It’s become a staple of President Donald Trump’s riffs on the horrors of the US-Mexico border, something he knows by heart so well that he doesn’t even need it scripted on a teleprompter: Human traffickers gag women with tape so they can’t even breathe before packing them into vans and driving them across the border illegally.No one can find the source of these stories in news archives. Experts say that trafficking victims are more likely to be lured to their intended destinations through deceit than by force.
But two weeks after Trump had started talking about tape-gagged women — when a January 17 Washington Post article had questioned the claim — a top Border Patrol official had to email agents to ask if they had “any information” that the claim was actually true.
The email, shown to Vox by a source within Border Patrol, was sent as a “request for information” by an assistant Border Patrol chief, apparently on behalf of the office of Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan (referred to internally as “C-1”). It asked agents to reply within less than two hours with “any information (in any format)” regarding claims of tape-gagged women — and even linked to the Post article “for further info.”
Vox’s source indicated that they and others in their sector hadn’t heard anything that would back up Trump’s claims, but wasn’t sure if agents in other sectors had provided information.
And as Daniel Dale of The Toronto Star notes, these tales are accompanied by very specific -- though contradictory -- information about how traffickers drive.
But the duct tape -- where does that come from? An urban legend? A movie? Trump's twisted fantasies?
I wonder if someone at the White House is showing Trump stock footage and insisting to Trump that it's real. I found this at Shutterstock:
Here's a sample of the clip:
Doesn't look like documentary footage to me, but do you thinks it's believable enough to fool the president?
Hey, it might be.
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