Porous Border Is Sex, Human Traffickers’ Best Friend
It is ineffective. Itwill cost too much money. It is a medieval security measure. Anti-borderenforcement advocates have dreamed up a new reason to oppose a wall or physicalbarrier along the southern border. It is racist.
Rep. AlexandriaOcasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) again displayed a knack for developing novel arguments tojustify her novelty policies.
“The entire PREMISE of a wall is not based in fact. It’s based in a racist + non-evidence based trope that immigrants are dangerous,” she rage-tweeted.
Actually, the premiseof the wall is to reduce the likelihood that illegal aliens or human and drugtraffickers will successfully cross through a porous border.
If we close open border crossings, that will increasingly drive human and drug traffickers to guarded ports of entry argued Timothy Ballard, founder of the anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad.
“Althoughcritics reject the idea of a physical barrier along the southern border for anumber of different reasons, my experience leads me to the conclusion thatphysical barriers are a tool that we must utilize in the fight against humantrafficking. Walls, barriers, physical deterrents, it doesn’t matter what they’recalled, they work,” said Ballard, who comes to the issue with 12 years’experience working as in the child trafficking unit of Homeland SecurityInvestigations, a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
During his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony,Ballard stated as many as 10,000 children per year are trafficked into the U.S.to be used as sex slaves.
A wall is not the only countermeasure, but part of acomprehensive and flexible approach to toughening the border, Ballard testified.
Earlier in the day, U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan made a similar argument. He also noted that presently 87 percent of migrants are apprehended outside of ports of entry and that traffickers continue to exploit gaps in the law and the border.
But the mostcompelling argument came from someone not in the room. Ballard relayed thewords of Liliana, a girl who was kidnapped from her Central American village atthe age of 11 or 12. She was taken to New York City and subsequently raped formoney between 30-40 times a day for five years.
“Hadthere been a wall for me my captors would have been forced to take me to a portof entry. A U.S. officer might have seen my distress. I might have yelled outto them. I am currently working with Homeland Security agents on my case,”Ballard recalled her telling him. “I love them. I think they would have rescuedme at the port of entry.” Liliana concluded, “I know many girls who came inlike me…we know a wall could have saved us…”
Would a wall have saved Liliana or the thousands ofothers from years of brutality? No one will ever know, but the chances of hercaptors being forced toward a port of entry would have been far greater if awall were in place.