Ted Poe: “This is an excellent piece of legislation. Like Ms. Frankel mentioned during her comments on the floor, we had the…”

“This is an excellent piece of legislation. Like Ms. Frankel mentioned during her comments on the floor, we had the opportunity to go to Peru together to visit children who were way up in the mountains being protected from those deviants who wanted to traffic them not only in Peru, but other parts of South America. I had, also, the opportunity to go to Costa Rica and meet some young girls who were being trafficked in Costa Rica and into other foreign countries. I remember one girl named Lilli. She was 7 years of age when I met her. She did not talk at all, even though she had the physical ability to talk, but she did not talk because of the trauma that she had been through before she had been rescued and put in that shelter in Costa Rica. There are a lot of little girls like Lilli throughout the world, including in the United States. Societies must make the decision now that we will not tolerate the stolen innocence of young children by those who sell them on the marketplace of slavery for money, whether that is the trafficker, the slave master, or the buyer, the consumer. We, as a world, cannot tolerate that. The United States has taken the lead on international trafficking and, I believe, on trafficking here in the U.S.…”