Republican senators shared grisly details from a trip to the southern border last week, where they said they witnessed evidence of severe sexual abuse of migrant women and children and called on the Biden administration and Congress to take steps to secure the border.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) recounted the evidence of rape, abandoned children, and deaths they saw while touring the Mexican border at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, with Cruz calling the plight of migrants “the worst plague of slavery in America since the Civil War.”
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Cruz brought colored wristbands that he said cartels officiating human smuggling tagged their victims with, each signifying the amounts in thousands of dollars that the person owes the cartel for passing to the United States. One was very small and hadn’t been cut, meaning an even smaller child’s hand slipped out of it.
“In [the second group we encountered] were two 7-year-old girls. Each of her was an unaccompanied minor — their parents weren’t there. They had no family members. They were not sisters. There were two 7-year-old girls all alone with a group of strangers who had been transported by violent drug cartels,” Cruz said. “The Border Patrol showed us a patch of grass about 100 yards from where we were standing where just a couple of weeks earlier two other little girls, 5 and 6 years old, had been violently raped.”
The cartels have “rape trees,” Cruz continued, where they hang the undergarments of women and girls they rape as trophies and “as a taunt to law enforcement.” He also said local landowners showed them pictures of the bodies of migrants who were left for dead on their properties.
“This is not humane. It’s not compassionate,” Cruz said. “It is cruel, it is vicious, it is evil, and it is deliberate.”
Ernst said that compared to her last trip to the border several years ago, the situation is “infinitely worse” today. She also focused on the extreme hazards to young children and related a story she heard from Border Patrol agents about how their search and rescue teams spent two days unsuccessfully searching for the body of a toddler who died in the wilderness.
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“This administration continues to encourage these dangerous journeys with their catch-and-release, open-door border policy,” she said.
Republicans have been pushing for solutions to the escalating crisis at the border. The number of illegal immigrants encountered at the border was 200,000 in June. It’s a decrease from the 240,000 in May, but the number of encounters is still at a historic high.
