A self-described journalist smeared President Donald Trump on May 8, making the claim that Trump talking about migrant women being bound and ferried across the border was the president’s “disturbing kidnapping fantasy.”
Aaron Rupar, formerly a writer for the far-left Think Progress blog and currently a journalist for the openly left and openly anti-Trump Vox website, was covering Trump’s rally on Thursday night when he posted a video clip of the president discussing sex trafficking.
“Have you seen what’s happening? Human smugglers, human traffickers, have you seen what they’re doing? It’s an ancient crime. It’s bigger now than ever because of the computer, because of the Internet,” Trump told the crowd. “Most come through our southern border where we don’t have a wall. They don’t come through ports of entry where you have people looking inside the car, the van. So you can’t do that.”
“If you have women tied up with tape over their mouths you can’t take them through a port of entry … They come through areas where you don’t have the wall,” he added.
Trump brings up his disturbing kidnapping fantasy about women being taped up and smuggled across the border in cars (there’s no evidence this is something that happens) pic.twitter.com/D96hdBlhVp
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 9, 2019
Rupar then claimed that Trump’s description of human trafficking at the border was the president’s “disturbing kidnapping fantasy.”
“There’s no evidence this is something that happens,” he said.
A number of openly anti-Trump outlets have also claimed there was no evidence for Trump’s descriptions of human trafficking, including The Washington Post, CNN, and ABC. Quoting a number of alleged experts on the border, many of whom expressed anti-Trump sentiments, the Post’s Katie Mettier wrote, “Experts don’t know what he is talking about.”
The problem is that back in February The New York Times, another anti-Trump outlet, admitted that there was, in fact, evidence to support Trump’s description of female migrants being bound.
“Yes, There Was Duct Tape: The Harrowing Journeys of Migrants Across the Border,” the headline stated. “There is some truth to the president’s descriptions of the threat of sexual assault and of women who have been duct-taped and bound,” wrote Manny Fernandez.
“Because I didn’t want to let them, they tied my feet together and my hands behind my back,” a 45-year-old Honduran woman told The Times, saying she was then raped shortly after she crossed the border in Texas.
Another Times story, this one from 2014, described how “thousands of migrants are believed to be kidnapped and abused while going through Mexico.”
In some cases, women are used as currency to pay for passage through areas controlled by drug cartels. The cartels generally require each coyote to sell at least one woman into prostitution every two months in lieu of his monthly fee, Óscar Martínez, a Salvadoran journalist who investigated smuggling rings for his book “The Beast,” told The Times.
Describing the methods used by smugglers, Sean McElroy, assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Houston, added: “They rent a house, gut it, throw down a few mattresses, and then when aliens get there, take their shoes, clothes, and put them in a room, And usually, you will walk into a bedroom and see 20 people sitting on hands and knees, sometimes tied up with zip ties and with burlap sacks over their heads.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement made more than 1,500 human-trafficking arrests, most for sex trafficking, in fiscal year 2018. In the same time period, Border Patrol agents apprehended 17,000 criminals entering the United States illegally.
One case was highlighted by Eric Dreiband, assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. He described how the department had recently sentenced five members of a Mexican sex-trafficking organization which had, over the course of a decade, sex-trafficked young women and girls from Mexico and Central America into the United States.
“The case … was a very complicated, long-running human-trafficking case where Mexican nationals were engaged in trafficking young girls and women across the border, smuggling these women across the border, into the United States, and forcing them into prostitution,” he said.
Another expert, former Homeland Security agent Timothy Ballard, who worked in the child trafficking unit, said that approximately 10,000 children are smuggled into the United States each year as sex slaves.
“Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal enterprise on the planet, with millions of child victims stuck in its clutches,” Ballard wrote in an op-ed for the openly conservative Fox News website. “Indeed, this is no peripheral issue—this alone should be front and center in our border and immigration debate.”
Ballard, who is now founder and CEO of Operation Underground Railroad, an organization dedicated to rescuing children from sex trafficking, noted that one rescue involved a young girl who was 13 when she was kidnapped from her village in Central America and trafficked to New York City.
“The U.S. is one of the highest, if not the highest, consumers of child sex. As such, traffickers know they will become very wealthy by getting their enslaved children into our country,” he wrote. “We do these traffickers a great favor by leaving our border virtually wide open.”
