehensive services. The two work as a multidisciplinary task force alongside prosecutors and other partners. OVC also funds MDTs in other configurations and a portfolio of legal service grantees who help survivors with criminal record relief, immigration relief where allowed, family law and restitution.

Program grantees have relied on national TTA providers to keep the model consistent from site to site. This NOFO recompetes those TTA cooperative functions with three changes that every applicant, incumbent or new, has to address.

Change 1: Category 1 now includes Homeland Security Task Forces

Category 1 asks the winner to help ECM task forces and MDTs "coordinate with Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs), where appropriate." It also includes a stand-alone objective, Objective 4 (Category 1 only): "Support OVC-funded task forces and MDTs to coordinate and integrate their efforts with HSTFs and their activities."

HSTFs were created by executive order in January 2025. They are federally led task forces focused on cartels, transnational criminal organizations and immigration-related crime, staffed by DHS, DOJ components and state and local partners. Human trafficking cases often involve transnational criminal organizations, so an operational connection exists. The difficulty is that victim service providers in ECM task forces have spent 15 years building trust with survivors, many of whom are foreign nationals worried about immigration consequences. Closer coordination with an immigration-focused task force puts that trust at risk.

The NOFO keeps both commitments. It still requires a response "rooted in victim-centered best practices" and still requires compliance with the VAWA Confidentiality Provision (34 U.S.C. § 12291(b)(2)), which strictly limits sharing of personally identifying victim information. A competitive Category 1 application will show how a task force can deconflict and share intelligence with an HSTF at the case level while keeping victim service records confidential and keeping survivors' cooperation voluntary. Applicants that ignore the HSTF objective will lose points. Applicants that treat it as permission to share victim data will be proposing something that violates the confidentiality requirement in the same NOFO.

The rest of Category 1 is familiar ECM support: task force onboarding and structure, partner recruitment, protocols and SOPs, data collection and analytics, "the use of intelligence and advanced analytical methods," and a corps of peer liaisons. These are experienced investigators, prosecutors and service providers who give peer-to-peer advice remotely and on site. The NOFO says it is "critical" that liaisons have experience building partnerships "especially between law enforcement and victim service providers." Name your liaisons and include their CVs.

Change 2: Category 2 narrows the scope of legal services

Category 2 must cover "the full range of legal needs of trafficking victims." The NOFO lists them: victim compensation, child custody and family reunification, identity theft, expungement of records for nonviolent crimes, criminal restitution, civil actions, removal of nonconsensual intimate images, repatriation, and legal services allowed under Section 3.13 of the DOJ Grants Financial Guide. The winner must be able to support providers "throughout the United States, including U.S. territories and Tribal lands," and help them with new legislation, the NOFO says, "such as the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act."

The restriction comes from the unallowable-costs language that appears in every FY 2026 OJP solicitation. Funds cannot be used to provide or support "legal services to any removable alien or any alien otherwise unlawfully present in the United States." There are exceptions for legal services to obtain protection orders and for immigration-related legal services "expressly authorized or required by any law, or any judicial ruling."

Immigration relief for foreign national survivors has historically been a large part of trafficking legal TTA. That includes the T visa, continued presence, U visas and related remedies. The Category 2 applicant must design a curriculum that stays within the restriction. The likely approach is to train heavily on record relief, civil remedies, restitution, compensation and family law, and to frame any immigration-related content around remedies "expressly authorized" by statute, with careful legal review. Applicants should get their own legal opinion on how far the exception for statutorily authorized remedies reaches. Do not leave the question for reviewers to decide.

Change 3: who can apply, and the no-profit rule

Eligible applicants are public and private institutions of higher education, 501(c)(3) nonprofits and for-profit organizations, including small businesses. Governments and tribes are not eligible. Nonprofits that hold money offshore to avoid unrelated business income tax are excluded.

For-profits may apply, but "all recipients and subrecipients (including any for-profit organization) must forgo any profit or management fee." A consulting firm can win, but only at cost. Firms that usually earn a fee on federal TTA work should account for this before deciding to compete.

The NOFO also requires that the winner have "demonstrated expertise in successfully managing national-level training and technical assistance programs that address human trafficking." That requirement favors incumbents and a small group of national organizations. A newcomer's realistic route is a consortium: a national TTA manager as prime applicant, with specialist subrecipients such as a survivor-led organization, a prosecutor association or a legal clinic network. Each subrecipient needs a signed MOU or letter of intent describing its work.

Scoring

The narrative is limited to 20 pages. Tables and charts count toward the limit.

Capabilities and Competencies is worth 30%. That reflects the national-TTA experience requirement, and it is where incumbents have the most advantage. Challengers have to make it up in Design and Implementation.

There are no special deliverables beyond standard performance reporting. OVC is not asking for a curriculum by a set date. It will judge the TTA plan as a whole.

How to write it

Address deduplication directly. The NOFO says twice that applicants "must describe how they will coordinate with existing OVC-funded award recipients" to "prevent duplication," and must "develop relevant collaboration mechanisms." OVC funds several other anti-trafficking TTA providers, covering minor victims, housing, services and other topics. Map that landscape, name the other providers where you can, and propose a specific mechanism, such as a shared TTA request intake, quarterly provider coordination calls or a referral protocol.

Use what already exists. Applicants "should propose how they will leverage existing training and resources." Reviewers will not reward rebuilding curricula that OVC already paid for. Inventory the existing OVC TTA materials, including the ECM task force e-guide and other OVC-funded materials, and state what you will update, what you will retire and what is new, such as HSTF coordination modules and Trafficking Survivors Relief Act implementation.

Include survivors in the work. OVC "encourages" ongoing engagement with survivors of human trafficking. In practice, competitive applications budget paid survivor consultants or a survivor advisory council with a defined role in curriculum review.

State the priorities you serve. OJP's agency funding priorities include "supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault" and "directly supporting law enforcement operations." Both apply. Complete the Agency Funding Priorities Inventory in JustGrants, and in the narrative explain how the project advances each priority, since the NOFO requires the narrative to state them.

Respect the funding restrictions. Under 22 U.S.C. § 7105(b)(2), this money supports victim services, so primary prevention activities are not allowed. Awareness campaigns, school prevention curricula and demand-reduction programs are out of scope. The NOFO also applies the statutory restriction on promoting prostitution under 22 U.S.C. § 7110(g). Remove anything that looks like prevention from your training plan and budget.

Should you apply?

Incumbents should apply and should rewrite their proposals. A recompete with a new HSTF objective and a narrower legal services scope will penalize a resubmitted 2023 proposal. Show OVC that you have already worked out the HSTF and immigration-restriction questions.

Challengers should apply only with a consortium that can match the national-TTA requirement and a design that addresses the new requirements better than the incumbent does. A national prosecutor or law enforcement training organization paired with a victim-services TTA partner would be a credible Category 1 team. A national pro bono legal network with a record-relief specialty would be a credible Category 2 team.

Direct-service organizations, such as individual ECM victim service providers or local legal aid offices, are not the intended applicants. They can still benefit by joining a winning team as a subrecipient or peer liaison, which pays for staff time and gives them influence over the training their peers will receive for the next three years.

The two-step deadline gives you until December 1 for Grants.gov and December 8 for JustGrants. The November 16 SAM.gov cutoff falls first, so check your registration now.

For other open victim services and anti-trafficking funding, search current OVC opportunities on Granted. For other FY 2026 OJP solicitations with the same priority and certification structure, see our analysis of NIJ's FY 2026 School Safety evaluation NOFO and BJA's reworked Justice Reinvestment Initiative.