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alex padilla
Trump Has Dismantled Anti-Human Trafficking Programs and 'Repeatedly Sided With Sex Offenders'
"The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to our capacity to hold sex offenders to account and undermined support and services for crime victims," said Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Sep 17, 2025
Congressional Democrats and victim advocates took aim Tuesday at President Donald Trump's gutting of federal programs combatcing human trafficking, belying campaign promises to aggressively target perpetrators of such crimes.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, on Tuesday released an 18-page memo "detailing how the Trump administration has repeatedly sided with sex offenders and human traffickers over their victims—often rewarding sexual predators and elevating them to positions of power within the US government while crippling key offices, programs, and grants that combat sex crimes and support survivors."
This seemingly flies in the face of Trump's "Agenda 47" campaign platform, which vowed to aggressively crack down on human traffickers, and the groundswell of Trump supporters' unheeded calls for action and accountability in the Jeffrey Epstein case. Fighting child sex trafficking—both real and imagined—has long been an issue of passionate importance for the MAGA movement.
"Trump began his second term promising to 'make America safe again.' But safe for whom? Law-abiding citizens or dangerous criminals?"
Noting that "Trump and his supporters have gone from demanding the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files to doing everything in their power to prevent their release, openly tampering with potential witness Ghislaine Maxwell and calling the matter a 'Democrat hoax,'" the memo—titled Epstein Is the Tip of the Iceberg—begins by asking: "Trump began his second term promising to 'make America safe again.' But safe for whom? Law-abiding citizens or dangerous criminals?"
The memo notes that in the past seven months, Trump has:
- Gutted federal offices designed to combat human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual violence against women and children.
- Terminated the programs and grants designed to support the victims and survivors of human trafficking networks and crimes of sexual violence.
- Made it systematically harder for law enforcement to prosecute sex offenders and dismantle sex trafficking networks.
- Repeatedly used the powers of his office to pardon individual sexual predators and give official protection, aid, and comfort to accused rapists and child pornographers.
- Rewarded numerous individuals who have a personal history of sexual predation and domestic violence by appointing them to his administration and elevating them to senior positions within the government.
Senior administration officials including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and former de facto Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk have been accused of either committing or enabling sexual crimes or misconduct.
Trump has also been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and has been accused of rape, sexual assault, or harassment by more than two dozen women.
"President Trump in office has repeatedly taken the side of criminal sex predators and violent abusers against their victims, and this pattern goes well beyond his strenuous efforts to bury the Epstein Files," Raskin said Tuesday in a statement. "Trump is systematically dismantling the offices and programs we rely on to combat human trafficking and prosecute sex crimes."k
"Our memo shows how the Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to our capacity to hold sex offenders to account and undermined support and services for crime victims," the congressman added. "Far from aiding victims and survivors, President Trump consistently sides with their abusers. His all-of-government policy to aid traffickers and sex criminals and abandon survivors has made American women dramatically less safe."
Following whistleblower claims "that the Trump administration concealed information about the safety of unaccompanied Guatemalan children they tried to deport in the dead of night," Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday called for an oversight hearing to examine the US Office of Refugee Resettlement's "mass child deportation efforts and apparent lies under oath."
"The urgent call for a hearing comes after the disclosure alleged that at least 30 of 327 unaccompanied Guatemalan children the administration attempted to deport without due process 'have indicators of being a victim of child abuse, including death threats, gang violence, human trafficking, and/or have expressed fear of return to Guatemala,'" Padilla's office said in a statement Wednesday.
An investigation published Wednesday by The Guardian also detailed how the Trump administration "has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking."
Jean Bruggeman, executive director of the advocacy group Freedom Network USA, told The Guardian that “it’s been a widespread and multipronged attack on survivors that leaves all of us less safe and leaves survivors with few options."
Numerous critics have warned of the dangers of Trump's diversion of federal resources and personnel dedicated to combating human trafficking to enforcing mass deportations.
As Raskin told Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel during a charged Wednesday hearing, "When Trump decided that rounding up immigrants with no criminal records was more important that preventing crimes like human trafficking of women and girls, drug dealing, terrorism, and fraud, you ordered FBI’s 25 largest field offices to divert thousands of agents away from chasing down violent criminals, sex traffickers, fraudsters, and scammers to help carry out Trump’s extreme immigration crackdown."
"You ordered hundreds of FBI agents to pore over all the Epstein files," Raskin said, "but not to look for more clues about the money network or the network of human traffickers, pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism, counterintelligence, or anti-drug trafficking duties to work around the clock, some of them sleeping on their office desks, to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared."
"Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," Raskin added.
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'Trump Is Making Your Life More Expensive': Tariff Chaos Engulfs US Economy
“Poor and working people are paying the price" of the president's tariff policies, said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Sep 16, 2025
US consumers are increasingly feeling the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs, and the head of the Congressional Budget Office said on Monday that they are fueling inflation.
During an appearance on CNBC, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director Phillip Swagel said that the president's tariffs have pushed up inflation more than the agency initially anticipated, although he emphasized that their impact on inflation so far was "not by a lot, but by enough to show" in the numbers.
Swagel also said that the higher-than-expected inflation was a surprise because there are signs that the US economy has slowed significantly since January.
