Teen Migrant Claims She Was Repeatedly Raped During Journey to U.S.

A 17-year-old girl from Honduras apprehended by Border Patrol agents claims she was sexually assaulted multiple times during her two-month journey through Mexico.

Del Rio Sector Border Patrol agents near Eagle Pass on March 8 encountered a young Honduran girl. During a processing interview that includes a medical screening, the 17-year-old unaccompanied minor said she was sexually assaulted multiple times in January and February as she traveled from Honduras to the Texas border.

“Migrants who choose to make the journey to illegally enter the United States place themselves at the mercy of smugglers who have no regard for life or safety,” Del Rio Sector Acting Chief Patrol Agent Matthew J. Hudak said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, this child’s story is not unique.”

Her story is so common that every migrant girl over the age of ten apprehended after crossing the border from Mexico is given a pregnancy test, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen testified before Congress last week.

“Because of the increase in violence, at ICE, when we have families with children, we have to give every girl a pregnancy test over 10. This is not a safe journey,” the secretary said during her broadcasted testimony.

Statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security show that at least one in three females migrating to the U.S. through Mexico become victims of sexual assault. President Donald Trump reiterated that fact during a speech in February.

In April 2016, Breitbart News warned about the attacks on migrant women and girls that do not stop at the border. In an article, article, Rape Trees, Dead Migrants and the Consequences of an Open Border, Breitbart News reported:

Women and young girls from Central America are routinely given birth control or morning-after pills by their mothers in anticipation of the likely sexual assaults that will occur on their illicit journey to the United States.

These females are often raped immediately upon making it to their first stop once they arrive in a Mexican stash house from Guatemala. They then are shipped to the U.S.-Mexico border, usually to Reynosa, Mexico, immediately south of McAllen, Texas. In the process of making it from the first stash house to the second, the women and young girls are often sexually assaulted or raped again by the smuggler–or group of smugglers–taking them between the two locations. The sexual assaults and rapes then often happen again in the second Mexican stash house of their journey.

After news outlets attempted to discredit reports from the President about sexually assaulted migrants, The New York Times offered confirmation, Breitbart News reported.

In the article titled, You Have to Pay with Your Body: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence on the Border, the newspaper reported on accounts in the Rio Grande Valley where women and young girls are frequently raped in stash houses.

The article states:

Gladys, 45, a mother of four from Guatemala, said she was kidnapped by armed smugglers after crossing the border and jumped out of a car to escape, but was captured again. For days, she was held prisoner at a stash house in McAllen and forced to have sex with six men. “I thought it would be better if I died when I fell from the car,” she said.

The article continues:

The New York Times found dozens of documented cases through interviews with law enforcement officials, prosecutors, federal judges and immigrant advocates around the country, and a review of police reports and court records in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. The review showed more than 100 documented reports of sexual assault of undocumented women along the border in the past two decades, a number that likely only skims the surface, law enforcement officials and advocates say.

In addition, interviews with migrant women and those working with them along the border point to large numbers of cases that are either unreported or un-examined, suggesting that sexual violence has become an inescapable part of the collective migrant journey.

In another article in late February, The New York Times also reported:

Undocumented women have been duct-taped and tied up before, during and after their migration to the United States, The Times discovered while reporting this story. Maybe not frequently, but it has happened.

“Because I didn’t want to let them, they tied my feet together and my hands behind my back,” a 45-year-old Honduran woman told us in an interview. She said she was raped after her smugglers forced her into prostitution shortly after she illegally crossed the border in Texas. The woman, who now lives in Austin and who asked to be identified by her first name, Lucy, was held captive in a makeshift brothel in the South Texas city of McAllen.

…

In one trailer home in Carrizo Springs, Tex., smugglers raped a Salvadoran woman and tortured two men — covering the men’s hands with plastic bags, putting their hands on a stool and pounding their fingers with a hammer — all because their relatives failed to pay the fees.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.