The City of Angels has long been the home to demons, but Democrat-backed legislation has empowered predators and turned one Los Angeles street into a breeding ground for child prostitution. The New York Times published a lengthy report this week on “the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.”

While the Blade has notoriously been a haven for sex-trafficking and prostitution for years, the child-prostitution business has “become much busier” over the past several years: “more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch,” NYT reported. Particularly since 2022, the Blade has “expand[ed] from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles.” Prostitutes have been “brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait.”

As if the proliferation of child prostitution were not bad enough, police presence has gradually decreased. One former child-trafficking victim NYT spoke to reported that, since she was first trafficked on the Blade at the age of 13, police helicopters “hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.” The sex-trafficking corridor has also “become more violent. The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota. The traffickers who governed the street were worse.”

“For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode,” NYT reported. “Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked. Teachers who would ordinarily follow up on absences or report signs of neglect could not,” the news outlet noted. “As trafficking grew, the means to deal with it shrank. In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem.”

Another key factor fueling the child sex-trafficking crisis on Figueroa, however, has been Democrat-backed legislation. Los Angeles Police officers’ “jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown, and trans women based on how they dressed,” NYT pointed out. “But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them,” the outlet reported. “Soon every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama. By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.”

California’s S.B. 357, passed by the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom (D) in 2022, decriminalized loitering with intent to commit prostitution, which was reclassified as “sex work.” A few years earlier, in 2016, Newsom signed into law S.B. 1322, which effectively decriminalized prostitution offenses for minors. Together, the two pieces of Democrat-backed legislation made it increasingly difficult for police to take trafficked girls off the street.

In the wake of S.B. 357’s passage, one sex-trafficker told the underage girls he was prostituting, “We run Figueroa now,” according to NYT. While Democrats pitched the dual pieces of legislation as intended to protect children from being prosecuted for the crimes of others — their traffickers or pimps — the “shield” laws have only prevented officers from intervening in trafficking areas like the Blade and rescuing underage girls unless they are prepared to swear before a court that they had reason or evidence to suspect trafficked girls of being underage.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Ali Hopper, co-founder and president of GUARD Against Trafficking and the driving force behind anti-grooming laws in Florida, recounted that she and her colleagues have worked extensively with victims of sex trafficking and “even gone undercover in illicit massage parlors to understand how these operations continue largely undisturbed despite existing laws. What we’ve found is that without strong penalties for buyers and the ability to disrupt profits, this industry will persist — buyers remain undeterred, and profit remains the driver.”

“We believe no person’s body should ever serve as a place of employment and do not endorse legalization. However, clarifying definitions is essential to securing justice and protecting victims. Redefining ‘prostitution’ as ‘sex work’ in public discourse, while maintaining its criminal definition under law, helps law enforcement and the public clearly distinguish between consensual adult acts and trafficking,” Hopper continued. “Because if money, movement, or autonomy are controlled, that’s not choice; that’s exploitation. Under no circumstance can a minor consent to commercial sex — every instance involving a child is trafficking, not choice. This dangerous confusion between prostitution and trafficking persists not only in California but across nearly every state and within many nations abroad.”

Ashlie Bryant, CEO of anti-trafficking group 3Strands Global Foundation, told TWS, “California’s compassion must be matched by practical protection. S.B. 357 normalized open-air solicitation in many corridors across the state, and S.B. 1322 — though rightly reframing exploited minors as victims — left too many children without an immediate, supported route to safety.” She continued, “In practice, traffickers took advantage, and child sex-trafficking proliferated.” Bryant further explained, “We need a reset: targeted enforcement against buyers and traffickers, clear authority to intervene when a child is being exploited, funding for strong implementation of support programs for survivors, and guaranteed, trauma-informed services and prevention education scaled statewide. That is how we protect kids — not in theory, but in fact.”

In the rare instances when police were able to arrest traffickers, Democrat prosecutors have often had sentences reduced significantly. Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Vice Officer Elizabeth Armendariz, for example, did undercover work posing as a child prostitute on the Blade in order to collect evidence against traffickers. “A few months ago, Armendariz was on this same corner when a man in a flannel shirt threw his white Mercedes into reverse, rolled down the window and rattled off all the evidence she needed to prosecute him, right into her tape recorder. His street name was Double R,” NYT chronicled. “Armendariz signaled to nearby officers — she had gotten what they needed — and within minutes, a patrol car took Double R into custody. He faced up to six years in prison (though he ended up with 180 days in county jail and probation, plus an anger-management program).”

