Trump is titillated by trafficking

U. S. President Donald Trump has been painting a wildly inaccurate picture of human trafficking in his effort to sell a border wall that would not make a meaningful difference in fighting the problem, experts on trafficking say.

Over the past two weeks, Trump has repeatedly told lurid stories about women being “thrown into the back seat of a car, or thrown into a van with no windows, with no form of air,” and smuggled over undefended parts of the border with “tape over their mouths, electrical tape.”

“They tape their face, their hair, their hands behind their back, their legs. They put them in the back seat of cars and vans, and they go — they don’t come in through your port of entry, because you’d see them. You couldn’t do that,” he said in his speech to the American Farm Bureau on Monday.

Six trafficking experts from around the U.S. told the Star that they had met no trafficking victims who had suffered anything like the experience Trump described.

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Rather, they are subjected to either verbal coercion, such as threats against their families, or promises of a hopeful future.

“It is far easier to lure victims with false promises of a better life in the United States,” said Vandenberg. “Why kidnap someone when you can convince them to travel willingly?”

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Vandenberg said a search of her organization’s database of federal trafficking cases found just 26 cases in which kidnapping charges were also filed, less than 2 per cent of all cases.

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A high proportion of trafficked Latin American women, the experts said, come into the country legally, on U.S. visas. Others enter illegally but are not bound and gagged, nor driven in vehicles through remote unfenced areas.

“Either he’s watching action films or he’s watching some other type of movie that involves handcuffs and tape over people’s mouths. But in neither case is it based in any reality of what individuals helping trafficking victims see,” said Lori Cohen, director of the Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Sanctuary for Families, a New York service provider for sex trafficking victims.

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Trump has also claimed that a border wall could “eliminate” human trafficking from Mexico, or at least “90, 95 per cent; a tremendous percentage would stop.” This is not even close to accurate, the experts said, given how traffickers use the visa system.

Many victims, they said, arrive on visas fraudulently obtained by traffickers. Others are exploited by traffickers after they independently arrive in the U.S. on visas. None of these people would be helped by a wall.

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[Others say] a wall would merely cause certain traffickers to take more risks and impose higher debts. And they noted that Trump’s own policies have quietly made life harder for the trafficking victims he is purporting to fight for in the wall battle.

His administration has cut the number of “T” visas that protect trafficking victims from deportation when they agree to work with law enforcement. It has also decided to routinely require people whose “T” applications are denied to appear before an immigration judge, the first step in deportation proceedings.

If Trump is serious about addressing trafficking, Cohen said, he should abandon policies that “play into the hands of the pimps.”

  Daniel Dale

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.