Human Trafficking and the U.S.-Mexico Border

Earlier this week, The White House released a statement that uses the complex issue of human trafficking as another reason to justify building a wall across the country’s southern border, a claim the President repeated in his State of the Union address to Congress. While we believe the U.S. government has an important role to play in combatting human trafficking in all its forms, President Trump is distorting facts and politicizing one of the few issues that has benefited from bipartisan support over the last two decades. Furthermore, conflating his border wall demand with an urgent humanitarian crisis shifts attention away from the many organizations and survivors who are working on solutions to prevent and address the root causes of this complex issue and the systems that perpetuate it. Inflammatory rhetoric deployed to score a political victory undermines these efforts, as well as U.S. leadership on this issue.

To learn more, we refer you to these resources from HU’s partners:

Letter to Congress from the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking and Freedom Network: https://endslaveryandtrafficking.org/atest-letter-to-congress-in-advance-of-2019-state-of-the-union-address/

Statement from Polaris: https://polarisproject.org/news/press-releases/polaris-statement-border-wall-and-human-trafficking

This article in The New Yorker, supported by The Fuller Project for International Reporting: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-hypocrisy-of-trumps-anti-trafficking-argument-for-a-border-wall