On International Women's Day, March 8, Congresswoman Jackie Speier raised awareness of the risks single women face at the border, citing the threat of sexual violence, violence based on gender and human trafficking.

"Women and girls who are single and arriving at the border face an increased risk of exploitation and abuse, including sexual violence, gender-based violence, and trafficking," she said, as recorded in the congressional record.

Speier has long been an outspoken advocate for combatting human trafficking, highlighting the practice as a form of modern slavery. 

"The sexual exploitation of young Americans needs to stop now, not tomorrow or next year when another 100,000 adolescents are forced by pimps to sell their bodies multiple times each night," Speier said in 2012 during Human Trafficking Awareness Month. "It's time to get the pimps in jail and the girls off the street. We are doing this in California and it's time for the rest of the nation to follow suit."

In 2011, Speier launched a Human Trafficking Zero Tolerance Initiative in her county of San Mateo. Defendants charged with human trafficking in U.S. district courts in 2011-19 increased by 79 percent and the number of defendants convicted to prison increased by 82 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

"Migrants and refugees are preyed upon by criminal organizations, sometimes with the tacit approval or complicity of national authorities and subjected to violence and other abuses," states a 2017 Doctors without Borders report.

Speier's comment came two weeks before the U.S. and Canada re-establishing the Cross-Border Crime Forum March 22, which is designed to curtail many border-based crimes, including human trafficking.