Sen. Ron Johnson is main an effort by Republican senators to induce 4 of their Democratic counterparts with related committee chairmanships to carry hearings on human trafficking.
“Given your committees’ roles in overseeing [the Department of Homeland Security], we urge you to analyze and maintain hearings into DHS’s efforts to fight human trafficking,” Johnson, R-Wis., and the opposite Republican senators wrote in a letter to the Democrats, who management the committees by advantage of their occasion’s majority within the Senate.
Co-signed by all 49 GOP senators, the letter, dated July 27, got here two days after the docudrama movie “Sound of Freedom” — based mostly on the true story of Tim Ballard, a former Homeland Safety agent who rescued a whole lot of youngsters in Colombia from sex-trafficking — was proven to members of Congress on Capitol Hill in a particular screening.
The letter is addressed to Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., chairman of the Everlasting Subcommittee on Investigations; Richard Durbin, D-Sick., chairman of the Judiciary Committee; Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Homeland Safety and Governmental Affairs Committee; and Robert Menendez, D-N.J., chairman of the Overseas Relations Committee.
Republicans level to what they are saying is “the Biden administration’s open-border coverage” for “facilitating the multibillion-dollar enterprise mannequin of a few of the most evil folks on the planet — drug-, human-, and sex-traffickers.”
The letter consists of quite a few statistics on unlawful crossings on the border, together with information from Customs and Border Safety, which “reported over 2.3 million encounters on the southwest border, together with 152,057 encounters of unaccompanied and single minors” in fiscal 2022.
The GOP senators additionally cited the Rand Corp., a nonpartisan institute that performs analysis and evaluation, which has estimated that “14,500 to 17,500 individuals are trafficked into the USA annually to carry out bonded or compelled labor.”
The quantity is probably going greater, because the U.S. is presently ranked because the “prime vacation spot for youngster sex-trafficking.” In consequence, Republican senators instructed their Democratic counterparts, “with out our consideration and management, human trafficking will proceed to plague this nation.”
The GOP senators concluded their letter by urging the Democrats to capitalize on the momentum “Sound of Freedom” has initiated “in creating public consciousness of this modern-day type of slavery,” by holding hearings on sex-trafficking of their respective committees.
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