Nick Freitas: Are US immigration laws fueling child trafficking?

Laws are often passed under the guise of protecting the vulnerable, but sometimes they hurt the very people they’re intended to protect.

And immigration policy expert Lora Ries is no stranger to this, telling BlazeTV host Nick Freitas that this has been going on for decades when it comes to child trafficking and immigration policy.

“In 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act became law and it created a T visa for victims of trafficking even though we already had something called an S visa, which was nicknamed, you know, the snitch visa,” she explains.

The “snitch visa” allowed immigrants to "temporarily come into the U.S., help this prosecution testify in a criminal case, … and then depart.”

“Instead of using that, which they should have done, they created a T visa, which became both a temporary visa but also a permanent visa,” Ries says.

“It just has become yet another pathway for permanent immigration,” she continues, “And so this victim can then bring in their family members, their parents, who often put them into the trafficking situation to begin with. And on and on.”

Freitas points out that this creates an incentive for “people to send unaccompanied minors into the United States.”

“That may sound very, very generous, but in reality, you’re creating a situation where human traffickers are going to exploit this,” he adds.

Despite the policy being “about prosecution,” Ries explains that when the bill was first introduced in 2000 and passed, “The estimated number of trafficking victims was 600,000 to 800,000."

The State Department reports that this number has now skyrocketed to 27 million.

“So this is not working,” Ries says, “and it gets reauthorized every few years. And just more money going out the door.”

Ries also explains that “when the Department of Homeland Security was created, the House Judiciary Democrats in particular insisted that the functions for giving shelter to unaccompanied minors and sponsors was not going to go in DHS.”

“They said, ‘Nope, it’s going over to the Department of Health and Human Services.’ And so that department receives a lot of money to go to these, you know, anti-trafficking NGOs. And during Biden’s four years, 550,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border,” she continues.

“Four hundred thousand of them, Biden’s HHS lost track of. And so those functions need to be taken away from HHS. It is not HHS’ mission and they’re clearly bad at it, and it needs to go back to DHS,” she adds.

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