Op-ed by Summer Lane | Photo: Alamy
It is a fact that the southern border in the United States has been thrown wide open. President Donald Trump recently told journalist Megyn Kelly that he believed that the number of illegal crossings would hit “15 million” very soon, and anyone who looks at the videos surfacing from the border would likely agree.
As the southern border facilitates mass human and drug trafficking, law-abiding citizens have been left adrift in a sea of chaos as the Biden administration actively refuses to secure the sovereignty of the United States.
A recent Fox News report chillingly detailed allegations made against Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King that suggested the company had participated in illegal child labor practices stemming from utilizing the labor of migrant children who had crossed over the border.
The allegations were included in a letter sent to King from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. The allegations raise serious questions about the millions of minors who are being whisked across the border, only to disappear.
In April, Robin Dunn Marcos, the director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Unaccompanied Alien Children Program, admitted to the House Oversight Committee that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had lost contact with more than 85,000 children over the past two years.
Why are these children vanishing? How is it possible that our government agencies have catastrophically failed to keep track of these kids?
Human trafficking targets children
Over the summer, the smash-hit independent film, “Sound of Freedom,” rocked the July box office and dominated other blockbuster films like “Indiana Jones” and “Mission Impossible,” telling the story of former DHS Agent Tim Ballard and his ongoing quest to rescue trafficked children worldwide.
The film has brought an astonishing level of awareness to the global scourge of human trafficking, which has largely remained hidden in the shadows for the past several decades. According to America’s own U.S. Department of State, there are more than 49.6 million people in modern slavery at any given time (based on statistics from 2021), which includes situations like forced labor or forced marriage. Human traffickers often use children for illegal labor and commercial sex work.
Just in the United States, an estimated 360,000 children go missing every year, and roughly 30 percent of those children end up getting trafficked, according to data from Saved in America (SIA). A horrifying 60 percent of those trafficked children are foster youth, and SIA’s data additionally noted that the sex trafficking industry is second only to drug trafficking in America, generating roughly $99 billion per year.
And yet, the United States is considered among the most civilized and modern countries in the world. But the question remains: how can the United States consider itself a civilized country when thousands of children are being trafficked and abused every year within its borders?
Abortion and America’s waning moral superiority
It’s obvious that the abortion industry targets children. In 2020, there were over 620,000 abortions in the United States, according to data from Pew Research. Of course, abortions in some states have significantly decreased or halted altogether in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Still, the abortion industry’s shockingly callous pursuit of terminating unborn children is disturbingly on par with the other abuses toward society’s most vulnerable members, whether it’s trafficking or forced labor. In every one of these scenarios, a child is irrevocably harmed for the benefit of someone else.
With the abortion industry killing hundreds of thousands of unborn children every year and the trafficking cartels forcing children into abusive labor and sex work at the behest of the unsecured border, so-called American moral superiority seems dead on arrival.
It brings to mind the Biblical passage of Matthew 25:45, which says, “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”
America, under the Biden regime, has fallen to new moral lows. While trafficking and abortion will likely always be an issue in the world, there can be no doubt that bad policies, incompetent federal agencies, lawlessness, and an overall disrespect for the sanctity and dignity of human life are exponentially boosting these problems.
As these issues and more continue to rise to the surface, the American people, as the keepers of their own republic, must not turn a blind eye to the plight of those who are being trafficked and enslaved by corrupt entities. More than ever, the people must support legislation that will protect children, and they must also elect officials who will prioritize securing the southern border and administering justice in the face of the evil actions of human traffickers and abusers.
