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Oct. 3, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
29:48
Truth About Human Trafficking on the Southern Border with Brandon Darby

Charlie sits down for an eye opening discussion with Brandon Darby of Breitbart News and the Cartel Chronicles about the truth behind human trafficking that is still ravaging the U.S. border with Mexico. Driven by rampant corruption and...

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Trump's Border Update 00:03:05
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Hey, everybody.
We have an episode here about what President Trump is doing for child sex trafficking on the southern border.
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The president right now is at Walter Reed Hospital at the recording of this episode.
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Brandon Darby is here.
I wanted to give you that short update.
We don't know much more than that.
They are saying it is a precautionary measure.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thrilled to be joined today with Brandon Darby from Breitbart.com.
Human Trafficking Crisis 00:15:37
He's the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart, Texas, and he co-founded Breitbart, Texas Cartel Chronicles project with Il Defenseo Ortiz and Senior Breitbart Management.
Brandon, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Hey, thank you for having me on, Charlie.
So you are covering what is happening on the southern border more so than anybody else.
And you do an incredible job with it.
The cartels do not think very highly of you.
That means you're doing amazing work and you understand the issue in particular of sex trafficking and child trafficking.
Can you just first, just from a basis starting point, can you tell us about the southern border, about how children are being sex trafficked, about how women are being exploited?
Tell us some first person stories and also just the enormity of this unspeakable practice that's happening just a couple hundred miles to the southern border.
Yeah, well, you know, so a lot of people don't realize this, but Breitbart's border effort started definitely from a humanitarian perspective.
I used to have a home near Austin, a large home, and I used the home as a shelter for trafficking victims.
And most of the people who were in that home were people who did not speak English.
They were people who had attempted to come into the U.S. illegally, right?
And in the process of that, they got caught up by really bad groups of people who exploited them.
Some were women who were exploited, some were men who were exploited for work, and were put into situations where they were basically slaves.
Well, then what happens is those people are given a particular type of visa because they're going to testify against the bad guys who put them there.
And one of the things I noticed when I ran that shelter and when I dealt with that is that most of the people who were getting in trouble and who were getting prosecuted were low-level people.
They weren't the big guys who were behind it all, right?
So I began to wonder why.
And that's what led Breitbart to the border.
And that's where our border coverage started.
So the issue of human trafficking and sex trafficking, which is definitely a humanitarian issue, was really what was behind what we did.
So back in those days, I guess it was 2011 and 12, what you saw was that the FBI and that the U.S. government really wasn't going after sex traffickers and human traffickers.
There were some cases here and there, but there weren't a lot of cases.
And there were a lot of reasons behind that, right?
It wasn't so simple.
It wasn't that the government just didn't care or somebody didn't care.
They're really complicated investigations, you know, and very expensive investigations for agencies to carry out.
But that's really what got us into it: we came at it from that angle.
Contrary to, like, if you look at left media or mainstream media or legacy media, they have a lot of criticisms of Breitbart and our border coverage.
But our border coverage is really good.
And I think part of the reason it's really good is because we have the support and the admiration of law enforcement officials on the U.S. side.
And we also have the support of humanitarian groups on the Mexican side, right?
Who understand that we have a long history in combating sex trafficking and human trafficking as a company and both as a company and me as an individual.
So how do more relaxed immigration enforcement of our immigration laws contribute to the increase in human trafficking?
How does that play a role in that?
So it's a little bit complex, but to simplify it, right?
And there is nuance and you could go down a bunch of rabbit trails.
But the bottom line is that what's happened in Mexico is many of the transnational criminal groups along our southern border began to realize that they could make more money from human smuggling, right?
Which is different than human trafficking, even though it's often interrelated.
They could make more money from human smuggling than they could from narcotics for a lot of groups, not all groups, because some groups have a lot of access to the manufacture of different chemicals.
Some groups are primarily, you know, cartels, for instance, are primarily, they're just traffickers.
They're not manufacturers per se for the most part, right?
Well, a lot of those groups, like the Gulf Cartel, different factions of the Gulf Cartel, different networks in Los Etas, they began to make as much or more from asylum claimants, right?
