The Daily Signal - At Border, This Congresswoman Met a Girl Who Was Gang-Raped by Drug Runners

Episode Date: May 20, 2021

On a recent trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., saw young girls who had been gang-raped on the journey to America. In one case, Cammack says, a Border Patrol agent "pointed out a 9-year-old girl" at a processing facility in Donna, Texas. The girl "came up to me and she had tears in her eyes," the Florida Republican recalls, adding: She looked extremely distraught and I was asking her her name. She was really struggling to tell me her name. I asked her where she was from, and I kept hearing this really broken crackle. And I asked the Border Patrol agent. I said, "Is she just very upset? What's going on?"And he pulled me aside and he said, "Ma'am, we found this young girl in the fields. She was being gang-raped by cartel members. And she had been screaming so loud for so long that her vocal cords have given out."This is a 9-year-old girl who had been recycled by the cartels, meaning they are children that are sent along to escort single adults to the border so that they can get through the processing, because they don't run biometrics on children under the age of 12.Cammack joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to describe this encounter as well as share her perspective on the situation at the border. We also cover these stories: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he opposes Democrats' “slanted” bill to create a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. President Joe Biden speaks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about his nation's latest conflict with the terrorist group Hamas.  Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot appears to be granting interviews only to black or Hispanic journalists.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, May 20th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Today I speak with Congresswoman Kat Kamik of Florida. She joins me to talk about her recent trip to the border where she spoke with a young girl who was gang raped by the cartels. Don't forget. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and, as always, encourage others to subscribe. Now on to her top news. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says he opposed to you. the slanted January 6th commission bill that would establish a commission similar to the 9-11 style commission that would look into the unrest that occurred January 6th at the Capitol. Here's what McConnell had to say about the bill via C-SPAN. Now, Ms. Fredden, one final matter after careful consideration, I've made the decision to

oppose the House Democrats' slanted and unbalanced proposal for another commission to study the events of January the 6th. President Joe Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday. Biden told Netanyahu that he expected a significant de-escalation by Wednesday on the path to a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. After the call with Biden, the Israeli prime minister said he is determined to continue this operation until its aim is met. Netanyahu said he greatly appreciates the support of the American president. but added that he will move ahead to return security to the Israeli people. Hamas has now fired more than 3,000 rockets at Israel,

and Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes at Hamas targets. Over 200 Palestinians and 12 Israelis have been killed. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has signed the state's fetal heartbeat abortion bill that bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Here's what Abbott had to say about the legislation Wednesday during the signing ceremony. Thank you for joining with us here today. Our creator endowed us with the right to life.

And yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion. In Texas, we work to save those lives. And that's exactly what the Texas legislature did this session. Chicago's Democrat mayor Lori Lightfoot appears to now only be granting interviews to journalists of color. NBC5 Chicago political reporter Mary Ann Ahern, who is white, wrote on Twitter earlier this week that as Chicago's mayor reaches her two-year midway point as mayor, her spokeswoman says Lightfoot is granting one-on-one interviews only to black or brown journalists. Lightfoot appears to have confirmed this on Twitter Wednesday, writing, It's a shame that in 2021, the City Hall Press Court is overwhelmingly white, in a city where more than half of the city identifies as black, Latino, AAPI, or Native American.

Diversity and inclusion is imperative across all institutions, including media. In order to progress, we must change. And she added that this is exactly why I'm being. intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Congressman Kat Kamek who talks about speaking with a young girl who is getting raped by the cartels at the border. Americans use firearms to defend themselves between 500,000 and 2 million times every year. But God forbid that my mother has ever faced with a scenario where she has to

a threat to her life. But if she is, I hope politicians protected by professional armed security didn't strip her of the right to use the firearms she can handle most competently. To watch the rest of Heritage expert Amy Swearer's testimony on assault weapons before the House Judiciary Committee head to the Heritage Foundation YouTube channel. There you'll find talks, events, and documentaries backed with the reputation of the nation's most broadly supported public policy research institute. Start watching now at heritage.org slash YouTube and don't forget to subscribe and share. We're joined today on the daily signal podcast by congresswoman Kat Kamik of Florida Congresswoman. It's great to have you with us on

the daily signal podcast. Thank you so much for having us. Pleasure to be here. It's great to have you with us. I wanted to start off by talking about the border. We're mainly going to be talking about the situation that's happening at the southern border. You recently went on a trip to the border and before we get into everything you saw, can you just kind of tell us your general thoughts on the trip and kind of the main takeaways that you got from being there? Well, so at this point, I've been there twice, and each trip has really yielded a pretty cohesive message in my mind. It's a very, very broken, non-existent border that we have right now on the southwest border.

