News Reporter: Fact Checker: Is there a human trafficking crisis at the southern border?

Friday, 8 February 2019

Fact Checker: Is there a human trafficking crisis at the southern border?

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

Is there a human trafficking crisis at the southern border?

In recent weeks, President Trump has used human trafficking statistics as evidence of the need for wall at the southern border. He says traffickers illegally cross the border because "human trafficking by airplane is almost impossible," that there is "an invasion of our country by human traffickers," and "thousands of young girls and women" are smuggled across the border for prostitution with "duct tape put around their face."

Let's dig in. In fiscal 2018, the Justice Department initiated 230 human trafficking prosecutions. That's an 18 percent decline from the year before. Most of the cases involve U.S. citizens and you have to do some digging to find a case tied to the southern border. Of the 450 trafficking victims the FBI identified in fiscal 2017, it's unclear how many are from Central America, but clearly not thousands.

A database maintained by the Human Trafficking Legal Center, which assists victims, found that of the 1,435 federal cases dating back to 2009, only 26 involved kidnapping and 29 involved smuggling. Only one mentioned "duct tape" — but that 2012 case involved the victim being required to wear duct tape during sex. Plus, the United Nations found that 79 percent of international trafficking journeys go through official points of entry — like airports.

On just about every level, the president's rhetoric on human trafficking far exceeds the available data, either from within the government or from outside sources. He earns Four Pinocchios.

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Another year, another factually flawed State of the Union address

President Trump's State of the Union speech once again was chock-full of stretched facts and dubious figures. Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, some have even been awarded the Bottomless Pinocchio, yet the president persists in using them. We found nearly thirty falsehoods on a wide range of topics scattered throughout the president's remarks. Here's a sampling:

He claimed to have added "5.3 million new jobs" and "600,000 new manufacturing jobs." Nope. He's including the last few months of Obama's term. He said "more people are working now" than ever before in U.S. history. That's because there are more people. He claimed to have "unleashed a revolution in American energy" and the U.S. is now "the number one producer of oil and natural gas." That revolution began a decade ago. The U.S. has led the world in natural gas production since 2009 and in crude oil since 2018. The U.S. hasn't spent "$7 trillion in the Middle East," nor did Trump stop North Korea in it's tracks. And, as we've previously reported, there's no new security crisis at the border.

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Political polarization has grown. The loss of local newspapers hasn't helped.

The number of local newspapers has declined dramatically over the last two decades and many of those that remain are shells of what they once were. Research is still scant on how the decline shakes out into other areas of American society. But a new study comparing voting data from communities where newspapers have closed to where they are still operating found that in areas where newspapers closed voters were less likely to split a ticket. In other words, those communities were becoming more polarized.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

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Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup.

— Meg Kelly