President Donald Trump reportedly declared Thursday that human trafficking has reached record levels and is now "worse than it’s ever been in the history of the world."
The comment came during a visit to the Joint Interagency Task Force South in Key West, Florida, according to pool reports quoted by both Talking Points Memo and The Hill.
“Drugs are flowing into our country,” Trump said. "We need border protection. We need the wall. We have to have the wall. The Democrats don’t want to approve the Wall because they think it’s good politically, but it’s not."
"If you look at what’s happening in California with sanctuary cities — people are really going the opposite way,” he continued, TPM reported. “They don’t want sanctuary cities. There’s a little bit of a revolution going on in California. Human trafficking is worse than it’s ever been in the history of the world."
According to The Hill, Trump’s remarks echoed those made last July, when he told law enforcement officials in Long Island that human trafficking had reached record levels.
"Human traffickers. This is a term that's been going on from the beginning of time, and they say it's worse now than it ever was," he said at that time.
"You go back 1,000 years, where you think of human trafficking, you go back 500 years, 200 years, 100 years, human trafficking, they say — think of it, what they do — human trafficking is worse now, maybe, than it's ever been in the history of this world."
U.S. administrations have sought to curb human trafficking in the United States without success, according to The Hill. Under the Obama administration, officials began tracking human trafficking in the U.S. for the first time, the news outlet reported.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline estimates that about 8,500 cases of human trafficking were reported in 2017, an increase of nearly 1,000 cases from the year before.
Polaris, an international nongovernmental organization, estimated in 2016 there were 40 million victims of human trafficking worldwide.
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