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Figueroa Street in Los Angeles is a hellhole of child prostitution and organized crime. The New York Times feature on this strip calls it “one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.”
“In the shadows, Figueroa had become more violent,” the New York Times reported. “The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota. The traffickers who governed the street were worse. Tonight Ana was waving at cars in front of a tire shop when a trafficker pulled up on the wrong side of the street, climbed out and beat one of the girls near Ana over the head with a pistol.”
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Girls as young as 12 walk this street and try to fill their nightly quota of six or more tricks. That is, hundreds of men sexually prey on and exploit dozens of teenage girls every night. That this street exists in America is a shame beyond words.
This evil has its source, on one level, simply in evil. Prostitution is often called the world’s oldest profession.
But also, Figueroa’s hideous industry exists because of policy choices made at the federal, state, and local levels. The California Democratic Party is a leading cause. Its efforts to legislate the sexual revolution into being, its opposition to the rule of law, and its embrace of open borders have all made Figueroa Street possible.
And LA isn’t the only place in America where prostitution is thriving thanks to the efforts of liberal politicians and tastemakers.
Scott Wiener’s California crusade
The states, in our federalist system, are called the laboratory of democracy. The petri dish of Figueroa Street is the result of California Democrats’ experiments in dismantling all norms of decency, removing all constraints on sexual perversion and predation, giving some criminals infinite leeway, and attacking organized religion.
San Francisco’s Scott Wiener, a liberal Democratic state senator who is running for Congress, is a leader in this progressive crusade.
A central part of his gay-rights efforts in 2022 was passing a bill forcing police to back off of street prostitution. “This Pride Month,” Wiener said, “as we see a surge in violence against and harassment of the LGBTQ community, it is more important than ever to get rid of a law that targets our community.”
Specifically, Wiener’s bill legalized loitering for the purpose of prostitution. Wiener argued that gay and transgender people were disproportionately arrested or questioned by police, and so equity required the repeal of the state law that banned loitering for prostitution.
The result was what you would expect, the New York Times reported. The job of the LA police “grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said.”
Protecting the lifestyle they wanted to protect, Wiener and other California progressive Democrats also protected the business of pimping out 12-year-olds for sex.
Wiener’s LGBT agenda has also included driving religion out of public life. This, too, has harmed children in a way that may have added to the child-prostitution problem.
In 2023, Wiener passed SB 407, which in effect prohibited observant Christians, Jews, and Muslims from adopting or fostering children in California. All foster or adoptive parents under this law must swear they will support a child in identifying as the opposite sex. This could include surgery or hormone treatments to make the child appear as the opposite sex. Also, adoptive and foster parents are forced to support homosexual activity by their children.
About half of the girls on Figueroa Street came from the foster care system, the New York Times reported. Even before SB 407, “California’s foster care system was buckling under the weight of demand. There were too many children, too few good homes.” Wiener’s law banned millions of California couples from adoptive or foster care, exacerbating the problem.
Democrats’ lockdowns also played a role. California, and particularly LA, closed schools longer than most places in the United States, and outlawed all sorts of healthy activity and gatherings.
LA Unified School District barred the schoolhouse doors for 13 months, longer than almost any other district in America. Recreation centers and gyms were all closed through even late 2020, and community leaders realized what the lack of positive outlets would do to children and families.
Local officials defended the draconian lockdowns, saying, “It absolutely is worth it to do everything you can to slow the spread of a deadly virus that wreaks havoc on people’s lives.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) compared his COVID approach favorably to that of Florida and said his harsher lockdowns saved lives.
Figueroa shows some of the long-term costs of those lockdowns. The New York Times reported, “In recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode. Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked. Teachers who would ordinarily follow up on absences or report signs of neglect could not.”
That’s only California. Prostitution and trafficking are problems across the country. And in many states and counties, you can find laws and local policies that explicitly protect prostitution. Behind these rules is often George Soros’s money.
The Soros prosecutors
Prostitution is illegal in Virginia, but in Fairfax County, the state’s most populous municipality, dozens of brothels sell sex in plain view. County Supervisor Pat Herrity said about 80 to 100 “illicit massage businesses” are “operating in plain sight today” in the county, the Fairfax Times reported.
The reason: The Soros-funded prosecutor has policies against prosecuting prostitution cases or cases involving immigrants.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano was elected in 2022, and his primary source of funding was Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC.
Soros’s nonprofit groups are top lobbyists for the legalization of prostitution. Soros’s Open Society Foundations published a book titled 10 Reasons to Decriminalize Sex Work.
Justice for All, another top donor to Descano, funds “legal services and protections to individuals engaged in consensual sex” as part of fighting the “criminalization of sex work.”
This is why an obvious brothel was allowed to operate in a residential neighborhood in Fairfax, steps from a school bus stop, for months. Police told residents, “Our hands are tied,” which clearly meant, The county won’t prosecute if we bring prostitution charges. Sure enough, police eventually built a prostitution case and brought charges, which Descano’s office promptly dropped. Only action by the state’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, drove the brothel out of business.
Likewise, Descano has a policy against pressing charges that could have “immigration consequences.” In practice, that means native-born Americans in Fairfax are more prosecutable. It also means the sex trade, which preys especially on immigrant girls and women, gets largely ignored.
Erasure of borders and families
Lax immigration enforcement also fuels the prostitution industry. Women and girls who are trafficked are almost always in desperate situations. Girls in great families could become drug addicts or run away from home, but disproportionately, illegal immigrants or unaccompanied minors end up in these dire straits where they can be exploited.
The Biden administration, starting on its first day, ran an experiment in open borders. It changed policies so that anyone who arrived at the border and claimed asylum could enter the country and stay here (until, theoretically, one day getting an asylum hearing).
The predictable result was a massive influx of illegal immigration, which inevitably fed the black market economy, including prostitution.
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Throw in the Left’s attacks on marriage and the traditional family over decades, and you get millions more fatherless girls.
No Democrat, probably not even Scott Wiener, wants Figueroa Street to happen. But their policies made it inevitable.