CNN on Tuesday published an analysis using numbers from the Yale Budget Lab estimating that Trump's tariffs will cost US households an average of $2,300 extra per year, which is nearly three times as much as the $800 US households are projected to receive on average from new tax provisions contained in the Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that passed earlier this year.
The combined distributional impacts of the Trump tariffs and the GOP tax law are also highly regressive. According to CNN's analysis, a household with annual earnings of $38,840 would be $2,560 worse off thanks to the tariffs and the tax law, while households earning $517,700 would be $8,180 better off.
The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that Trump's tariffs aren't just hurting Americans in the US, but those living abroad as well.
As explained by the Post, Americans living abroad have been unable to send mail to the US without paying hefty fines thanks to the chaos being caused by Trump's tariffs. The reason for this, writes the paper, is that Trump earlier this year canceled a policy known as the de minimis exemption, effective August 29, that "allowed the tariff-free flow of goods under $800 into the United States."
This has led not just to increased shipping costs for Americans living abroad, but has also resulted in foreign nations slowing or even outright halting shipments to the US because they are unsure about how to calculate the costs.
"Confusion about the rules have led to issues since the exemption was lifted on August 29," the Post wrote. "At first, national postal services in more than 30 countries temporarily suspended sending some or most US-bound packages. Since then, restrictions have eased, and the Universal Postal Union deployed a tool this week to help operators calculate duties and resume services."
Reacting to fresh revelations about the impact of the tariffs, many progressive Democrats hammered Trump for increasing the cost of living for working-class families.
"Under Donald Trump’s economy: coffee is up 26%, beef is up 14%, oranges are up 17%, bananas are up 6%, chicken is up 6%, chocolate chip cookies are up 5%, potato chips are up 4%, milk is up 4%," wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "But average worker pay is only up 2%. Trumpflation is eating up your paycheck."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added that “from school supplies to gas to groceries, Trump is making your life more expensive."
"Poor and working people are paying the price of his reckless policies," said the congresswoman.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, took to the Senate floor on Monday to single out a different Trump policy that he said was also raising prices for US consumers—namely, his attacks on green energy projects.
"This administration is shamelessly working to block one of our best defenses against rising energy bills: renewable energy," Padilla said. "And I say so because renewable energy is absolutely affordable, renewable energy is abundant, and whether you want to admit it or not, renewable energy sources are our future."
The senator also pointed to his home state of California as an example of what can happen when the government encourages the development of green energy projects.
"[California is] harnessing the power of solar and wind and hydroelectric power and nuclear, geothermal, even hydrogen power to our state," he said. "And it’s exactly because of those investments that even in a year like 2024, just last year, when we experienced record heatwaves that we also saw record renewable energy generation, and we kept the lights on."
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Top Democrat Launches House Probe Into FBI Role in 'Disgraceful' Arrest of Padilla
Rep. Jamie Raskin described the incident as "the most recent in a string of increasingly flagrant abuses of power by the Trump Administration to deter congressional oversight and intimidate Members of Congress."
Jun 19, 2025
A top House Democrat is launching a probe into the FBI's forcible removal of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) from a public press conference in Los Angeles last week, the latest in a pattern of arrests and physical assaults by the Trump administration against Democratic politicians.
Padilla was tackled to the ground and dragged out of the Wilshire Federal Building in handcuffs when he attempted to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question about the outsized federal response to protests in Los Angeles against increasingly aggressive raids and tactics by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
According to Axios, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is leading a probe into the incident and calling on the FBI to launch a formal investigation.
In a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, Raskin demanded that the Bureau "immediately provide answers" regarding the "disgraceful and indefensible assault."
In the aftermath of the arrest of Padilla, the White House has made false claims about the events leading up to the shocking display, many of which are disproved by video of the encounter.
Noem has said that Padilla "burst into the room, started lunging towards the podium, interrupting me and elevating his voice, and was stopped, did not identify himself, and was removed from the room."
However, video of the incident shows that Padilla identified himself, by name, as a U.S. senator. There is no evidence of him "lunging" toward the secretary.
Raskin has described the incident as "the most recent in a string of increasingly flagrant abuses of power by the Trump administration to deter congressional oversight and intimidate members of Congress."
On June 10, the Department of Justice brought charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers outside an ICE detention facility the previous month. Noem accused McIver of "body slamming" a female ICE officer, but this claim was disproved by a Washington Post review of video evidence.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was also charged for trespassing as part of the same incident, though the charges were later dropped.
But Democratic politicians have continued to be roughed up by federal law enforcement. Earlier this week, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by masked ICE agents as he escorted a man out of immigration court.
"You don't have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens," Lander said in the video of his arrest.
The agents refused to provide a warrant despite repeated requests from Lander, who is a U.S. citizen. After he was released, the Department of Homeland Security released a brazenly false statement, claiming that Lander "was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer," which is also disproved by video evidence.
Raskin called out these incidents and other aggressive actions against political dissenters in his letter. He called on the FBI to disclose whether an internal investigation was underway and whether the officers involved in Padilla's arrest or other incidents like it would face discipline.
"Like it or not, the people of the United States enjoy broad and robust First Amendment rights and now deserve urgent answers from their government about these high-handed authoritarian tactics," Raskin said.
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