Men Accused Of Traveling To Tijuana To Have Sex With Minors

San Diego FBI investigators say a series of disturbing text messages referred to young boys and girls for sale, using terms like, brand-new, or recently stolen. There is a new effort to crack down on sex tourism in Tijuana and other areas overseas. Investigators are using a trail of text messages as evidenced. Joining me is San Diego Union reporter Christine Davis. Cristina, welcome to the program.Thanks for having me.Has Tijuana been a frequent haunt of pedophiles in the U.S., or is this unusual?Unfortunately this kind of activity is nothing new. -- Is one of the biggest victim advocates in San Diego. She has been doing this kind of work against child sex trafficking down in Tijuana for decades. There have been orphanages and homes and services for these children. But, these recent cases show it is still a big problem down there.How are -- young are the children being bought and sold ?the men were specifically requesting as young as eight years old. These were just the very recent cases. They were focusing on an age range of 8-12. We have seen other cases where we have seen newborns and infants. There was a seminary student from the Midwest a few years ago who was coming down to Tijuana with the intent to have sex with --, he was requesting infant girls. So, all ages.One of the text messages in your story talks about a young girl quote, recently stolen. Do we know where these children are being stolen from?All throughout the country and up through Central America. Unaccompanied minors troubling up through those areas from Mexico. They could be targets of this kind of industry. There are certain towns in central Mexico that are known to be actual recruiting hubs of Seth -- sex trafficking -- traffickers and children. They can be the children of other sex workers. It runs the gamut. Talking to some of the experts, it seems like most of these children are brought up from other parts of the country. They are not from Tijuana necessarily.You mentioned two men from California who were recently arrested for trying to arrange sex with underage kids in Mexico. How much time are they facing if convicted?Both of them were recently arrested. At this stage, they have been arraigned, and I would imagine that they are starting to get discovery. Their lawyers are starting to get discovery from the prosecution. If they are going to go to trial, that could be another year or two out. These cases do take quite a while and federal court. If they are being charged under the protect act, they can be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison for just the charge of traveling with the intent to have sex with a minor. They do not even have to prove that they actually had sex.Tell us a little bit more about the protect act. It is a recent -- I said it is a recent law, but it has actually been on the books force quite some time.It is not the first law to address this type of activity. I think there was one back in 1993 or 1994 that was passed. It apparently was not as strong, and there might have been some loopholes in it. The reality is that the federal government was not prosecuting very many people under the law. 2004 came along and they wrapped up this sex tourism law in the protect act. It is a law that deals with child protection and child protection. The sex tourism is just one small part of that law. Some people say that the government is still not using the government enough. These cases are interesting. Maybe we are going to see more and more of these cases start to come into our court system.You say the Mexican authorities are cracking down on this type of activity, too. Are they working with U.S. law enforcement ?that is my understanding. [ Indiscernible ] did not want to talk too much about the cases, which is understandable. I did not get too much into that with him. He indicated to me that there is a new working relationship with Mexican authorities, and maybe with some other governments, as well, on this issue. These cases that I examined are the fruits of some of those efforts started to take hold.The text message -- messages that are included in your article are very disturbing. It also occurred to me that perhaps the text are a new form of evidence for law enforcement. Is that correct ?I have been covering courts for a very long time. I would imagine some of the criticism for them not using some of these laws to prosecute people in the past, I would imagine these are hard cases to break. It is hard to prove intent for a criminal act sometimes. I would imagine with today's technology, with Facebook and the Internet, things are getting documented in text messages. I would imagine that this is really good evidence for these kinds of cases.I have been speaking with Cristina Davis. Cristina, thank you.Thank you so much.