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.
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. 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. (Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.)
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Border experts have told the Post and other reporters that they’ve never heard anything like what Trump’s talking about.
But 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.
That’s where traditional fact-checking tends to run into a wall. While journalists might suspect that Trump is making things up, it’s possible that he’s just repeating something he heard in a briefing (or, less plausibly, read in an intelligence report) that wasn’t open to the public.
