Legacy media fail to fact check Trump’s ‘border czar’ on sex trafficking

To tackle any problem, you have to start with the facts.

‘Border czar’ Tom Homan in Phoenix in December. (Maxim Elramsisy / Shutterstock.com)

For months, millions of people who watch Fox News have been told they’re living in a dystopian society in which the horrific scourge of sex trafficking has increased by a whopping 600% over the past four years. This claim has come from Tom Homan, now Trump’s border czar, as a standard talking point on illegal immigration.

If only the rest of the media did anything to fact check him. When Homan made this same claim on CNN in a December interview, the network did not question or challenge him. Given all of CNN’s resources, it’s hard to blame much smaller operations like a local TV station spreading Homan’s claim on social media. Even when Homan repeated this to lawmakers in testimony this month, somehow no one in the “legacy media” seems to have fact checked it.

For my podcast and newsletter They Stand Corrected, fact checking the news, I searched for data.

Nothing available justifies Homan’s wild claim. Reaching any media representatives at this White House is nearly impossible, but I tried asking Homan for the source of this claim on X, Elon Musk’s playground. No reply so far, and I don’t expect one.

Here are the kinds of things the media should have told you. Groups that fight human trafficking, which includes sex trafficking, say it’s virtually impossible to know numbers. “It is estimated that between 15,000 to 50,000 women and children are forced into sexual slavery in the United States every year, and the total number varies wildly as it is very difficult to research,” DeliverFund says. Even the current website for Customs and Border Protection, in the Trump administration, cites estimates from 2017.

Meanwhile, in 2024, when Homan was already making his claim, the available data did not look good for Trump. Each year from 2012 through 2020, the number of people prosecuted for alleged human trafficking either increased or stayed about the same. But in 2020, the final year of Trump’s first term, the percentage of successful convictions fell to its lowest level since 2013. Prosecutions and conviction rates jumped up again during the Biden administration, in 2021. And in 2022, the latest year available, a record number of people were convicted.

Perhaps most important, virtually everyone convicted of this heinous crime—95%—is a U.S. citizen. Only 3.4% were “undocumented non-U.S. citizens,” which includes people in the country illegally when arrested, whether or not they hope to remain. And, for the record, 58% of defendants were listed as white, while 18% were listed as Hispanic. That's very much not the image you get from hearing Homan constantly discuss this in the same breath as illegal immigrants.

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Imagine that you’re among the millions of Fox viewers—a huge swath of America, given that Fox just beat all the other networks for coverage of Trump’s Speech to Congress. Imagine you’re even aware that CNN did not question Homan’s claim. Why would you possibly support Democrats if they’re failing so epically on such an important issue?

This is just one example of how the media’s “open mic nights” for liars create seismic problems. It’s not just that Trump and his team amass power through lying. It’s that people who want to build a better society aren’t given the information they need to be productive. If people who want to fight human trafficking believe the key is to end illegal immigration, they won’t make much of a difference.

To tackle any problem, you have to start with the facts. Just as doctors can only recommend courses of action based on diagnoses, we as a nation can only work to fix problems when we know what’s causing them.

This is an essential role of the Fourth Estate. The news media should be fighting for truth, always. It’s literally the whole point of the industry. Teachers try to educate people. Firefighters try to put out blazes. Journalists ensure veracity. It’s so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be said.

I made this argument internally back when I was at CNN. But it was a losing battle. Networks don’t even fact check all their own reporting; the idea that they would always fact check interviews was treated as some sort of ridiculous idea.

The legacy media isn’t going to fight “the good fight” for truth. It’s up to us.

Josh Levs is host of They Stand Corrected, the podcast and newsletter fact-checking the media. Find him at joshlevs.com.