And in both of my trips, I have had the opportunity to tour the processing facilities where we have migrants that are being housed there, for indefinite periods of time. I have been to the physical border wall construction sites where we have materials that are lying there, not being used, not being built, but taxpayers are still footing the bill. I've been to the communities that are right there

on the border that are impacted, both from the lack of construction of the wall, which actually acts as a levy to protect them from flooding, but also for, you know, talking to them about the influx of individuals that come through their neighborhoods at all hours of the day. all the way down to the migrants themselves and the horror stories that they have experienced on their journey to the United States. It's been very discouraging, heartbreaking.

You can call it a public health crisis. You can call it a humanitarian crisis. You can call it a national security crisis. But no one, not even the president himself, can deny the fact that we have a crisis on our southwest border. And that is what I think is so important for people to recognize that if you can't even call it what it is, is, then you have no business even trying to address the situation. If you can't even identify the fact that you have a problem. And Houston, we have a problem. Well, Congresswoman, you witnessed something during this trip to the border when it comes to girls, young girls in gang

rape at this visit. Can you kind of recount what you saw? Yeah. So I had the opportunity to start out one of my trips going to the Donna processing facility, which is really a series of large tents. that have been strung together to house these pods of women and children and, you know, single parents. As I was going through these pods, there are certain areas where the Border Patrol have really been forced to house some of these kids who have experienced trauma, or they haven't been able to identify a parent or a relative, so they're truly abandoned. They have nowhere to go. And it was during this time that one of the sector chiefs took me to this play pen that they had set up. Actually, out of their own funds, the Border Patrol agents had put together this play pen with toys and stuffed animals to try to make the kids a little bit more comfortable.

And they pointed out a nine-year-old girl. And she came up to me, and she had tears in her eyes. She looked extremely distraught. And I was asking her her name. She was really struggling to tell me her name. I asked her where she was from, and I kept hearing this really broken crackle. And I asked the Border Patrol agent, I said, you know, is she just very upset what's going on? And he pulled me aside and he said, ma'am, we found this young girl in the fields.

She was being gang raped by cartel members and she had been screaming so loud for so long that her vocal courts had given out. This is a nine-year-old girl who had been recycled. by the cartels, meaning they are children that are sent along to escort single adults to the border so that they can get through the processing because they don't run biometrics on children under the age of 12. So up into that point, they can recycle these children. Well, a lot of these children are getting sexually assaulted and abused. And when I ask the agents, how many of these young girls are being abused on these horrific journeys? They said at least 60%, if not the vast majority. How is it that we, as the United States government, have become complicit in completing the trafficking cycle that the cartels have established, very lucrative cycle, I should say?

Because what we're doing is we're not penalizing them. We're not going after them. We're taking in these victims and doing the very best that we can. But we can't even identify this whole thing as a crisis. So really, at this point in time, President Biden isn't President Biden to me. He's trafficker in chief because he knows what's going on at the border. I know because the Republican conference, we compiled all of our findings together and we sent it to the White House and to our so-called borders are. And they know from firsthand testimony and through videos and photos and written testimony that we have collected in our trips to the border, that these are real situations.

Just when I was there, I had been there and a 16-year-old gave birth to twins right there on the banks of the Rio Grande Valley River. It is unconscionable what we are seeing unfolding on the southwest border. And I think it's heartbreaking that these young kids are being used as pawns for the cartels to make money and to really shepherd people across the border because they're using our own laws against us. They know the systems better than we do. And every time we make a modification or a change, they know and they know who to send and when to send them. And as I've said before, it's a great day in America if you're a member of the cartel

because you're making money over fist. And that doesn't even include the narcotics that are coming across. But the human lives that will be destroyed because of the inaction of the United States government is an abomination. And it's time that we step up and take action once and for all. Well, on that note, I wanted to ask you about the rhetoric we've been hearing. During the Trump administration, we heard all the Democrats talk about the kids in cages, which those facilities were actually set up by the Obama administration.