Who were coming here to seek asylum and get into the U.S., they began to make as much or more from that as they were making from cocaine and from heroin and from methamphetamine and marijuana.
So these organizations became, in fact, asylum cartels, right?
And so if someone came up and they were a very attractive female, they'd have a very different experience than someone who was an older male, right?
Who was an agricultural worker, the agricultural worker, they'd say, okay, you're going to pay us $10,000 to get you across.
We're going to tell you what to say and we're going to help you get across into the U.S.
But when they catch you, here's what you're going to say.
You're going to say that you're fleeing violence, you're what have you.
And then you're going to wire us back money every two weeks for however long it takes you to pay off the $10,000.
If you don't, we have people who live in the village where your town where your family's from, and we're going to kill you.
We're going to kill them or we're going to rape your sister.
I mean, horrible things.
So that would be that man's experience.
So now he's in indentured servitude, right?
And so then on the flip side of that, you have a young female and they say, well, hey, here's the deal.
You're not going to be able to pay us.
And you already owe us a lot of money and it costs twice as much as we thought it would.
Sorry.
So here's what you can do in order to get into the U.S. and pay it off.
And now we have a sex trafficking situation.
And now we have a girl who's being coerced.
And so when we have policies that allow people to come here, and I'm very sympathetic to those people who come here, very sympathetic.
But when we have policies that allow them to come here in this current context without even considering the impacts to U.S. workers or what have you, just talking about the well-being of the migrants, right?
The people who are trying to get here.
When we have policies like this, we are in fact, what we think is kind is actually fueling the very systems of oppression and violence that people are trying to get away from in the first place.
It's fueling the very systems that prevent there from being economic growth in their countries to begin with.
So what so many people think is helping other people is actually further poisoning.
It's kind of like all of us who have kids, we feed our kids sugar and then we educate ourselves about sugar and go, wait a minute, maybe this isn't so good that I'm giving so much sugar to my kids.
I thought I was being nice, but I'm really poisoning them, right?
It's that kind of thing.
So our policies, and I have this argument all the time with people, especially with liberals.
The most humanitarian thing we can do about our border in the current context is to acknowledge there's a problem.
And with Democrats, we didn't have that.
We had Beto O'Rourke and others saying, no, Pasanada, there's no problem here.
Everything's safe.
Well, clearly that isn't the case, right?
So as rude as Trump can be sometimes, you know, he actually is, you know, he is actually, I think, paving the way for the best humanitarian circumstance that we've had on our border in many decades.
So can you dive deeper into the part you talked about where some of these women who want to come across the border that might be younger, these coyotes or these traffickers, they look at them as potential sex-trafficked objects.
Where do they go?
Where's the demand for that?
And as long as our borders stay open, if you support open borders, you support more women to be sex-trafficked.
Is that correct?
It is ultimately what you are supporting unintentionally, probably.
I don't think that people, I think the vast majority of people who support open borders, A, they think they don't support open borders, but they do because they're ignorant and they don't understand the facts and how policies impact things and what a de facto policy is, right?
And two, I think that they really believe they're doing the most loving thing.
But yes, ultimately, if you support the status quo on our border, you support the exploitation of foreign labor, you support you're supporting something that leads to the sex trafficking of many young women.
You know, sex trafficking and human trafficking is very different.
There's a lot to that, right?
So we have a lot of runaways in the United States who end up teenage runaways who end up in situations like this that would be defined as sex trafficked.
If you were in San Francisco, probably the majority of the people who are being sex trafficked are being sex trafficked by Chinese or Asian gangs.
If you were in certain places in the Northeast, there's a lot of Russians, Asians, and what have you.
But when you talk about the majority of the border, of our southern border, for instance, you're talking about primarily Latin American, Central Americans, Mexicans, people who are being sex trafficked.
And a lot of them, you know, I've heard all kinds of things.
People say, well, they shouldn't have tried to come here illegally in the first, brother, like a 13-year-old girl trying to get here, right, does not obviously does not justify her being sex trafficked by drug cartels.
You know what I mean?
So that's the situation we're in.
But it is exactly as you say, with a little bit, I would probably add a few caveats, but yes, if you support the status quo, and you defend the status quo, you are in fact defending all of the implications and the consequences of the status quo.
