I don't even think this is what they were talking about but there are over one million prisoners in the US and prisoners can be forced to work without pay. The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.
I also don't have a reference on hand. I listened to an NPR radio segment that blew my mind. There's a bunch of information from reputable sources but finding a specific number can be tricky. First of all, it's estimated because it's obviously unknown. Also, defining the "bounds" of slavery inherently changes the count. There is a fairly recent citation that states there are 400,000 enslaved people in the United States on any given day.
https://www.state.gov/what-is-modern-slavery/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Unite...
https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/human-trafficking
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/us-modern-slav...
It does actually.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 1 of the 13th Amendment explicitly refers to this as slavery:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_...
Had a group try and grab my young adult daughter and pull her into a van.
These are real issues that many Americans completely ignore.
"The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates that on any given day in 2016 there were 403,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in the United States, a prevalence of 1.3 victims of modern slavery for every thousand in the country."
I'm not entirely sure how they got to that number though.
It's also important to remember that slavery is explicitly allowed in the US constitution, and there are certainly valid interpretations of modern slavery that would count significant numbers of those currently incarcerated as being victims of modern slavery - for example https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...
So it does still exist - but America only considers criminals for it. From what I've gathered, though, that is still a lot of people.
That is not > 1m as previously stated.
Whether that number is 1m, 500k, or 100k... who gives a fuck. It's 2022 and hundreds of thousands of people are living through modern slavery.