With completed border wall to his right and unused construction materials to his left, former President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday in Arizona that if he wins the Nov. 5 election and returns to office in January, he will impose the death penalty on sex traffickers.
“We will seal the border, stop the invasion, and launch the largest deportation effort in American history. We will impose tough new sentences on illegal alien criminals,” Trump said, adding that “these include: [a] 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for anyone guilty of human smuggling; a guaranteed life sentence for anyone guilty of child trafficking; and a death penalty for anyone guilty of child or woman sex trafficking.”
Trump named other crimes that should result in the death penalty, such as “killing our police, sheriffs, Border Patrol, ICE, or [other] law enforcement officials.”
“Federal law allows for prosecutors to seek the death penalty against child sex traffickers if the victim is killed, or a life sentence if the victim survives,” Charles “Cully” Stimson, deputy director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels hosted Trump’s tour of the Mexico-Arizona border Thursday, which also is the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That night, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to formally accept the party’s presidential nomination to take on Trump in the Nov. 5 election.
During his remarks at the border, Trump took aim at the border security policies of Harris and President Joe Biden, who stepped aside last month and endorsed Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket.
“She’s going to have no borders,” Trump said of Harris, later telling reporters that “when we win this November, we will end the Kamala Harris border nightmare once and for all.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports that the Border Patrol has encountered about 10 million illegal aliens on America’s borders under the Biden-Harris administration.
“We went from the best numbers in recorded history to the worst numbers in recorded history,” Trump said of those encounters with illegal aliens.
“We have a Marxist that’s running,” he said of Harris, “and … this country is not ready for a Marxist president. She will never build the wall. She doesn’t want to build the wall.”
Since Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Harris, Trump and many other Republicans have criticized Harris’ leadership, or lack of it, on the nation’s border and immigration policies. Trump repeatedly has claimed that Harris failed as “border czar.”
Although Biden didn’t give Harris that title, he tasked Harris in the third month of his presidency with “leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” according to a White House fact sheet.
Since March 2021, Customs and Border Protection reports, the Border Patrol encountered over 1.9 million illegal aliens from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras along the southern border. The agency said it encountered about the same number of illegal aliens from all nations, not just those three, during all four fiscal years of the Trump-Pence administration.