That big picture - as Vox and the rest of the media has made clear again and again - bears very little resemblance to the truth.īut the claim about women gagged with tape and packed into vans has attracted particular attention because it’s quickly become a centerpiece of Trump’s rhetoric - according to the Post, as of Friday he’d made 10 references to it in 22 days - without anyone knowing exactly where he got it from.īorder experts have told the Post and other reporters that they’ve never heard of anything like what Trump is talking about.īut it’s extremely hard to prove that such things have never happened - especially because the president has access to classified information that experts speaking to journalists do not. US Border Patrol Headquarters It’s not clear where Trump is getting his information - but it doesn’t appear to be through official intelligenceĭonald Trump’s rhetoric about the border is built on a lie: the idea that the US-Mexico border is a lawless place where American citizens are constantly in grave danger, and where criminals are able to smuggle drugs and people without any risk of apprehension. We require this information to be submitted to BPHQG2 by 1200 EST. Please forward any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims “that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans.” Reference the news article below for further info. We require your assistance on a quick turnaround for C-1. The text of the email, whose subject line was “Quick Turnaround: RFI taped-up women smuggled into the U.S.,” is as follows: ![]() (Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.) However, no one from the Trump administration has come forward to offer evidence for the claim, either before or after the internal Border Patrol email was sent. 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. 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.” 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’s become a staple of President Donald Trump’s riffs on the horrors of the US-Mexico border, something he knows so well that he doesn’t even need it scripted on a teleprompter: Human traffickers gag women with tape so they can’t breathe before packing them into vans and driving them across the border illegally.īut 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.
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