Under Biden, sex trafficking at the border flourishes

FPI / June 1, 2023

After returning from the U.S. southern border, Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack noted that she had “seen children as young as two months old being smuggled by coyotes across the Rio Grande.”

“On my first trip to McAllen, Texas in 2021,” she continued, “I met a little girl who couldn’t speak because her vocal cords had been severely damaged by gang members who sexually abused her.”

In July 2022, border officials apprehended a teenage girl who had a bag of “Plan B” pills in her shirt pocket. “I knew I’d be raped multiple times” on the journey north, she explained. The bag was already missing several pills.

A video shared by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last July showed evidence of what he called a “narco slave trade,” along with images of migrant children killed along the border.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for the worst plague of slavery in America since the Civil War,” Cruz says in the video.

"While Cruz’s claim might sound shocking at first," Team Biden’s open border policies "make it difficult to arrive at a different conclusion," Shane Harris wrote for the Association of Mature American Citizens on May 30.

In February of 2021, Biden ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection not to return unaccompanied children at the southern border to Mexico despite a court order that allowed it.

On Jan. 29, just over a week into the Biden administration, a three-member panel of circuit court judges in Washington, D.C., halted a lower court decision that had blocked children from being removed, a practice that had been taking place since March 2020. Despite the panel's decision in favor of CBP, the Department of Homeland Security told immigration and border agencies that they would not be permitted to continue turning back children to Mexico and other countries of origin.

That opened the floodgates, "creating a massive incentive for families to pay smugglers to send their children north," Harris noted. "The very next month, arrivals of unaccompanied children more than doubled, from 9,402 in February to 18,870 in March. The number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the border has remained above 10,000 in all but one month since."

Human smuggling was an estimated $500 million industry in 2018. It is a $13 billion industry today.

"Human trafficking is the second-fastest growing criminal industry in the U.S. Trafficking victims are used against their will for a variety of reasons, among them: forced labor, sexual exploitation, crime, and marriage," Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn said last month. "Girls and women are at particular risk of human trafficking for sex and prostitution. Females account for 94 percent of victims of sex trafficking, and two out of every three child trafficking victims worldwide are girls. Thirteen years old is the average age at which a child is sold for sex. That is absolutely horrifying."

With U.S. immigration policies giving preferential treatment to families over single adults, smugglers often pair up minor children with strangers and send them across the border together. “You don’t have a kid? I’ll provide a kid,” is how one border patrol agent described the mentality of smuggling rings.

Many of the children are placed with strangers as sex slaves. Team Biden is literally delivering them "into the hands of evil," Harris wrote.

In a telling omission, Harris continued, "the Biden Justice Department made no mention of migrant children in its National Missing Children’s Day proclamation last week. Throughout the crisis, Biden and his top border lieutenants have continued to call their immigration policy 'fair, orderly and humane.' It seems likely that the migrants themselves, and in particular migrant children, would hardly feel the same."

Free Press International
[Freedom Is Not Free!]