And if people had more education about this issue, we'd be in a lot better spot.
And I think the migrants would be in a lot better spot.
And I think that the nations of origin of those migrants would be in a lot better position.
So you cover the border better than anyone else.
And the president has talked about building the wall.
And there are parts of the border that the wall has been erected.
And we're waiting for more parts of the wall to continue to be built.
Have you seen that play a role?
Has that slowed down the flow of the illegal border crossings in our country?
Have you seen the parts with the wall play any sort of impact?
I think the biggest impact that the two biggest impacts that Trump has had, I think the first one is getting focus on the border and making it a conversation that isn't just Brandon and a few other people at Breitbart yelling about it, but now it's a national discussion.
Now we have the vast majority of news outlets have immigration and border reporters where they didn't before.
I think that's one aspect.
And I think the second thing he's done is with policy and discouraging, you know, stopping the pull factors that bring people here that play a role in why people come.
So I think his policies of not allowing people to stay has played a big role.
But as far as the wall and the effectiveness of the wall, I think the most effective way to discuss that and to point this out is let's look at the last three decades of coverage from the left, whether it be from ProPublica, whether it be from NPR, whether it be from the New York Times, whether it be from Mother Jones, all have articles saying that the U.S. government, when they built walls in the urban areas along the border, that they funneled migrants to their death, right?
They said that the walls funneled migrants into these remote areas where they could cross to their death.
That's what they said for three decades now, since we've put up fencing and barriers in the urban areas and not in between those urban areas.
So according to them and the implications of their reporting for three decades, walls do work.
They are effective.
And not having walls in, walls do impact flow, right?
They do impact traffic patterns.
And then not having barriers and walls in between the cities is causing the death of migrants.
So with Trump's beginning to build walls in between, I think it's a good thing.
I think it's very important.
A lot of people say to me, Brandon, it's so racist, so why don't you want a wall with Canada?
I'm like, well, that's actually quite ignorant, but I'll answer the question.
But the reason is because we have an economy that is similar to Canada's economy.
We don't have a massive disparity of wealth, and we don't have territory north of the Canadian border that is controlled by paramilitary organized crime groups, right?
In Mexico and most places on our border, when there's a law enforcement action that needs to happen, the government can't send in police to engage in that police action.
They have to send in their Marines.
They have to send in armored convoys.
They're oftentimes engaged with rocket launchers and missile launchers and grenades and heavy armaments.
It's very bad.
So when we talk about building a wall, and this is one of my biggest criticisms of the Trump administration, and I used to have this argument with Bannon when I worked for him for many years.
One of my biggest criticisms is the way they describe it.
To me, I talk about the border in humanitarian terms.
I present the humanitarian argument for border security under the current circumstances that we exist under with Mexico.
And by not doing that, I think they've left a lot of room for the left to come at them and attack them in angles they couldn't have.
If they had come out and said, hey, you know, all of these decades of reporting from the left said that not having walls in the middle of the desert were killing people, we're going to finish that off to protect their lives, right?
And protect our country.
I think they would have had much more success building the wall and not as many lawsuits.
I think there's a lot of wisdom there.
And so immigration and illegal immigration, those were the top two issues before the pandemic, before the Chinese coronavirus.
We haven't heard that much about border crossings.
Have you seen the virus impact that at all?
What are you seeing on the border post-the Chinese coronavirus?
I don't really think the virus is that impactful on border crossings.
I think our policies are very impactful on border crossings, but we are beginning to see a number of places where the numbers are kicking up again, right?
Different regions of Texas, different sectors on the Texas border, the numbers are kicking up again.
And what we're seeing, instead of people coming across and turning themselves into border patrol agents, we're beginning to see people come across and try to run from the border patrol agents again, which is quite meaningful if you think about what that means.
But what's significant is when you don't have 15 border patrol agents from one zone in the sector having to deal with a number of children who came across the border see when they're not having to do that because the policies discourage it, then those agents are able to physically go after the people who are running and trying to sneak in, which is very significant.
It's huge, actually.
Cartel Power Dynamics 00:10:32
It signifies that the policies are in fact working to slow the spread.
