At a time of year for movies that is normally dominated by big-budget blockbusters, this has been the summer of Sound of Freedom. The crowd-funded, low-budget film about child trafficking has greatly overachieved at the box office, bringing in more than ten times its $14.5 million production cost and even beating out Disney’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in its first week.
While the establishment media has been reluctant to acknowledge Sound of Freedom’s success as well as the prevalence of child trafficking, it has also stubbornly refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the immigration policies championed by the anti-borders left and implemented by the Biden administration have greatly enabled the sinister trade depicted in Sound of Freedom that profits off the buying and selling of children.
Lucás Ávila and James Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom.”
The treachery is compounded by the fact that these policies are sold to the American public as “compassion” and acting on the behalf of children. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
There are numerous examples of how the actions of this White House have made it the human trafficking cartels’ de facto business partner. A leaked memo from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed that, as of May 31, the federal government ended familial DNA testing at the southern border. Such testing had been an integral tool in stopping the cartel practice of “renting” young children to clients who pose as the child’s parent to gain passage into the United States.
For an administration that claims to care about migrant children and to have operational control of the border, this may be the most illogical policy imaginable. Yet Team Biden enacted the policy anyway, with little scrutiny from our corporate media that it supposed to be a check on the government but increasingly acts as its propaganda arm.
Migrants walk along a fence at the U.S.-Mexico border before the lifting of Title 42 on May 9, 2023, in Yuma, Arizona. (Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images)
Catch-and-release is another policy that is no doubt popular with the cartel kingpins who are stockpiling cash faster than Tony Montana ever did. Releasing illegal aliens into the United States on the honor system that they will show up for a hearing months or years in the future creates exactly the kind of shadows the child trafficking racket needs to flourish in the U.S.
A boy and man from Honduras are taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico Border on June 12, 2018, near Mission, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)
A Guatemalan adult migrant man and boy cross the U.S.-Mexico border at the Rio Grande between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, on January 26, 2021. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
The more migrants flood the U.S. immigration system, the higher the probability that trafficked children can get through undetected. If the flow of illegal aliens under Donald Trump was a garden hose, Joe Biden turned it into a tsunami. Government data shows that, since Trump’s last year in 2020, CBP encounters with foreign nationals in the country illegally increased more than 400 percent by 2022. How many children are living in quasi-slavery in the U.S. today thanks to such recklessness?
Watch: Sound of Freedom’s Tim Ballard: The Biden Administration Is “Facilitating the Trafficking of Children”
The situation has gotten so bad that even Biden’s top Homeland Security (DHS) officials are admitting that their policies are making the problem worse. Blas Nunez-Neto, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ deputy for border and immigration policy, recently lamented how catch-and-release is enriching the human smuggling cartels. Part of the lure to migrants, Nunez-Neto said, is that illegal aliens in the immigration court system are eligible for Employment Authorization. Again, policies sold to the public as humanitarian acts are serving to empower cartels and ensure even more human trafficking.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) sounds good, but in many cases has turned into a conduit for trafficking children. Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) who are not Mexican are ultimately turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has a track record of losing contact with migrant children released from its custody and releasing them to sponsors under investigation for human trafficking.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks about border security during a briefing at the White House on May 11, 2023, in Washington, DC. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
An uninformed observer could be forgiven for thinking the cartels and the U.S. federal government are partners in the child trafficking operation, with the cartels handling transportation of children to the American border, and the feds then taking custody and distributing the children to clients in the U.S. interior.
In light of this status quo, it is particularly galling to hear Mayorkas preposterously claim that he is “taking it to the cartels.” On the contrary, it’s hard to imagine how the cartels could be so successful without him.
“If you’re making pedophiles happy and making them salivate over your policies, I think it’s time to push pause and reconsider your policies,” Tim Ballard, the real-life hero in Sound of Freedom, said in a recent interview.
Our nation should have pushed the pause button on anti-borders policies a long time ago. If we cannot take such common sense action to combat a practice as evil as child trafficking, then we lack the moral authority to lecture the rest of the world on anything else.
Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) in Washington, D.C, and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.
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