By: Jason Hopkins, Daily Caller News Foundation
An anti-sex trafficking activist claims that the trafficking of migrant girls has exploded since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, according to a Monday report from the Free Press.
A woman who identified herself as “Lisa” and runs a non-profit organization dedicated to dismantling sex trafficking rings said that the number of girls being trafficked has drastically changed in just the past few years as open border policies have made it easier for criminals to operate in the U.S., according to a report by the Free Press. The claims follow hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) from Latin America entering the U.S. and warnings from observers that federal officials are not 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 their location over to the police, told the Free Press.
Much of the information Lisa and her team have provided to the police over the years has resulted in suspected human traffickers being arrested and exploited girls being placed into proper care. The Shepherd’s Watch leader pointed to a number of sites — which included Facebook, TikTok and OnlyFans — which have served as platforms to advertise these 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 continued. “That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.”
Lisa said that these ads are increasingly in Spanish, unlike in years past, according to the Free Press. She claimed that now more than 90% of these advertisements are for migrant girls.
When President Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, he immediately worked to undo the border enforcement policies of the previous 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 these actions specifically reversing or beginning the process of undoing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Biden went on to shutter a number of other major Trump-era border enforcement initiatives, such as the Remain in Mexico program, construction on the border wall and the COVID-era Title 42 health order.
What followed was a major uptick in illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to data from Customs and Border Protection. More than seven million migrants attempting to illegally cross the southern border have been apprehended by the Border Patrol agents, including hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors.
Federal immigration agencies have altogether encountered nearly half a million UACs at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden entered office, according to Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden, who has demanded the Department of Homeland Security provide answers on the whereabouts and safety of these children. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) 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, he said.
“Human trafficking has swollen into a multibillion-dollar industry further enabled by the current administration’s lax border policies. 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,” Gooden wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a letter last month, which was first obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Office on Trafficking in Persons provides an array of benefits to individuals who have escaped 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 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 or not they have a criminal record or history of child abuse, according to the Free Press. However, when the inspector general of the department conducted a study earlier this year of hundreds of randomly chosen minors to confirm if their sponsor had been properly vetted, its 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 said of the current sex trafficking situation to the Free Press. “It’s that easy.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a DCNF request for comment.
