When a girl — for the sake of privacy I’ll call her “Leticia”— was raped by more than a dozen gang members in Honduras, her family reported the crime to the police. The family immediately began receiving death threats. Then a local charity attempted to relocate Leticia to a women’s shelter, but the shelter refused to take her in for fear it would not be able to protect Leticia or the other women from this gang’s reign of terror. Honduras has only three women’s shelters and the police use two of them as their own personal brothels. In the end, to protect Leticia from further harm, she had to leave Honduras. Honduras has experienced a 346 percent increase in the murder rate of women and girls.

Legislative proposals to roll back the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act — a bill that passed with unanimous, bipartisan consent in both the House and Senate and was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008 — ignore the stories of these girls, the unthinkable violence that these children are fleeing, and the fact that they are by no means just escaping to the United States. Asylum-seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are going wherever they can. Since 2008,there has been a more than 700 percent increase in people from these three countries in particular seeking asylum in Nicaragua, Belize, Costa Rica and Panama.

True, smugglers are lying to parents and telling them their children will be able to stay in the United States. Governments need to work to stop smugglers who are exploiting people in desperate situations. But it is also clear that children do not come to the United States on a whim.