Now those facilities that were not overcrowded under President Trump are overcrowded, and we see the situations happening like the one you described of that girl that was gangraped, but we don't hear Democrats talking about this situation as you laid it out. So what is your perspective on the rhetoric and why are we not, Why is this something that's not being talked about by the Democrats anymore? Well, one, it doesn't fit their narrative. Their MO is to trash President Trump at all costs. And the minute that reality sets in that it was President Obama,

who had established these quote-unquote cages, these pods, their clear vinyl walls where people can come in and out freely within the pod system. Once they realize that, oh, we can't talk. about that anymore, they've tried to deflect and deter and really do anything but talk about the crisis that's unfolding. When I was in the Donna Processing Facility, these various pods are specifically designed to house about 250 people max. They were housing over 3,000. And you talk about COVID restrictions. They weren't even doing COVID tests when they were picking people up in the field. So when you report in either to the facility that's under one of the major bridges

in McAllen, Texas, it's an outdoor facility basically put together with some construction materials and plywood where people can report if they've managed across the border. They report to Border Patrol agents under this bridge. They sit there for several hours. They get seen by a medical contractor. And what they're checked for is lice and scabies. And if they are running a fever, then it takes two Border Patrol agents to escort that individual to the local hospital where they then get COVID tested. But if they're not exhibiting symptoms, they go right on through into the Donna processing facility from there. So again, you don't see AOC standing in an empty parking lot, you know, staging a photo shoot where she's fake crying because it doesn't fit the narrative. She could never in her world do that because she would be slamming her own president.

And we all know that this is not a Republican problem. It's not a Democrat problem. This is an American problem. This is our national security at stake here. And if we're going to continue to be a country of law and order and upholding the rule of law, we actually have to enforce the laws on the books. But again, this is all a fundraising, you know, tool for the Democrats. They want to slam Trump.

They made an incredible amount of money on President Trump slamming him over and over and over again for doing the very thing. that the American people wanted. But now we have a situation where, oh, the facts don't support that narrative anymore. And so how are they going to raise money off of it? Well, they're just going to continue to deflect and drive a new narrative that is bringing up all the bad things

from the past or so-called bad things from the past while inadvertently or purposely, I should say, purposely avoiding the reality and the facts as they stand right now. We talked about the situation of the child, basically, who was getting raped. Were there any other things from this trip that really stood out to you and were etched in your memory of things that you walked away with?

Absolutely. You know, I had a lot of interaction, personal interaction with a lot of these migrants. One that sticks out is a young girl that I met in the fields right outside McAllen. I was out with the Texas Rangers at midnight and we were patrolling the brush and came across a group that really hadn't come as a group,

group, but they had managed to find each other in the brush. And it was two young teenagers, a brother's sister from Guatemala, a son and a father, their name was Eber and Isais, and then a man and his daughter, who was three years old. She looked terrified. She couldn't tell me her name. The father was being pretty sketchy about the whole situation. And so later that day, or yeah, I guess it was later that day at the Donna Processing Facility, we asked the Border Patrol agents to follow up on that particular case of that father and daughter. And as we suspected, when they were doing the interviewing process, it had come out because a couple of red flags had been raised during that interview. They said, well, we're going to run a rapid DNA test on you

to make sure that this young girl is in fact your daughter. And that's when he admitted that, no, that wasn't his daughter. He didn't know who she was, but he had been given her as a loan by the cartels to get him across. He was a convicted sex offender. This is what is happening on a daily basis. We're seeing 25 to 3,000 illegals coming to the border every single day. And these kids, like I said, are just collateral in all of this. They're being used as pawns.