Another factor fueling the surge in child sex-trafficking in Los Angeles is immigration. Democrat-backed immigration policies at both the federal and state level have further enabled the trafficking and abuse of minors. Under then-President Joe Biden, an estimated 300,000 unaccompanied children (UACs) encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border went missing, with President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan anticipating that the majority of them were trafficked and forced into prostitution. “We gotta save these kids, a lot of them are living a life of hell every day. … We’re gonna find some of them living with pedophiles, living in sex-slavery, some are gonna be dead, but we gotta find these children,” Homan said in an interview late last year. “When you lose the border, trafficking and sex trafficking’s gonna skyrocket, child deaths will skyrocket, migrant deaths will skyrocket, American deaths will skyrocket.”

Child sex-trafficking specifically more than tripled under Biden’s watch, particularly in border towns and “sanctuary” cities, where state or local law enforcement officers are barred from cooperating with federal immigration agents and prohibited from investigating suspected immigration law violations. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its sub-agency the Office on Trafficking in Persons, which offers assistance to migrant minors who have escaped sex trafficking, reported an annual average of 625 child trafficking victims prior to Biden’s inauguration. Once the Biden administration took over the White House, however, that number spiked to 1,143, eventually climbing to over 2,200 and reaching an annual average of over 1,800 during Biden’s four years in office.

California and Los Angeles have both notoriously enacted “sanctuary” laws, becoming hubs for illegal immigration, particularly in the face of Trump’s and Homan’s immigration crackdown and mass deportation program. “The open market for child sex that is facilitated by Los Angeles laws is horrific and sickening. It’s a product of several things besides the lenient laws there,” Jessica Vaughan, director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told TWS. “First, it has long been recognized that girls in foster care, and runaways, are especially vulnerable to ending up being trafficked for sex. Most of these girls are American, but there has been a significant increase in the number of illegal alien kids in foster-type care or in the care of a sponsor who is not a loving family member, but who has taken custody of the girls (and sometimes boys) to traffic them for commercial sex,” she continued. “The reason for the increase in illegal alien kids is due to reckless policies of the Biden administration with respect to kids who cross the border illegally without family members — the so-called unaccompanied minors.”

Vaughan noted that hundreds of thousands of UACs over the past several years “were allowed to enter during the Biden border crisis, and they were turned over to largely unvetted sponsors, some of whom were traffickers, gang members, abusive adults, or even family members who then trafficked the kids, sometimes for work, but sadly also for commercial sex.” She continued, “Not only were the sponsors not vetted (and the large majority here illegally also), but the Biden administration did little post-release monitoring to check on their well-being. It was a child welfare disaster that went largely unacknowledged until the Trump administration launched an investigation and rescue operation that has found thousands of the kids so far. It would not be surprising if some of the girls arrested along the Blade in Los Angeles are kids who came in under the Biden system and ended up on the streets.”

“In addition, there are probably some who came in on visas or visa waivers with little screening. These cases are very difficult, because the girls are abused, held under the thumb of the traffickers, may not speak English, or have any inkling that there is help available. They typically have no idea how to escape their situation, and are so afraid of their traffickers that they refuse help if it appears,” Vaughan observed. “There are many groups providing much-needed services to the victims of trafficking, but there is not enough attention on prosecuting the traffickers, who, in situations involving illegal alien kids, probably would be amenable to deportation in addition to prosecution,” she continued.

“Unfortunately,” Vaughan added, “sanctuary policies in Los Angeles get in the way of effective coordination between local police and ICE and could be preventing ICE from taking action against the traffickers (and the johns) that is likely more of a severe consequence than can be meted out by local authorities. In cases like this, the locals need to set aside their sanctuary policies and instead work with ICE to address this absolutely heinous abuse of kids.”

Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, also pointed to California’s increasingly permissive abortion laws, which not only enable and provide cover for traffickers but further assault human dignity. “The focus of Gavin Newsom’s policy agenda seems to be disrespecting the dignity of the human person to the greatest degree possible,” Szoch declared. “From promoting and paying for the killing of unborn children and allowing abortion drugs to be sent through the mail without any evidence that they are not going straight to abusers to setting up a market for minors to be exploited by the sex industry, Gavin Newsom does everything possible to ‘shield’ abusers.”

“In California, the only people shield laws protect are criminals,” Szoch concluded.