Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 08:51 pm
Ivanka Trump, the person who is supposed to represent everyday women in the Trump White House, said of human trafficking on Friday, “No one can meet with a survivor without being deeply moved.”
Kellyanne Conway, who doesn’t believe the vetted women who accused Trump SCOTUS Brett Kavanaugh or those many women who accused Trump himself, suggested these human trafficking stories are under-reported.
Meeting participants on Friday took turns telling horror stories about people who were trafficked over the southern border. “When they get here, really a nightmare,” said Joel Roundtree, an HSI special agent, according to the White House pool report sent to PoliticusUSA.
The Trump White House held a meeting Friday on human trafficking. Before you get excited that this could be a sign of missing-in-action humanity on the part of the Trump administration, Trump is using this issue to advance his wall and try to paint Speaker Nancy Pelosi as someone who is advancing human trafficking.
“Nancy Pelosi is doing a very, very great disservice to our country,” Trump said, trying to push the Speaker to pay for his wall for which he falsely promised Mexico would pay. You can file this comment along with the one that Democrats want his wall. That is to say, it is simply inaccurate. A lie, even a bold-faced one. There is no evidence that Democrats support his wall. None.
Trump claimed that human trafficking is a problem that specifically can be helped by the wall. Trump said people couldn’t just go through a point of entry with people “bound up and all sorts of problems.”
To carry on our theme of Reality V Trump, reality is almost the opposite. Research has shown that it is Trump’s own “tough” immigration laws that put migrants at greater risk of being trafficked.
And when Trump tried this tact in 2017, NBC News pointed out that experts and even his own Department of Homeland Security said they couldn’t guarantee how a wall would impact trafficking.
Dottie Laster, executive director of the Heidi Search Center in San Antonio, Texas, and a human trafficking expert, explained NBC News that “the challenges of getting into the United States is a tool traffickers — sometimes called coyotes — use to their advantage.”
Thomson Reuters Foundation published research in June of this year, funding for which was provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation, that showed that Trump‘s tougher immigration laws were driving victims of human trafficking into hiding and put migrants at risk. “But worried and silenced by the nation’s hardened attitude toward migrants, frightened workers face greater risk of falling victim to forced labor, trafficking, wage theft and debt bondage, advocates and officials…”
As for Ivanka‘s heart-warming comment that no one can hear these stories and not be moved, that’s true, but only because these stories serve Trump.
The horrific stories of gang rape did not move anyone in the Trump administration.
First Lady Melania Trump said victims of sexual assault need to provide “really hard evidence” when going public with their accusations.
This is, of course, a great point unless one is dealing with the facts, and the facts are that there are seldom witnesses to sexual assault and the only evidence is physical and can be explained away by saying it was consensual. This is why victims face such huge legal hurdles having the crimes perpetrated against them adjudicated.
So, no one can remain unmoved except… Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump, , Melania Trump, Senate Republicans… Basically no one is a survivor unless their story helps Trump‘s political agenda.
The Trump administration believes victims of human trafficking (right now, when selling the wall), but they do not believe American citizens who have been raped. There is a grotesque callousness about using an issue the entire Republican Party has said doesn’t matter for a Supreme Court Justice to advocate for a wall no one but the ever-dwindling Trump base wants.
Only an empty shell of an alleged human being would use a horrible crime against women and children to push for a solution that will actually not do anything to protect those vulnerable people.
There are bonus points in Hell for caging these vulnerable children and justifying that by wrongly accusing their parents of committing a crime by seeking asylum in this country.
There are even more points when one is defending a serial-accused sexual assaulter and is now using sexual crime to drive support for broken campaign promise.
And finally, super duper extra points for not believing any women and women who were children at the time who come forward against any Republican man, but suddenly believing women and children when it advances one’s political agenda.
Nancy Pelosi isn’t the person who is doing a very, very great disservice to our country. Trump‘s got that covered from top to bottom. Ivanka Trump is supposed to be the compassionate public relations model for the Trump administration, but she is sadly all lip-service and no action.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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