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.
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.
