Holding and transporting humans against their will, for a variety of reasons, is a problem as old as humanity. This is, in a word, slavery, and a modern-day slave trade is going on, right now, all over the world. Some cultures turn the other way and tacitly allow it.
Here in the modern (in this context, you can read that as "post-Stone Age") world, we abhor human trafficking - this modern-day slave trade. But it's still going on, and in recent years has been encouraged, right here in the United States, by the previous presidential administration's open-border policies. It's still happening now, at a scale that is nothing short of horrifying.
An epidemic sweeping the country’s roadways and causing human trafficking victims to vanish without a trace is being highlighted on the heels of one of the largest child-smuggling busts in United States history.
Individuals being trafficked along interstate highways has become increasingly common throughout the U.S. However, data regarding just how many victims are transported along interstate highways remains unavailable, largely due to the secretive nature of such crimes.
The interstate highway angle is key; more on that in a moment. Now, under the Trump administration, there's a crackdown underway, but the problem is still a huge one, and the federal government, along with state and local authorities, is engaged in a frustrating game of Whack-a-Mole.
In November, a multi-regional operation involving several federal, state and local agencies resulted in the rescue of 122 missing or endangered children from ten states, according to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.
The mission, referred to as "Operation Home for the Holidays," marked one of the largest child-recovery efforts in the country’s history, and included children ranging in age from 23 months to 17 years old.
This is good news, of course. But there are a lot more perps to catch, and people to set free.
Many of these people are being moved through the United States using our road networks, often stuffed like cattle into cargo trailers. They are now, as reported, making use of the interstate highway system, but that can change literally at a moment's notice. As I reported recently, illegal alien drivers are increasingly turning to secondary roads, state highways, and local roads to move illicit cargoes. The western United States, in particular, is a massive web of these local roads, making it nearly impossible to cover all of them.
Read More: Wyoming Sting: ICE Now to Deport 40 Undocumented Truckers
The problem is, this is a lucrative enterprise. There's a lot of money in this modern-day slave trade. It's hard to find an exact figure; these are criminal acts, after all, and the perps don't exactly file tax returns. But estimates run as high as $150 million per year, globally.
Here are some more figures that should horrify any civilized person:
In the United States alone, there are nearly 200,000 cases of human trafficking every year, according to the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The peak reporting year was 2022.
Of those cases, roughly 81 percent of the victims are trafficked for sexual purposes. The remainder are primarily for involuntary labor. 25 percent of the trafficking victims are children. 75 percent are female. Half are U.S. citizens.
It's not just a Latin American problem.
Read More: New: Law Enforcement Busts Massive Chinese Human Trafficking Op
Now, American authorities are doing great work recovering victims, especially children.
It's time we started calling this what it is: A slave trade.
"These traffickers bring them from different cities and essentially sell them as human goods," Toby Braun, founder of American Special Investigative Group, told Fox News Digital. "They sexually abuse them and also [force them] to create material for them."
Victims are often transported between traffickers using interstate highways throughout the country, with a particular emphasis on states and cities with marine ports and international airports.
This is a problem as old as mankind, but that doesn't make it any less heinous.
Addressing this will take a huge investment in law enforcement and prosecutorial resources. It will require removing the financial increment by identifying the closing avenues for laundering money and moving it internationally. Closing the borders will help, but this is also a domestic problem, with the FBI carrying much of the burden of domestic enforcement, but the FBI is going through something of a reboot under the directorship of Kash Patel, who is pushing the FBI away from its recent and well-deserved reputation for being a nakedly partisan agency.
The left makes a lot of arguments about slavery, but they fall strangely silent when this matter is brought up. This is slavery, a slave trade, happening right here, right now, today. The left loves to talk about history, about a slave trade that ended 200 years ago, practices that have been illegal in the United States since 1865, but what about what's happening right now, right here?
Crickets.
There are thousands of people, mostly women and children, mostly bound for sexual servitude, right now, right here, in the United States. This is an intolerable problem, one that has to be addressed.
