Public speaker and film director Jaco Booyens told Breitbart News last week that an unsecured southern U.S. border emboldens human traffickers, adding that thirty percent of children smuggled across the border are sold into sex slavery.

“These cartels — they understand it’s easier to sell a child over and over than a pound of cocaine or an illegal weapon,” said Booyens, whose sister was a victim of human trafficking and whose experience is captured in the film 8 Days.

Booyens told Breitbart News that the cartels are “sending kids across the border” by design.

“A southern border that’s open is the reason California is now the leading state in the United States for trafficking,” said Booyens, “Thirty percent of children that cross the border today will be sex slaves in the United States.”

Booyens added that an “undocumented” child is much easier for cartels and human traffickers to sell over and over again.

“Because nobody’s looking for that child,” said Booyens, “That child is a ghost — doesn’t exist.”

“So it’s a beautiful situation for traffickers — pimps — to say ‘okay, so, if you’re going to look for American kids, we’ll just bring them across the border, and we’ll sell these kids into the sex trade, underage, majority of them twelve-years-old.'”

Booyens said that the majority of these children are around the age of twelve, and are sent across the border with “rape kits in their backpacks.”

“If they’re not detained by authorities, within an hour, the first rape will happen,” said Booyens, “and that rape kit is a drug to make sure the girl does not get pregnant, so that she can be sold over and over, because if she’s pregnant, she has no use for the pimp.”

“This is a very twisted environment.”

The Mainstream media had recently dedicated a lot of time and energy toward demonizing U.S. border patrol agents for separating children from adults who illegally smuggle them into the United States. Meanwhile, the real crime of human trafficking seems to have gone virtually unreported.

When asked why human trafficking is not talked about despite being so common, Booyens told Breitbart News that many people perceive human trafficking as prostitution, without being able to fully grasp how it is “very different prostitution.”

“Sure, the act is the same, sex is being sold,” said Booyens, “but we’re talking about minors here — they go to school, or they’re in a foster care system. So it’s very difficult to detect.”

The public speaker added that many educators and police don’t know what human trafficking of minors looks like, and are not always properly trained to profile for it.

Booyens spoke to Breitbart News moments before going on stage to address thousands of students at Turning Point USA’s annual Student Action Summit.

When asked what had caused Booyens to become so interested and involved in battling human trafficking, the speaker informed Breitbart that his sister had been trafficked.

“My sister was trafficked,” said Booyens, “So it got real personal real quickly — when you go through that experience — you’re thrown into a world that you didn’t know exists — and then, this person that comes back, the sister is not the same person that left.”

“By default, when your sister goes through it, you want to fight the battle and say no one else should ever be exposed to this, ever again.”

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.