And she, God knows where her parents are. God knows where she is today. But these are the situations that are. are really putting a face to the crisis that's unfolding. You know, another situation was I met a mother and her young daughter in the McAllen Airport. When I was leaving to go back to Washington, D.C., they put 24 children and six infants on my plane

from McAllen to Dallas, Texas. And as we were getting off the plane, they all had packets, Manila packets that on one side said, please help me, I do not speak English, tell me which plane I need to take. And then on the other side of the manila envelope, it was in Sharpie and it said their itinerary of where they were going. On the inside of the packet,

because I asked one of them to please show me what was in the packet, it was their plane tickets and a notice to appear in English. Now, when I spoke to this young woman, she was very confused. She'd never been out of her home country of Honduras. She did not speak English, certainly. she actually couldn't even read. So had she even been given materials in Spanish, she wouldn't have been able to understand them. So she had to do a layover in Dallas overnight, and she couldn't

understand why she had to stay in the airport. She was just trying to get to San Francisco. And when I asked her, why San Francisco? She said, because my sister is there. And I looked at her, I said, is this really your sister? And she hesitated and then said, no, I was told to say that my sister is in San Francisco. It's part of the package that the cartels do for folks coming across. They'll give them a phone number, and it's that phone number that the migrant then gives to the Border Patrol agent. HHS then calls that phone number to, quote, unquote, verify that that is a family member, but it's just a phone call. So whoever's picking up that call on the other line could be anybody, but because they're so overwhelmed, they don't have any way to verify

other than, hey, I'm calling on behalf of this person. They say that you're their sister. Is that true? And they say, yes. So she's now in San Francisco somewhere with her daughter that's two years old with no resources, no money, no cash, no nothing. And this is happening every single day. And when people say, well, you know, this is just a southwest border problem. No, it's not. This is a situation, a crisis that is coming to a town near you. My husband is a first responder. He's seeing an uptick in overdoses in our community, and a lot of that is due to the increase of narcotics that's coming across. We're seeing illegals that are coming to our community. We're seeing kids in foster care systems that are getting

aged out early to accommodate the influx of unaccompanied minors that we have coming across the border. This is crazy. And I see the media getting fatigue on this issue, but we need to recognize that It's, we cannot lose our vigilance. We cannot lose sight of the fact that without a secure border, we cannot have a secure nation, first and foremost. So that's why we're hammering this border issue over and over and over and over again. Well, Congressman, what do you want people who are listening or watching this to know that the mainstream media isn't reporting?

Because I've been to the border twice so far this year, I've been a couple other times before this year. And there's so many things I've learned there that I've never heard reported ever in mainstream news. And so if you could pick one or two things that you want people to know that they're not hearing on TV, what would that be? You know, I would say that the cartels are making an ungodly amount of money on a daily basis, somewhere to the tune of $15 to $25 million a day in just the trafficking and smuggling of human beings. That doesn't include the narcotics. and we're seeing, for example, fentanyl, 5,000 percent increase in fentanyl coming across the border.

Now, we talk about all the people that are coming here that they want to be caught by border patrol because then they go through the process of then being integrated into the United States. The thing that we're not talking about is the close to 200,000, quote-unquote, godaways. Gotaways are individuals that are crossing the border illegally that don't want to get caught. They don't want to go through processing because they are either a gang member, someone on the terrorist watch list, a convicted sex offender, a violent offender. These are people who know that once they are caught, they will get turned right back around because of their record because they have a record in the United States. So we have close to 200,000 godaways that have been captured on either camera or have been reported by Border Patrol agents in the field that have seen them. attempted to apprehend and couldn't get to them in time.

$200,000, just this year alone, just this year alone, are in the United States, and we have no record of who they are or where they're going. All we know is that they cross the border illegally. And again, the only reason that someone would cross the border illegally and not report into processing is if they had something to hide and a record that was on their name. So that is a huge, huge issue that needs to be talked about, are the God, and the lack of apprehension there. But the second thing is, again, the drugs, recognizing that we are all a border town.

Every single city in America is a border town now. The drugs are having a direct impact on our communities. We're seeing the increase in fentanyl and heroin. We're seeing the increase use of cocaine and other drugs in our communities. If you don't believe me, ask your local EMS or fire departments that are responding to these calls. This is a direct result as of the open borders that we have on the southwest side of their country. So those are the two big takeaways. And also, don't lose hope.

Don't lose faith. We will get this situation under control. It might take a while, but we have to keep that pressure up on the administration and Democrats in Congress for them to just even take action on this. Well, Congressman Kimick, it's been great having you on the Daily Signal. Thank you so much for making time to talk about this. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Have a good one. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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