Nine months into Donald Trump’s second term, the southern border is steadier and safer than it has been in years. Crossings have slowed, corridors narrowed, smugglers know the door is locked. That discipline is an achievement. Yet beyond the gates, the traffickers’ creed still operates. The cartels and their accomplices keep their own books, and those books are not written in dollars but in lives. They maintain what can only be called a human ledger — a balance sheet of women reduced to line items of profit, their suffering counted as revenue.
The San Antonio case of Venezuelan national Edson José Contreras-Torrealba revealed this ledger in all its cruelty. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, he was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring to “recruit, entice, harbor, provide and transport” women he smuggled into Texas, forcing them into prostitution to pay off debts. ICE confirmed that he carried a 9mm handgun while running the operation. One victim was billed $30,000 for her “safe passage.” Another was confined and starved until she submitted. His books were simple: acquisition costs, daily yields, debt enforcement. (RELATED: The Horrific Immigration Scandal We Need to Talk More About)
Vigilance must reach beyond checkpoints, into motels, detention centers, and city streets where this market hides.
And his ledger has counterparts across the country. In Tennessee, eight defendants were indicted in early 2025 for luring Venezuelan women with promises of safety before forcing them into prostitution.
In Maryland, a Salvadoran woman was sentenced to 11 years in prison for recruiting a 15-year-old pregnant runaway into a trafficking ring with MS-13 connections.
In Boston, Homeland Security Investigations charged a trafficker for coercing a migrant woman into sex work, robberies, and firearms crimes.
In Georgia, a motel near Atlanta paid a $5 million settlement after women claimed they were trafficked and raped repeatedly on its property.
In Florida’s Operation Autumn Sweep, law enforcement arrested 157 suspects, including 25 illegal immigrants, while women were prostituted to pay off smuggling debts.
And in Nebraska, federal agents rescued women and girls from traffickers exploiting them in filthy hotels. Different states, same accounting.
The accounting starts long before America. Humanitarian groups estimate that 60–80 percent of Central American women are raped on the way north. Doctors Without Borders reported a 70 percent surge in sexual violence cases at border clinics in Tamaulipas in late 2023, with 28 rapes logged in a single month across just two towns opposite Texas. Passage is not only bought with money. It is exacted in violation.
Even within U.S. custody, the ledger persists. Between 2015 and 2021, women in ICE detention filed 308 complaints of sexual assault, and a DHS inspector general review found 1,000 complaints in six years, 95 percent never investigated. When predators wear uniforms, the market is not hidden. It is institutionalized.
The numbers show the scale. In FY 2024, HSI identified or assisted 818 human-trafficking victims, made 32,608 arrests, and seized $886 million in criminal assets and $192 million in virtual currency. In 2022, U.S. attorneys received 1,912 trafficking referrals, up from 1,519 a decade earlier. Canada reports the same grim arithmetic: in 2022, police recorded 528 trafficking incidents, with 94 percent of victims women and girls.
And still, the public outrage is selective. When Florida’s Operation Dragon Eye rescued 60 children, headlines blared across the country. But when women are trafficked in equal or greater numbers, raped daily, and prostituted by the same networks, there is no comparable reckoning. Their exploitation is quieter, less visible, easier to ignore. Traffickers bank on that silence.
Trump’s return has restored order at the frontier. But traffickers adapt. A sealed border reduces opportunity; it does not erase the entries already written on women’s bodies. Predators will continue to search for cracks in the wall, seams in enforcement, shadows where the ledger can keep running. Vigilance must reach beyond checkpoints, into motels, detention centers, and city streets where this market hides.
Contreras-Torrealba’s conviction should not be filed away as one more case. It is proof that trafficking is not an anomaly but an industry. Trump has restored discipline at the border. The next task is to burn the traffickers’ books, to erase the human ledger itself. Because criminals do not measure profit in headlines. They measure it in bodies. And until the ledger is closed forever, every woman lost remains a debt America must never allow to stand.
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