Human Trafficking Policy and Arrests

I want to make it clear today that

my administration will focus on a very specific issue,

and that I am ending the absolutely horrific practice of human trafficking,

and I am prepared to bring the full force and

weight of our government to the federal,

and at the federal level, and the other highest levels

that we can do in order to solve this horrific problem.

It's getting worse, and it's happening in the United States,

in addition to the rest of the world,

but it's happening in the United States, which is terrible.

After President Trump was sworn in, we started to see

an uptick in human trafficking arrests within days of becoming president.

For example,

on January 29th, authorities announced that 474 were arrested

in a statewide California human trafficking operation, and 28 sexually exploited children were rescued.

From January 18th to February 5th,

108 were arrested in Illinois as part of a national sex trafficking sting operation.

In Texas,

178 people were arrested for sex trafficking in a sting operation

that operated in January during the Super Bowl.

16 people were arrested in January in Michigan

for sex trafficking during the Detroit Auto Show,

and in February of that year, authorities arrested 11 in Virginia in a child sex trafficking sting.

President Trump gave a listening session in the White House,

surrounded by advocates who have been working to combat child sex trafficking

with the federal government for many years.

And President Trump looked into the camera and said,

over the past four weeks, we have been working

with the government harder than ever before to end the scourge of human trafficking.

Dedicated men and women across the federal government have focused

on this for some time, as you know, obviously dealing with the federal government,

and it's been much more focused over the last four weeks,

I can tell you that.

There has never been an administration that has done this much,

signed this many bills into law to combat human trafficking, or

allocated this much money to help the victims.

Now here's some things that President Trump's administration has done

to combat human trafficking that rarely gets covered by the mainstream media

that all of you can go on WhiteHouse.gov and look up.

President Trump has signed nine bills into law addressing human trafficking.

President Trump has awarded over $35 million in grants

that goes to victims of human trafficking.

Now, President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 that

seized the assets of people involved in human rights abuses,

and has also passed executive orders that would seize money from abusers and allocate that money to the victims.

The mainstream media has not been fair to Jeff Sessions at all.

What they failed to report is that it was his Department of Justice

that was behind many of the sting operations to combat child sex trafficking,

and he made it very clear in many speeches that ending human trafficking was an absolute priority for his Department of

Justice. In 2017,

after Jeff Sessions addressed law enforcement in a training session to combat human trafficking,

we started to see not only more pedophile and child sex trafficking arrests,

we started to see more high-profile arrests.

We saw Mayor de Blasio's staffer and CNN guest Jacob Schwartz arrested

in May of 2017 for possession of 3,000 images of child porn, including the rape of a six-month-old baby.

We saw former Oklahoma State Senator Ralph Shorty charged

with sex trafficking in the production of child porn.

Unfortunately,

we also saw many people arrested for pedophilia,

child porn, and or child sex trafficking that were involved in law enforcement.

For example,

former Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department psychologist Michael Dane Ward,

Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputy Adam W. Godbee facing child pornography charges

after more than 30 images and videos were found on his cell phone and laptop at his home.

New York Sheriff's Deputy Peter Farnham was arrested on child porn that year in July.

A former Secret Service agent, Lee Robert Moore, was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017

for sending sexually explicit messages to minors while on duty at the White House.

Authorities charged California's former Deputy Attorney General Raymond Joseph Liddy with possession of child porn in July of that year.

In 2018, what we started to see is we saw more high-profile arrests of sexual predators,

pedophiles, and child sex traffickers.

We saw the arrest of Harvey Weinstein.

We saw Kevin Spacey.

We saw the arrest of all the elites involved in the NXIVM child sex trafficking cult.

Allison Mack, Keith Raniere, Claire Bronfman.

What did we also see? We saw that our DOJ seized Backpage.

Backpage was one of the biggest catalysts for online child sex trafficking.

Backpage operated and was involved in child sex trafficking in almost 100 countries.

And it was President Trump's DOJ under Attorney General Jeffrey Session that

shut down those child sex trafficking operations that were operating in almost 100 countries.

That's a huge deal.

So in 2019, we started to see some much bigger fish go down.

Of course, that was the year that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested.

And then this year, 2020, we saw the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Furthermore,

President Trump announced during the COVID lockdown with General Milley that

the United States military was conducting many operations to combat drug trafficking and human trafficking.

President Trump specifically talked about a secret military operation commanded by General Milley, who is a highest ranking US military official,

that led to the rescue of a girl who dealt with the most horrific abuse

that anyone could deal with next to death, according to President Trump.

There are the activities of human trafficking and especially with respect to women.

And as you know, proportionally, it's mostly women.

And it's a horrible thing. It's a horrible thing. And

there's never been a time like it. And it's because of the Internet.

And this is all over the world.

But for the most part, they're coming through in this country.

They're coming through the southern border. But

we're hitting them very hard. They have tremendous illegal trafficking in women and children also,

but mostly in women. And it's illegal and it's horrible and it's disgraceful.

And I've seen things that are an absolute disgrace. And we're trying to knock them out and we're knocking them hard.

President Trump has been working behind the scenes with other foreign leaders globally to shut down human trafficking forever.

Our U.S. government works with the government in Romania to extradite a child porn kingpin back to the United States so he could face justice.

These kinds of stories are happening all the time.

They're happening regularly, but you never hear about it in the mainstream media.

A lot of these military operations are pervert and they're not reported on.

But that doesn't mean that they're not happening. What else happened this year?

We had mass arrests of members of the CJNG cartel.

Hundreds and hundreds of members arrested.

And we had dozens of MS-13 members arrested.

Some of them arrested for drug trafficking.

Some of them arrested for human trafficking. But I can't emphasize enough that human and drug trafficking go hands in hands.

And the MS-13 members and the CJNG cartel members are usually operatives for much bigger fish.

One last thing that President Trump has done to combat human trafficking that I want to address is building the border wall.

What most people don't understand is that the biggest artery for human trafficking is at the border.

And Trump said that human trafficking,

thanks to the wall and thanks to the efforts with ICE, is now down 96%.

Ask yourself, why is it that all these pedophiles, from the lower hanging fruit to the bigger fish, were

allowed to be untouched for years and years and years until President Trump was sworn in as president?

For more UN videos visit www.un.org