It was just three years ago that all of the national media and every Democrat in Congress were insisting that it was ignorant, bigoted, and entirely wrong to believe that there were horrific problems south of the Mexican border that justify curbs on migration.

But Thursday on CNN, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said it's all true.

On Chris Cuomo's show, Gutierrez objected to the administration's new guidelines that now say asylum seekers have to stay on the Mexico side of the border while their case is determined.

"God," he said, "why should they have to wait on the other side of the border when they could be victimized again. …You know what we’re going to have there? We’re going to have illness. Right, you’re going to have more murder, more rape, more harm coming to people that are fleeing."

What's all this rape, murder, and illness that Gutierrez thinks lies just south of Texas?

Everyone remembers the havoc that followed then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's speech in June 2015 announcing his run for president.

"When Mexico sends its people," he said, "they’re not sending their best. ...They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

The Washington Post "fact checker" column at the time brushed the entire thing away, calling Trump's comments "false."

But he was right. Democratic New York Mayor Bill de Blasio himself said in June this year that migrant children illegally brought across the border and placed in detention centers in his city "have come with lice, have come with bedbugs, have come with chickenpox, physical diseases, and contagious situations that just make it worse for everyone else."

There is violence. There is rape.

Gutierrez didn't mean to reaffirm Trump and the truth about what's happening below our southern border. But he did.