Key sections of the Department of Justice’s official website, which highlighted international and domestic child sex trafficking as areas of concern, have been quietly edited by the Biden administration.
According to an archived version of the website, the sections that were removed include: International Sex Trafficking of Minors, Domestic Sex Trafficking of Minors, and Child Victims of Prostitution. All of the sections were listed under the category of Child Sex Trafficking, a page which hadn’t undergone any significant changes since it was reportedly added under the Trump administration in 2020.
Inexplicably, the revised webpage also removed a quote by Deputy Attorney General James Cole taken from a speech he gave at the National Strategy Conference on Combating Child Exploitation in San Jose, California, on May 17, 2011.
“Some of our most vulnerable children also face the threat of being victimized by commercial sexual exploitation,” the quote read. “Runaways, throwaways, sexual assault victims, and neglected children can be recruited into a violent life of forced prostitution.”
While the Child Sex Trafficking section remains on the site, War Room discovered that a paragraph related to how predators groom and lure child victims had also been deleted.
“After cultivating a relationship with the child and engendering a false sense of trust, the trafficker will begin engaging the child in prostitution, and use physical, emotional, and psychological abuse to keep the child trapped in a life of prostitution,” it read. “It is common for traffickers to isolate victims by moving them far away from friends and family, altering their physical appearances, or continuously moving them to new locations. Victims are heavily conditioned to remain loyal to the trafficker and to distrust law enforcement.”
Revelations of the site’s revision come on the heels of the decision of California’s lower house committee to strike down Senate Bill 14 yesterday, which would have made the human trafficking of children a ‘serious felony’ in California. According to Fox News, “serious felony charges under California law currently include murder, rape, and any other crime which may incur the death penalty or life sentence in state prison.”
Despite the bill clearing the state’s Senate with bipartisan support, no Democrats on the committee voted for the bill. California GOP chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson described the decision as “heartless and disgusting,” adding that “you’re on the wrong side of an issue when you deliver a win for human traffickers.”
One Instagram user, who goes by the handle @EndWokeness, shared a screenshot of both stories on Twitter, commenting: “Epstein would be proud.” The viral tweet sparked a discussion amongst Twitter users, many of whom expressed an apparent lack of surprise at what they argued was a decision to “protect pedophiles.”
News of California’s decision to block Bill 14 comes just as anti-human trafficking film Sound of Freedom has been facing backlash from left-wing publications like Rolling Stone, which joined in a chorus of mainstream outlets labeling the movie a “QAnon-tinged” conspiracy flick.
Sound of Freedom, which tells the true story of a former US government agent who quits his job to rescue children from global sex traffickers, hit theaters on July 4 and has earned over $40 million at the box office so far.
