Texas Buying Billboards in Mexico, Posting ‘Most Shocking Question Ever’ to Would-Be Illegals

It has come to this. Those who hope to stop the human catastrophe resulting from President Joe Biden’s open border must tell the brutal truth.

On Thursday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas unveiled his state’s new billboard campaign aimed at dissuading potential migrants in Mexico and Central America from making the journey northward to the United States — a campaign featuring one billboard that posed what even the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail described as the “most shocking question ever.”

“How much did you pay to have your daughter raped?” the billboard read.

Thursday on the social media platform X, Abbott posted photos of four such billboards with deterring messages in Spanish for those in Central America and Mexico. The ones placed in Northern Mexico are also translated into Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

A photo of the billboard with the “most shocking” question, translated into Spanish, appeared in the top left corner below.

Texas put up billboards in Mexico & Central America to deter illegal immigration.

These billboards tell the horror stories of human trafficking & consequences of crossing illegally.

This new campaign is to stop the illegal journey from even beginning in the first place. pic.twitter.com/69XPaXYW7e

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) December 19, 2024

Indeed, Texas’s entire billboard strategy suggests heartbreaking truths about the migrant crisis.

For instance, billboards put up in Mexico featured garden-variety warnings against crossing the border. Photos of detained migrants accompanied those warnings.

For Central America, however, all four billboards featured photos and messages aimed at women, girls and those who love them.

“Many girls who try to migrate to Texas are kidnapped. For the sake of your family, stop,” the first such billboard read.

“Your wife and daughter will pay for the trip with their bodies. Coyotes lie. Don’t put your family at risk,” the second billboard read.

In other words, authorities in Texas clearly believe that “coyotes” — those who smuggle migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border — have preyed upon the women and children of Central America.

Thus, if those billboard messages can reach the vulnerable parties, or their husbands and fathers, then perhaps they will not migrate.

“These billboards tell the horror stories of human trafficking,” Abbott said Thursday during a news conference. “They implore those people in Central America to consider the violent, horrific realities of what will happen to the women and children they bring with them.”

Texas Association Against Sexual Assault CEO Rose Luna also spoke at the press conference.

“There is a largely unspoken sexual assault crisis impacting women and children migrating to the Texas border,” Luna said. “Acknowledging this issue and its profound impact on survivors is not just crucial — it is our responsibility.”

Kimberly Wall, a rancher, described the horrific border phenomenon known as the “rape tree” — a tree beneath which coyotes sexually assault women and children before leaving the victims’ undergarments on the tree branches as trophies.

“There have been several rape trees and lots of women who have been found beaten and raped in front of our house and left to die,” Wall said. “It makes you terrified to go out of your own house and enjoy your own property. I know my husband has found three different rape trees and burned them down. You don’t know if you’ll be attacked by one of the men hiding in the brush. We all want a better life for everybody.”

Indeed, we want better lives for everybody. And Biden’s open border hurts everybody except criminals and the privileged few.

Recall, for instance, in August, when the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General reported roughly 325,000 missing unaccompanied migrant children.

Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming border czar, has pledged to find those children.

Meanwhile, how do liberal Democrats behave? Why have they not thought to warn the women and children of Central America?

Of course, one cannot read their hearts. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that they must care primarily about posing as their conservative and Trump-supporting neighbors’ moral superiors. Nothing else, save propaganda, could explain their head-in-the-sand indifference to the border crisis.

To be sure, sudden population surges always mean lower wages and higher rents. Employers and landlords love those.

And Democrat politicians love the prospect of future voters.

Surely, however, a billboard campaign such as Texas’s, coupled with more than 300,000 missing migrant children and overwhelming anecdotal evidence of widespread sexual assault of migrant women and girls, must awaken the consciences of all but the most diabolically prideful liberals, and thus finally convince them that they got this illegal immigration issue wrong.

If it does not, then likely nothing will.

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