Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has posted a pair of videos on Twitter exposing what he calls the “worst plague of slavery in America since the Civil War.”
Cruz made the nighttime videos recently while accompanying border officials and six other Republican senators to the border in the Rio Grande valley. Noting that the illegal aliens he encountered included two seven-year-old girls who had been entrusted by their parents to human smugglers to make the journey from Guatemala to the border, Cruz asked:
What monster would allow policies that result in seven-year-old girls being handed over to human traffickers? We found a patch of grass not far from the river where just a few weeks ago they found two little girls, ages five and six, both of whom had been raped.
Cruz displayed wristbands of various colors that he found discarded on the U.S. bank of the river, which he said identify how much the wearer has paid to the cartel and how much they still owe.
These children come in in debt to vicious cartels thousands and thousands of dollars. The teenage boys work for the gangs in every city in America, and the teenage girls experience a hell worse than that, with far too many of them human-trafficked into sex slavery. This is not compassionate. This is not humane. This is barbaric. . . . Joe Biden could stop it. We’re a year and half into the Biden presidency, and Joe Biden could not be bothered to drag his ass down here to the border. Kamala Harris–she’s supposedly the border czar–cannot be bothered to come to the Rio Grande valley. . . This is wrong, and it needs to stop.
In addition to showing a steady flow of migrants across the border, the videos include still shots of the bodies of migrants recently found dead. A study released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) earlier this month labeled the U.S./Mexico border the “deadliest migration land route in the world,” accounting for at least 728 deaths in 2021. The study added the following disclaimer: “[T]he project stresses that even these numbers do not capture the entire picture due to a lack of official sources to collect data, meaning that the study’s figures represent a significant undercount.” [Emphasis added.]
For the Cruz videos, see this July 25 tweet and this one from July 15.