Trump has a meeting to discuss human trafficking at border
By Grace Segers
/ CBS News
President Trump is holding a meeting Friday morning to discuss human trafficking at the southern border. Mr. Trump has argued that there is a "humanitarian crisis" at the border involving drug and human trafficking, as well as families and children crossing the border at the mercy of coyotes, as part of his argument to build a border wall. Mr. Trump claims that with a wall, fewer people will cross the border, including women and children asylum speakers.
"Women and children are the biggest victims, by far, of our broken system. This is the tragic reality of illegal immigration on our southern border. This is the cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end," Mr. Trump said in an Oval Office address in early January. He has argued that women and children will not make the difficult journey to the U.S. if there is a wall.
In a Rose Garden address announcing the end of the government shutdown — which occurred because Mr. Trump refused to sign any bill that did not include funding for a border wall, but eventually capitulated without any money for it — the president also went into gruesome detail of women trafficked across the border with duct tape around their mouths.
"Women are tied up. They're bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases, they can't even breathe. They're put in the backs of cars or vans or trucks. They don't go through your port of entry. They make a right turn going very quickly," Mr. Trump said. However, several experts on human trafficking have never heard of such a case, according to the Washington Post.
Mr. Trump also has inflated the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border. He has claimed that building a wall will reduce drug smuggling across the border, but much of that occurs at legal points of entry.
First published on February 1, 2019
© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Grace Segers
Grace Segers is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital.
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