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It might be pushing it to call the Trump administration’s family separation policy a cause of the national rise in the sexual trafficking of children, but there is evidence to suggest what analysts would call an “association.”
The years of the separation program, which started, we now know, in the early days of the Trump administration, in 2017, a year before it was publicly announced by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, were years in which human trafficking became one of the fastest growing crimes in the United States.
More data to support the “association”: the children being separated from their parents were statistically perfect targets for trafficking. They weren’t just unparented and they weren’t just homeless, they were internationally homeless migrant refugees… perfectly unprotected from trafficking predators. They checked box after box on the list of vulnerabilities to sex trafficking victimization.
And beyond the statistical data, there is this real-world information. Border control officers and journalists on both sides of the Mexican-America border have noticed – where large groups of displaced children gather, known traffickers work the crowds of boys and girls.
