The strongest accusation against King George in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final copy, but this July 4th it is more important than ever. It read:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

Our nation has come a long way since Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, penned these words. Nearly 250 years later, though, we remain one of the top destinations for modern slavery — human trafficking. As they were then, many of the victims today are innocent children.

To understand how bad things are, recall that just ten years ago, on June 20, 2014, then-Vice President Biden expressed alarm that 24,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended at the Southern border in a single year, calling it a “startling number” that was “untenable and unsustainable.” “Between 75 and 80 percent” of these vulnerable children, he estimated, were sold into forced labor or prostitution by smugglers.

Now consider more than 130,000 unaccompanied minors have arrived at our Southern border every single year since President Biden took office, more than four times the number of arrivals a decade ago. By the President’s own estimation, nearly 100,000 children are trafficked in the United States every year.

Americans on both the Left and the Right are eager to change this.

Last Fourth of July, when the independent film “Sound of Freedom” debuted, its compelling story about the prevalence and horror of child-sex-trafficking resonated with millions of Americans. Soon, the film was outgrossing major productions such as “Indiana Jones,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “The Hunger Games” at the domestic box office.

Sound of Freedom | Angel Studios

In places like Alabama, the outpouring of public support for the film was so great that it inspired the “Sound of Freedom Act,” making the penalty for first-degree human trafficking mandatory life imprisonment when the victim is a minor.

In Congress, Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), worked with us to introduce the SECURE Act, which requires the federal government to investigate and report on potential trafficking of the approximately 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children released by DHS into the U.S., but whose whereabouts remain unknown.

But in Hollywood, and in most of Washington, the “Sound of Freedom” was met with skepticism and scorn.

Countless pundits and reports attempted to connect the movie to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Biden’s own Department of Defense, despite the president’s expressed concerns about this issue, canceled screenings of the film at U.S. Southern Command Headquarters in Doral, Florida. And, of course, the SECURE Act hasn’t even been passed out of the Republican-controlled House.

It is a shame the film was politicized in this manner. Protecting kids and stopping traffickers shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Among voters, it’s not — only in Washington and Hollywood could it become one.

Child sex trafficking, like any market, relies on supply and demand. In this case, the supply comes from a steady stream of innocent children being bought, sold, and abused. Demand is driven by depraved adults.

The simplest and most effective way the White House could immediately reduce supply would be to secure the Southern border, thus undermining the cartels’ business.

Unfortunately, border security doesn’t fit into today’s liberal priorities. So late last month, the president opted instead to give amnesty to nearly 500,000 illegal aliens to “keep American families together.” This may sound nice, but it only further incentivizes desperate people to send their children into the arms of human traffickers.

Even fewer people in Washington are willing to do what it takes to reduce demand for sex-trafficking: Take on the billion-dollar porn industry.

Porn drastically increases the size and scope of the sex-trafficking industry. According to researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, “teen porn” was the “fastest-growing genre” of pornography between 2005 and 2013. By March of that year, it was the “largest single genre… in terms of search frequency,” accounting for “500,000” searches.

Since then, things have only gotten worse. The National Institutes of Health reported that COVID-19 brought a 19% increase in pornography consumption, and a drastic increase in the number of URLs confirmed as containing child sex abuse imagery followed thereafter, increasing from 132,676 in 2019 to more than 255,000 in 2022.

Our leaders could address this problem if they wanted to. In 2020, a single story exposing the overt child porn and trafficking videos on Pornhub was enough to force the company to delete 10 million videos — 80% of the site’s total content — almost overnight.

Imagine what would happen if Republicans and Democrats in Congress worked together to require porn companies to put warning labels on their sites about porn’s relationship to child trafficking or its negative effects on mental health. Or better still, if Biden encouraged Democrats to support Senator Mike Lee’s SCREEN Act, which requires all commercial porn websites to adopt age verification technology to ensure a child cannot access its pornographic content.

With an election approaching, these issues can no longer be dismissed. The “Sound of Freedom” may have come and gone from the headlines, but the scourge of human trafficking has only gotten worse under President Biden, and it could prove to be a serious vulnerability for his campaign come November.

Why? The answer is simple.

Because the millions of Americans that “Sound of Freedom” spoke to aren’t QAnon conspiracy theorists. Nor are they enemies of America’s freedom and democracy.

They’re patriotic voters on both sides of the aisle who want to see their country live out its founding ideals, most especially the Declaration of Independence’s insistence that God’s children should never, ever be for sale.

* * *

Kevin Roberts, Ph.D., is the president of The Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action for America.

Eduardo Verástegui produced and acted in “Sound of Freedom.”

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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This Independence Day, We Should Remember Those Still Enslaved