MIDLAND, TX (KWES) - The Midland County Republican Women held a luncheon at the Midland Country Club with guest speaker Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The speech brought up a few key problems of Texas, but the focus was on Human Trafficking.
There were reportedly 300,000 cases a year, Texas is ranked the second worst state in the nation and Houston was ranked the worst city.
"It's in small towns, it's in big towns, it's everywhere. It's in places you would never expect it cuts across all types of different demographic," Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General said.
Nearly 79,000 minors have been reported victims of Human Trafficking in Texas, many of them also have been forced to selling their bodies for sex.
"Human trafficking, smuggling of drugs, all kinds of crimes are being documented in Texas. We have over 600,000 crimes that we think were committed in the last 5-years, it is documented through DPS Department of Public Safet," Paxton said.
Paxton also says that traffickers are using children to cross the border and claim asylum.
"They don't want to separate the parents from their kids, so they will just release both so sometimes traffickers will use children as a way to get in the country and then trafficking the children," Paxton said.
Red Flags for Minor and Adult Sex Trafficking
- Changes in their school attendance habits, appearance, socio-economics, friend groups, interests, school activities, vocabulary, demeanor, attitude, and sexual behavior
- Luxury items like manicures, designer clothing, purses, etc. without an explainable source of income
- Truancy
- Getting into trouble in the company of older teens or adults
- Sexually provocative clothing
- Tattoos or branding
- Refillable gift cards
- Multiple phones or social media accounts
- Lying about the existence of those accounts or refusing parent access to those accounts
- Sexually provocative pictures on the phone or online accounts
- Unexplained injuries: bruising, swelling, redness, cigarette burns
- Third-party control of schedule and social interaction
- Isolation from community, family or friends
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