Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) told Breitbart News on Thursday that transnational criminal cartels are “making half a billion dollars a month” via human trafficking due to President Joe Biden’s directives towards the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration.
“What is happening at our southern border … truly is an atrocity,” Malliotakis said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption. “It’s not just a humanitarian crisis. It is literally a national security crisis. The president has turned our borders over to the cartels.”
She reflected on her recent visit to the southern border and migrant holding facilities and talks with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers.
Malliotakis shared, “What we’ve learned during this visit was that Customs and Border Protection has been completely overrun. They are being diverted by this migrant crisis that has been put in place by cartels and smugglers for multiple reasons. The first reason is because they’re making a half a billion dollars a month smuggling individuals.”
She added, “Many of these individuals, by the way, are exploited [and] put into sex trafficking. Many of the children are being abused. Women [and] children being raped, are sexually assaulted along this journey, and as [CBP agents] are being diverted in processing these asylum claims — of which less than ten percent are legitimate asylum claims — they are also being diverted in overseeing these facilities and in some cases they’re babysitting the smaller children who are coming over unaccompanied … with smugglers.”
LISTEN:
The Biden administration’s use of CBP agents as caretakers and babysitters for migrant children smuggled across the southern border without their parents drains human resources which could otherwise be used to better prevent illegal entry into the U.S., Malliotakis noted.
“As [CBP agents] are being diverted, a bunch of other nefarious activities are occurring at the open and porous parts of our border, and that includes the gun trafficking, the drug trafficking, the human trafficking,” she remarked. “There have been multiple reports about the individuals who are criminals that have been caught. One particular [CBP] unit we visited with … had intercepted sex offenders, gang members, convicted criminals, AK-47s, thousands of pounds of drugs — heroin, meth, fentanyl, to name just a few.”
She assessed, “President Biden has allowed this to happen. He’s incentivized this to happen by reversing the policies that President Trump had in place. … He and [Vice President Kamala Karris] need to go there, see what we saw, hear what we heard from the Customs and Border agents who are begging for these policies to be reversed and are begging for the support from our federal government.”
Malliotakis said Democrat policies are facilitating the sexual abuse of migrant women and children.
“Democrats claimed to be the champions of women,” she stated. “They claimed to be the ones who care for children. … We were at this border facility and one of my colleagues heard a story — and the girl was right there, an unaccompanied nine-year-old girl — she tried to talk to her and ask her [why] she was crying to ask her what was wrong. The girl could not respond, and the Border Patrol agent came over and said, ‘She cannot respond because she lost her vocal cords. She was gang raped.’ [A] barely nine-year-old girl.”
The New York Post reported on the incident mentioned by Malliotakis. The paper quoted a Border Patrol agent, who said:
We were going to send [the nine-year-old migrant girl] to the hospital. And as I got closer to her, I noticed that she couldn’t speak. And I asked the medical staff what happened. And the reason she was going to the hospital was because she had gotten gang raped. And the reason that she couldn’t speak was because she had lost her voice in the process while she was getting raped. Those things hit hard.
Malliotakis reiterated that criminal cartels exploit Border Patrol agents’ humanitarian conduct to evade capture.
“A six-month-old baby was thrown in the Rio Grande because [human smugglers] were trying to divert attention … so the CBP would automatically go try to save the baby, and then they could get away,” she said.