And now I say that, and I agree with the right.
I identify as on the right.
Obviously, I'm a Breitbart editor.
I want to see a secure border.
I don't think anyone's fought harder for that in the media fund at least than I have.
But at the same time, I don't share everyone's views on the right or most people's views about migrants.
I don't think we can allow most people to stay here.
I don't think that's fair to American citizens.
But at the same time, they're not my enemy.
My enemy are cartels, and my enemy are the politicians who are putting constant press releases, demonizing migrants, because they want us to focus on the migrants instead of focus on the policies that these politicians have allowed to exist for decades that encourage migrants to come.
So, you have these politicians who, and I'm talking about Republicans who take the strongest stance on the border.
But when you really look at their policies, what they've done is they're the ones that helped create this situation in the first place, you know.
And so, they would love us to focus on the migrant as our enemy.
And I don't think that person is my enemy.
I completely understand when people want a better life.
Again, I understand why we want to protect what we have and we can't accept the whole world here, but I understand why they come.
And in their circumstance, I might come myself, right?
I totally get it.
But it is interesting to me that the demonization, like everyone wants us to focus on those people when really they're such a small part of the overall problems that we're dealing with.
The overall problems have to do with policies, the overall problems have to do with economic situations in Mexico and our State Department consistently encouraging and allowing and accepting a level of corruption and violence from the Mexican government that we wouldn't accept from anyone else.
Can you help make sense for me and for some of our listeners the power that these cartels have?
I don't even have clarity on how they're organized, the jurisdictions they oversee.
What is the best way that you can describe the power of the cartels or an analogy to it?
Some people use the description that they're basically more powerful than the Mexican government in certain places.
Do you believe that's true?
Can you build how many different cartels are there?
I never can pronounce this correctly.
There's the Sinaola cartel.
I know that's one of them.
Has cartel violence gone down?
I'm just very curious on this.
No, we're losing cartel violence hasn't gone down.
Just a brief explainer: what you're referring to is the Sinaloa cartel, and the Sinaloa cartel leads the Sinaloa Federation, right?
So, in the Sinaloa Federation are countless various cartels.
Like, for instance, Arizona is all Sinaloa, right?
But it's a group called Los Mimos, and it's another group called Los Salas Arnueva Gente.
Well, both of those groups are at war with each other, both part of the Sinaloa Federation, but they're at war with each other.
And so, one of the newer cartels really isn't a newer cartel, it's just Cartel Jalisco.
They decided they were part of the Sinaloa Federation and they decided to break away and become their own cartel, right?
Various criminal groups who operate under the banner of cartels.
Like, if you were to go from the Gulf of Mexico, right, all the way to California, you start and you have the Matamortis faction of the Gulf Cartel, and then you have the Reynosa faction of the Gulf Cartel.
And then, as you get to about Zapata, Texas, it becomes Los Zetas, which recently changed their name to CDN, but they're really Los Zetas, right?
And then they kind of control all the way up to a little bit past Nueva Laredo, Laredo, Texas.
And then, somewhere after that, it gets a little dicey.
And then it's Los Zetas again until you get to Ciedado Cunha, which is Texas.
And then, after that, much become Sinaloa-aligned groups until you get all the way to El Paso.
There becomes cartel, La Lina.
And then they control a little bit of New Mexico.
And then after that, you get into the Sinaloa again, different factions, all the way until you get to about Mexicali, and somewhere between Mexicali and Tijuana.
Then it becomes the Tijuana cartel, the Tijuana cartel.
There's so many various cartels on our border.
As you go further into Mexico, there's even more cartels, and some of them operate independently.
I mean, it's a very complex environment in Mexico.
But what is interesting is that some of those dominant criminal groups, transnational criminal groups in Mexico, control their local government very well.
They control who the mayor, if you're the mayor and you don't do what they want, you die.
They go to you and they say, hey, do you want silver or do you want lead?
Do you want us to make you rich?
Do you want us to make you dead?
You know, we can do either one.
And if people usually choose rich, they would die.
So they choose the riches.
They choose the silver instead of the lead.
And then you have cartels who control things on a federal level, right?
