DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—An activist who fights sex trafficking argues that the trafficking of migrant girls has exploded since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, according to The Free Press.
A woman who identifies herself as Lisa and runs a nonprofit dedicated to dismantling sex trafficking rings said that the number of girls being trafficked has drastically changed in the past few years as open border policies have made it easier for criminals to operate in the U.S., The Free Press reported Monday.
The claims follow the entrance into the United States of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children, dubbed UACs, from Latin America and warnings from observers that federal officials aren’t properly tracking these children or vetting their sponsors.
“Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls,” Lisa, who runs Shepherd’s Watch, a nonprofit group dedicated to locating victims of sex-trafficking rings and handing over their locations to police, told The Free Press.
Much of the information Lisa and her team provided to police over the years resulted in suspected human traffickers being arrested and exploited girls being placed into proper care. The Shepherd’s Watch leader pointed to internet sites—including Facebook, TikTok, and OnlyFans—which have served as platforms to advertise trafficked girls to potential buyers.
“The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish,” Lisa said. “That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.”
Lisa said the ads are increasingly in Spanish, unlike in years past, The Free Press reported. She said that more than 90% of these advertisements now are for migrant girls.
When President Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, he immediately worked to undo the border enforcement policies of the Trump administration, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. The Biden-Harris administration took 296 executive actions in its first year, with 89 of them specifically reversing or beginning the process of undoing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Biden went on to shutter other major Trump-Pence administration border enforcement initiatives, such as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, construction of a border wall, and the Title 42 public health order during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What followed was a major increase in illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. More than 7 million migrants attempting to illegally cross the southern border have been apprehended by Border Patrol agents, including hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors.
Federal immigration agencies have encountered nearly half a million unaccompanied alien children at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden entered office, according to Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, who has demanded that the Department of Homeland Security provide answers on the whereabouts and safety of these children.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, has lost track of over 85,000 UACs in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands of other migrant children could be at risk of exploitation as the government is unable to properly track them, Gooden said.
“Human trafficking has swollen into a multibillion-dollar industry further enabled by the current administration’s lax border policies,” Gooden wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last month, a copy of which was first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Drug cartels, human traffickers, and smugglers are further incentivized by the policies of this administration to use UACs to easily slip across the border undetected.”
HHS’ Office on Trafficking in Persons provides an array of benefits to individuals who have escaped human trafficking, with authorities sending a previously trafficked adult or minor an eligibility letter when approved. The number of child eligibility letters rose dramatically under the Biden-Harris administration, from 672 letters in 2020 to 1,143 the next year and peaking in 2022 at 2,226 letters.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement is tasked with sending fingerprints of non-family sponsors to the FBI to confirm whether they have a criminal record or history of child abuse, according to The Free Press.
However, when the HHS inspector general conducted a study earlier this year of hundreds of randomly chosen minors to confirm whether a sponsor had been properly vetted, the office concluded that nearly 20% of the children were handed over to sponsors before the background checks were completed, meaning that these migrant children could’ve been placed with criminals.
“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa told The Free Press, speaking of the sex- trafficking situation. “It’s that easy.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
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