Tennessee Passes Landmark Human Smuggling Legislation into Law
On May 27, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed groundbreaking state-level human smuggling legislation into law.
Mass illegal immigration into our country during the Biden administration has turned every state into a border state. Increased supply of dangerous drugs such as fentanyl, combined with expanded human trafficking, have caused a severe strain on states and community resources.
Hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied children have been released to sponsors across the country. In all too many cases, these sponsors were actually fronts for traffickers. An unknown number of unaccompanied children fell into the full control of the cartels and blackmarket human traffickers.
States must pass laws to deter illegal immigration and give state and local law enforcement the tools they need to perform duties to stop and apprehend human smugglers. States should continue working to find solutions to mitigate the dangers associated with allowing millions of unvetted illegal aliens to cross into America and ensure public safety. Tennessee has taken the lead with its new human smuggling law.
Even before the Trump administration designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a relationship had been forming between transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups in terms of human smuggling. Cartels have leveraged existing drug smuggling “ratlines” across the US southern border to establish human smuggling corridors. Now, they reportedly make more money off of human smuggling than they do off of drug smuggling. This is because the overwhelming majority of human smuggling victims are young females who are sold into sex slavery where they become ongoing sources of revenue.
The key difference today is that the revenue stream is providing material support for foreign terrorist organizations.
Just as worrisome is the fact that over the past 4 years of Biden-Mayorkas malfeasance, cartels used the same routes to smuggle known terrorists and criminals into the U.S. thereby threatening U.S. national security and the safety of US citizens.
Enhanced investigation, enforcement, prosecution and intelligence sharing between local, state and federal law enforcement may be the best way to detect, prevent and put an end to human smuggling into and throughout the U.S.
The landmark human smuggling law passed in Tennessee is a major step toward making the state and local criminal justice system and law enforcement meaningful partners and force multipliers to stop this activity and improve public safety.
The legislation, authored by Representative Chris Todd and Senator Brent Taylor, was needed because there is a distinction between human trafficking and human smuggling that had gone unaddressed.
Human smuggling victims are distinct from other victims of human trafficking, who are often trafficked by family members, relatives and friends in small numbers (typically ones and twos). The different nature of human smuggling and especially the criminal and terrorist organizations behind it, require a finer point to the law.
- Human smuggling involves:
- Crossing international borders
- Trafficking larger numbers of victims at a time
- Control by organized crime in the form of terrorist cartels and others
A whole new illicit, underground industry was built up in the US over the past 4 years due to malfeasant border policies and rampant illegal immigration. The Mexican cartels had been in charge of the border, not US law enforcement. Those cartels have only recently, since the beginning of the Trump administration, been designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Moreover, it wasn’t until President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the US military to the border that the border came under control.
The terrorist cartels have expanded their reach across America. They have brought thousands of “unaccompanied minors” into the United States. Most of those minors are young girls who are subjected to unbelievably cruel and abusive situations, including sex slavery. Tragically, some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been implicated in human trafficking and human smuggling.
Unfortunately, the human smuggling legislation in Tennessee came under unfounded attack from the extremist Left.
Leftists made the specious accusation that the new law would criminalize family members or religious groups who are “performing acts of charity.”
In reality, the law targets human traffickers who force largely minor females into “involuntary labor servitude, forced labor, trafficking for commercial sex acts, prostitution and human smuggling.”
None of these activities is something that a loving family or legitimate charitable organization would be involved in.
In the new law human smuggling is defined as transporting one or more victims for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain. No loving family or legitimate charitable organization would be involved in human trafficking/smuggling for commercial advantage or private financial gain.
Border czar and former Obama administration US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan reports that as many of 300,000 unaccompanied minors who came across the southern border are unaccounted for. Many of them became trafficking victims. Tragically and outrageously, the US government became complicit in this trade as those minors were passed on to unvetted “sponsors” by our government. Homan reports that many of those sponsors were actually traffickers.
Tennessee’s new human smuggling law gives law enforcement and the criminal justice system effective tools for prosecuting human smugglers and is focused on the methods and techniques that they use, namely forced labor and forced sex slavery, all for commercial advantage and financial gain.
In the months and years ahead, look for other states to adopt the Tennessee model to combat human smugglers.
AUTHOR
Christopher Holton
Senior Analyst and Director of State Outreach.
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