When I was 21, I experienced a traumatic event: I was raped by a foreign exchange student in my college dormitory. Like many survivors, I didn't feel comfortable reporting the assault immediately and he returned to his home country without facing any charges for his actions, leaving me with lingering questions and concerns about whether he might harm others.
The feeling of being preyed on, targeted, and attacked by someone who was able to easily skirt the law has never left me. And now it’s a story we’re seeing repeated again and again because of broken borders.
Among the millions of people who have poured into our country claiming asylum are potentially tens of thousands of foreign nationals with nefarious intentions to harm the most vulnerable members of our society. Sanctuary cities have allowed these criminal aliens to evade deportation, suffering the minimum consequences, and moving freely throughout our country looking for their next victim.
This was how Laken Riley, who was just a year older than myself at the time of my sexual assault, came into contact with her rapist and murder. While the public knows her story, there are thousands of other victims that go nameless.
It’s not just American women who fall victim to these predators. Millions of young women and children have been put into the care of human smugglers and coyotes, enticed by the promise that they’d be allowed easy entry into the United States because of Joe Biden’s border policy. In July 2023, the FBI located 200 women and girls in just two weeks who had been sex trafficked. Countless more will fall through the cracks or accept sexual exploitation and assault as the price of coming across the border.
President Biden's administration claims to hold the moral high ground with their "safe, orderly, and humane" border policies, allowing millions to enter our country on frivolous asylum claims. Their official policy is to "release now, vet later." There is nothing compassionate about exposing American women and children to foreign criminals from around the world who either bypass Border Patrol, lie about having credible fear, or game the system to stay in our country. Open borders are not progressive.
Migrants and their human traffickers, paid by the Mexican drug cartels, know our laws better than our politicians in Washington, DC. They’re trained to know every loophole, what to say to Border Patrol, where to find NGOs, and which cities offer the best welfare programs. They also can rely on social media to help them figure out how to manipulate the system.
I witnessed this firsthand during a recent trip to the border near Nogales, Arizona. At one migrant camp, over 100 migrants, including a sizable number of military-aged men from Southeast Asia as well as dozens of young girls from South America, Africa, and Asia, slept in tents and tarps and around makeshift kitchens with free WiFi, waiting eagerly for hours in the hopes that Border Patrol agents would, quite literally, help transport them into our country.
My visit to the border made it clear that our current policies are not designed to stop illegal immigration and cut off the profits of the Mexican drug cartels. Instead, the policies are meant to facilitate the arrival of migrants into our country – providing a constant stream of customs for the cartels and an endless flow of migrant women and young girls for coyotes to take advantage of along the way. It’s all about facilitating and managing the logistics of the border crisis, but not putting a stop to it. Under Joe Biden, our nation’s border policy is a very expensive Uber service for the world’s migrants, none of whom are properly vetted beforehand.
President Trump’s policies like Remain in Mexico and Asylum Cooperative Agreements with El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala helped massively stem the flow of migrants, thus saving countless women and girls from being placed in the arms of predator cartel traffickers and discouraging migrants with no legal claims to asylum from making the journey.
Our border policy puts millions of women and girls in direct contact with predators who view them as easy targets. Human smugglers and criminal aliens have used President Biden’s border policies as open season. If we want to get serious about protecting vulnerable members of our society and curb the attacks on women, we need President Trump’s policies on the border. Joe Biden’s open borders that are supposed to invoke compassion are just empty words and open invitations for criminals from across the world.