Kamala Harris traveled to Arizona to visit the southern border on a campaign trip on Friday—a trip House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green described as “little more than the arsonist returning to the scene of the fire.”
“This issue [immigration] cannot be reduced to a political issue,” Vice President Harris declared in 2021 after her last visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. “We’re talking about children; we’re talking about families; we are talking about suffering.”
Harris has championed President Joe Biden’s open border policies, which reversed many of the border control strategies enacted by the Trump administration. Yet these reversals have encouraged criminal groups to perpetuate unthinkable acts of human suffering along the southern border.
There are currently an estimated 1.1 million victims of human trafficking in the United States. Illegal immigrants form a large percentage of exploited individuals.
While human trafficking is often associated with commercial sex, it also extends to the coercion of other labor or services. Illegal immigrants are particularly vulnerable to this sort of exploitation. Traffickers blackmail victims, who are often fearful of seeking help from law enforcement officials because of their citizenship status. The disorienting effect of a dramatic change in location—new language, different cultural norms, unfamiliar surroundings, lack of social support structures, and uncertainty of legal constraints—feed vulnerabilities and may lead to victimization.
The Biden-Harris administration’s policies on immigration have only worsened this crisis. Since Biden took office, more than 10 million inadmissible aliens have crossed the border, creating a startling new bank of labor and sex slaves for trafficking rings to exploit. Alarmingly, federal human trafficking convictions have been cut almost in half over the last three years.
As human traffickers go unpunished, victims continue to live in cycles of horror day after day. The southwest border has become a hotbed for human smuggling and, by extension, immigrant exploitation. Many victims are children.
A congressional witness testified in 2023, “A child can be sold up to 20 times per day, six days a week, for 10 years or even longer, depending on when the abuse began.” Some experts estimate that cartels traffic around 60% of alien children crossing the southern border alone or with smugglers.
Cartel smugglers exploit unaccompanied alien children for profit by cycling them through repeatedly across ports of entry in “fake families.” Others are abused in the heartbreakingly lucrative sex trafficking and child pornography industry.
The Biden-Harris administration’s policy releases children to people claiming to be their parents within 72 hours of crossing into the United States. Unfortunately, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security policy changes eliminated DNA testing between families to verify their relationship. The administration prioritizes the quick release of families and children over the security of young children vulnerable to criminal exploitation, emotionally weaponizing the plight of unaccompanied alien children to do so.
Expedited processes with fewer security and verification measures undermine safety practices not only for American citizens but also for aliens themselves. A Florida grand jury investigation revealed a chilling statement from an Office of Refugee Resettlement attorney instructing a federal employee to stop delaying release processes by asking questions about potentially unsafe sponsors. “We only get sued for keeping them too long. We don’t get sued by traffickers. Are we clear?”
When asked by Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul about whether the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies have crafted one of the worst human trafficking events of his lifetime, Tim Ballard, former special agent for the Department of Homeland Security on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, answered, “Absolutely … the policies absolutely made this possible.”
Biden-Harris border policies do not only make American citizens less safe but endanger the lives of aliens crossing the border. Border strategies must protect vulnerable populations from criminal exploitation. The first solution is the most straightforward—closing the open border and stopping illegal immigration.