Five members of a Mexican crime syndicate who operated in New York, Georgia, and Alabama are headed to U.S. prisons after years of running a lucrative criminal enterprise.

The illegal aliens weren’t dealing dope; they were trafficking girls for sex on both sides of the border.

“Between December 2004 and November 2015, the Rendon-Reyes Organization enriched itself by forcing multiple young women and girls to perform countless commercial sex acts throughout the United States and Mexico,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“The Organization targeted vulnerable women and girls, some as young as 14, from impoverished areas of Mexico and Central America. Members of the Organization typically used false promises of love and marriage to lure the victims into fraudulent romantic relationships. In some instances, they forcibly abducted the victims,” the DOJ said in a statement.

Human smuggling is a daily reality along the U.S.-Mexico border, and beyond. FAIR estimates that 17,000 to 19,000 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States each year.

More than 170 other defendants in other sex-trafficking cases have been prosecuted in New York, Georgia, Florida and Texas, with assistance the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency that several declared Democratic presidential candidates are on record as wanting to abolish.

Prosecution of the Rendon-Reyes Organization offers gruesome insights into the brutal business.

According to government investigators, the team of illegal aliens arranged for women and girls to be smuggled into the United States, where Rendon-Reyes forced them into prostitution. Among the side activities: severe and repeated beatings, forced abortions and threats to victims’ families.

While captives performed as many as 45 sex acts a night, all proceeds were funneled back to Rendon-Reyes’s home base of Tenancingo, Mexico, the heart of that country’s sex slave trade.

Days after the Mexican quintet were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 15 to 25 years, President Donald Trump called human trafficking “an urgent humanitarian issue” and announced he had signed several measures to combat such “heinous crimes.” These measures are intended to crackdown on and prosecute human traffickers and hold foreign governments accountable for their failure to do the same.

In addition – and perhaps most important of all — Trump declared, “Congress needs to pass legislation that strengthens border security and prevents human trafficking in all forms.”

As FAIR noted back in 2016: “The large and persistent influx of illegal aliens contributes to an environment of vulnerability and abuse. Failure to effectively address the illegal alien dilemma creates and perpetuates an environment in which exploitation runs rampant.”