President Trump, during a visit Thursday to the U.S. border with Mexico, put the focus on human trafficking, attempting to pressure Democrats to fund a border wall after negotiations to end an ongoing partial government shutdown imploded Wednesday.
“Where there is no fencing or walls of any kinds, [traffickers] just make a left into the United States and they come in and they have women tied up, they have tapes over their mouths, electrical tape — usually blue tape as they call it, it’s powerful stuff — not good,” Trump said during a roundtable event in Texas with federal and state officials.
Sitting before piles of confiscated cash, drugs, and a 50-caliber gun, Trump said human trafficking would essentially end if there was a border wall, the core dispute behind the nearly three-week shutdown affecting 800,000 federal workers.
“They have three, four, five of them in vans, or three of them in back seats of cars, and they just drive right in. They don’t go through your points of entry,” Trump said.
“Human trafficking is a phenomenon that has been going on for a thousands years or more and you’d think is something modern society wouldn’t have,” Trump said, arguing that with a wall, “we would stop human trafficking in this section of the world, I think we would stop it 90, 95 percent. A tremendous percentage would stop.”
“Children, they are being used by the coyotes, they are being sold left and right,” he added. “People are grabbing them to get in because our laws are really lousy, and if you have a child with you, it’s easier to get in.”
Trump said that trafficked women cannot be smuggled through designated points of entry.
“If we had a barrier they wouldn’t be able to make that turn. … they can’t go through their points with people, so we would stop that cold,” Trump said of human traffickers. “They can’t fly in obviously.”
A female Border Patrol agent in charge of the McAllen Station in Texas briefed Trump on various encounters with criminals.
“This is a stash house, Mr President. The smugglers there don’t care, they are treating human beings as commodities. They are putting them in deplorable situations. Sometimes they are in these houses eight days, sometimes even more … we know what the cost is,” the woman said, pointing to a photograph of people in a small room.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said he started a human trafficking unit because the problem is so bad in the state.
“Over 300,000 people are victims of that crime every year,” Paxton contended. “Houston is the worst city in the country.”
