On Thursday President Trump falsely claimed that women taking part in the annual migrant caravan trek, mostly from Honduras, through Mexico, “are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”
That was a lie. A Buzzfeed reporter embedded with the migrants almost immediately responded, making very clear it was false. The president’s remarks caused great upset and outrage.
On Friday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to explain Trump’s remarks. She couldn’t, since they were false, so she changed what Trump had said and then pulled some numbers out of thin air, as some on Twitter noted.
Here’s what Trump said: “And yesterday it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don’t want to mention that. So we have to change our laws, and the Democrats, what they’re doing, it’s insanity.”
Here’s the White House press secretary on Friday afternoon, having had a full 24 hours to actually pull some facts together, which she clearly failed to do:
Huckabee Sanders told reporters there was a story in the LA Times – which she didn’t have with her despite knowing the question would come up – that proved Trump’s claim.
There is not.
There are two stories in the LA Times this week, both of which make clear that the caravan is “designed to bring awareness to the conditions that have prompted many people to flee Central America, as well as the dangers migrants face once they’re on the road.”
“Robberies, rapes and assaults — perpetrated by smugglers, cartel members and Mexican immigration agents — are common. In one incident in 2010, 72 kidnapped migrants were killed by a cartel in northern Mexico,” it goes on to say.
The migrants that are making the trek, some who will go all the way to the U.S.-Mexico border, are doing so to draw attention to the desperate human rights problems, violence, murder, and yes, rape that immigrants often suffer when trying to come to America. But they don’t say the caravan migrants are being raped, and certainly not “at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”
Huckabee Sanders, having changed the narrative, then goes on to say that it’s “a well-documented fact that a lot of the people, I believe up to 80 percent, in recent years, of women that are making that journey have been raped in that process.”
Again, false, if she’s talking about the caravan.
Now, what is factual, as VICE notes, is “rape is a huge problem facing migrant women in Central America. On Aug. 29, 2016 Broadly reported that an ‘estimated 60 to 80 percent of female migrants from Central America are sexually assaulted on their journey.'”
So yes, rape is a huge issue – which is one of the reasons the migrants are making the journey, to raise awareness of the terrible conditions so many endure. Only to have President Trump belittle them.
“It is unclear,” CNN added on Thursday, “where Trump derived the evidence for his seeming assertion that Central American women are being raped at unprecedented levels.”