2025 US TIP Report — Thailand Tier 2, fourth year running

The US Department of State's 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report keeps Thailand at Tier 2 for the fourth consecutive year. What the reporting-period numbers say, and why the Tier system's conviction-rate emphasis matters for how these cases get built.

The US Department of State's Trafficking in Persons Report is published annually in June. The 2025 report covers Thai government activity during the 2024 reporting period. The headline: Thailand remains at Tier 2, its fourth consecutive year at that placement.

What the 2025 report says about the 2024 reporting period

• Investigations opened: 381
• Prosecutions: 647
• Convictions: 360
• Defendants sentenced: 273
• Share sentenced to more than two years: 99%
• Share sentenced to more than ten years: 48%

The Tier system incentive structure

Thailand was demoted to Tier 3 in 2014 with immediate consequences — non-humanitarian US aid eligibility was frozen. The government moved fast on prosecutions to climb back up the ladder: it reached Tier 2 Watch List by 2018, Tier 2 by 2022, and has stayed there since.

The Tier system rewards governments for measurable outputs — investigations opened, prosecutions filed, convictions secured — more visibly than for outcomes (victim housing, restitution, refoulement avoided). That incentive structure is the mechanism the Trafficking Conviction Industry page documents.

Where the 360 convictions come from

The 2025 report describes cases across the standard trafficking spectrum — labour exploitation in the fishing and agriculture sectors, sex trafficking in entertainment venues, cross-border smuggling from Myanmar and Cambodia. It does not disaggregate how many of those 360 convictions rest on evidence gathered by foreign-funded civilian sting operations.

The /trafficking page catalogues the three US-registered organisations most-documented as running that model in Thailand — The Exodus Road (Colorado Springs), International Justice Mission (Washington, D.C.), and Operation Underground Railroad (Anaheim) — using on-the-record reporting from The Washington Post (2016), VICE World News (2020, 2021, 2023), and Global Observer (2021), plus the organisations' own public materials and IRS Form 990 filings via ProPublica.

Reform proposal on the /reform page

The site's reform-proposal set includes a specific recommendation on this: the TIP-Report ranking should decouple from raw conviction-rate pressure and weight victim outcomes as heavily as prosecutions.