Like if you were to get into Sinaloa, they tend to have a lot of power on a national level.
Jalisco tends to have a lot of power on a national level.
So just to give an example, right?
Mexico's past president was very connected to transnational criminal groups.
Reporting in Mexico and our own reporting revealed that a lot of the money that went into his campaign came various cults from drug cartels.
So they're very powerful.
They have over every aspect, over most aspects of people's lives.
So it's very complicated.
And out of Mexico's 32 states, over half of them are physically in territories where the Mexican military cannot go in without having to, well, be the military.
They have to go in an armored convoys.
That's the deal we're talking about.
It's not, you know, even if we talk about like people like, well, I went to Puerto Vallarta and it was fine.
Or I went to Baja and it was fine.
Or I went to Cancun and it was fine.
Well, you went to places that are controlled by cartels or where businesses pay cartels protection money to be okay.
That's where you went.
That doesn't mean Mexico is okay.
That means that you went and contributed to cartels.
That's what you did if you went to Mexico and vacationed.
You contributed to the coffers of these transnational criminal groups that pump drugs into our country and kill untold numbers of Americans and who sex traffic little girls.
Like that's what you supported when you go to Mexico.
So, you know, it's very complex and complicated, but it is not, you know, the U.S. government treats Mexico like they're dealing with Canada or like they're dealing with the Netherlands or they're dealing with the United Kingdom or something.
And it's just not, it's more akin to dealing with Pakistan or it's more, there's problems there that are far beyond the, if people just begin to look into and Google corruption Mexico, drug money Mexico, it will blow their minds to understand this isn't just a right-wing trope.
This is reporting from across the board.
We just focus on it more than most people, right?
We drill down more than most people.
But there is reporting.
It's not prioritized, but there is good reporting from mainstream outlets about the level of corruption in Mexico.
Wow.
Well, that's really, it's really well said.
So as the final question, what would you say is the appropriate public policy approach to be able to solve a lot of these issues?
The president either said he would or did, I can't remember, classify the cartels as a terror group.
What would you say is the correct way to approach these transnational criminal organizations?
Well, I mean, there's obviously it's a complex problem that requires a complex solution.
But I think the biggest thing that we could do is, as a nation, is to look at it differently, is to call our State Department and say, I know that you have not only law enforcement and security priorities, but you also have economic priorities.
You have trade priorities.
But we need you to stop prioritizing diplomacy over law enforcement priorities to the extent that you do.
We need to more aggressively go after cartels.
Donald Trump did not declare cartels as foreign terror organizations.
He's talked about it several times.
I don't think that he, you know, Simple argue that every cartel should be a terrorist organization.
I don't think that's a good idea.
I think we should make an example out of a couple of regional cartels out on the drug dealers.
They'll go after all of the bankers, the lawyers, politicians, the industry leaders who are tied to them and whose money is tied to them.
And I think that that would cause a ripple effect across Mexico.
And I think that that would start to clean Mexico up.
We need to understand, and this before I go, is that you have a circle of corruption, okay?
One part of that circle is the drug cartel, right?
But the rest of that circle, the lawyers, the politicians, the industry leaders, and et cetera, all of those people are part of that circle.
And they're very happy that all we do is go after the drug kingpin, right?
They're totally happy because they can replace that guy non-stop.
We need to start going after the rest of the circle.
We need to start going after Mexico's leadership who are engaging in these types of behaviors.
I love that.
Well, thank you, Brandon.
We've learned a lot.
And again, Brandon is the premier border reporter in the country, and he does a great work at Breitbart.com.
How can people stay in touch with you, Brandon?
You know, I pay attention to Twitter.
I'm at Brandon Darby on Twitter.
I pay attention to my Twitter.
I generally, you know, our minds are so caught into what we're doing with corruption and cartel violence that I don't pay attention to a lot of other mediums, but definitely Twitter is a good way to pay attention.
Very good.
Well, Brandon, thank you so much for joining us.
Keep up the great work and hope to have you on again soon.
Hey, thank you.
Thanks, Brandon.
See you soon.
What a great conversation that was at Brandon Darby.
Connect With Brandon Darby 00:00:32
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God bless.
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