Sex-Trafficking

(New York City)

Three Mexican brothers have been extradited and charged with running a vicious sex-trafficking ring that lured girls as young as 14 to the US with promises of love and a new life — only to smuggle them into New York to brutally pimp them out, federal officials said yesterday.

The brothers — Benito Lopez-Perez, 32, José Gabino Barrientos-Perez, 51, and Anastasio Romero-Perez, 39 — began targeting three girls who later were forced to work as prostitutes in the Big Apple when the children were just 14 and 15 years old, Brooklyn federal prosecutors allege.

Prosecutors also announced charges against a fourth man linked to another Mexico-to-New-York prostitution pipeline — and the reuniting of a child with her Mexican sex-trafficking-victim mom after they were kept apart more than a decade by the kid’s pimp dad.[…]

The fourth defendant extradited in recent weeks, Antonio Lira-Robles, 37, is charged for his alleged involvement in a similar ring that also included the participation of his cousins — the brothers Eleuterio and Samuel Granados-Hernandez.

Frankly, I refuse to believe that these two instances are rare and isolated examples of child sex trafficking in the U.S. My suspicion is that child sex trafficking persists in every major metropolitan area of the country.