Nongovernment Organizations’ Complicity in Human Trafficking and the Southern Border Invasion

There is a common misconception that the U.S. southern border with Mexico is chaotic and unregulated. For years, U.S. policymakers have allowed our border to become so porous that the Border Patrol reported well over two million encounters with illegal border crossers every year of the Biden administration after the COVID-19 pandemic.¹ Our nation has been inundated by waves of illegal aliens. But it would be a mistake to believe this means the U.S. border is unregulated.

Indeed, before President Donald Trump began imposing much-needed controls, the southern border was meticulously managed and hyper-regulated by international drug cartels. The Biden administration claimed, against all evidence, that this was not the case. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas insisted to Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) that “yes, we do” have operational control over the southern border. Roy responded to Mayorkas with a dose of reality and the terms of the law: “In this section, the term ‘operational control’ means the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”²

No reasonable observer believed the U.S. government had operational control over our borders. But that does not mean they were uncontrolled.

A huge majority of the tens of millions of people who have illegally crossed our border in recent decades paid the cartels to do so. Once under the control of the cartels, these people are subject to deprivations and abuses, including kidnapping, forced labor, physical exploitation, extortion, and rape. Migrants are at the mercy of the cartels for almost their entire journey and often even after they arrive on American soil. Such border crossers are thus not merely illegal aliens; they are, by definition, victims of human smuggling or human trafficking. Nevertheless, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act should not be broadly applied so as to become a loophole for mass amnesty for illegal aliens even if temporarily applied.

Roughly one-quarter of sex trafficking victims in America are minors,³ and human trafficking has become a multi-billion-dollar industry.⁴ Border crossers are routinely raped; one aid worker said that “every woman we work with has been raped. Women start taking birth control before the journey because they know they might be raped.”^{5, 6}

Children have it the worst. The Biden administration lost track of roughly three hundred thousand immigrant children who arrived in the United States.⁷ Even those the government has kept track of endured difficulties and trauma on their journey. Before the Trump administration’s border crackdown, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minor children arrived at the U.S.–Mexico border by the hands of the cartels every single year.⁸

The Biden administration cannot plead ignorance or innocence for the human trafficking crisis. The open border policy under Democratic leadership directly resulted in the trafficking of children.

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