Donald Trump’s lurid, increasingly detailed descriptions of women trafficked over the southern border “bound, duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths, in many cases they can’t even breathe,” have been drawing attention both because of their sweaty-palmed, obsessive nature and because … nobody seems to know where the stories came from. It’s not just a mystery for you and me and immigration and trafficking advocates. It’s a mystery for the leadership of Customs and Border Protection, too.
After the tape story started getting media attention, an acting assistant chief at Border Patrol sent out a ”‘Quick Turnaround: RFI taped-up women smuggled into the U.S.” email, Vox reports. “Please forward any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims ‘that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans,’” and do it fast, agents were told.
We don’t know what the responses were, but it’s safe to say mouth-taped, trafficked women are not such a widespread phenomenon that the heads of the agency supposedly battling the problem are even aware it exists.