President Donald Trump signed a bill Tuesday that provides $4.6 billion in emergency funding for humanitarian aid and security to the southern border. In signing the bill Trump noted, “For many weeks, Democrats were giving us a hard time,” but finally “it became a bipartisan bill” and “we were very happy about it.”

It has been a long time coming since Trump first announced the existence of an illegal-immigration crisis on the U.S. southern border. Initially Democrats panned Trump’s assertion as merely a political ploy, claiming that he was manufacturing a crisis where there was none. However, the shear immensity of the crisis at the border could not be ignored for long even by the Leftmedia. And finally enough pressure was brought to bear against congressional Democrats that they finally capitulated and agreed to a bipartisan bill.

With the Border Patrol increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of illegal-immigrant crossings, what was the pressure that finally brought open-border Democrats to a bipartisan bill? The suffering of children — much of it due to an increase in human trafficking conducted in large part by drug cartels.

The Seattle Times reports that Tijuana police have been “warning migrant mothers to keep their children close by and supervised, after reports of men offering to purchase migrant children in order to cross.” The article quoted a Honduran mother who said, “I can’t go to work because I can’t take my eyes off my boys. … They want to rob our kids so they can cross into the United States.”

Recall that former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had warned about this very issue last year, which brought little other than jeers from those in the Leftmedia. Fast forward to this year and The New York Times admits that the claim that children are being trafficked for the purposes of illegally crossing the border and gaming U.S. asylum rules was accurate.

Once again, our nation’s border laws exit not just for protecting American citizens and interests but also for the benefit of those from other countries. When lawlessness is allowed to go unchallenged it will only lead to greater lawlessness and in turn greater suffering. How many children have been stolen from their homes by nefarious individuals who seek to use them as a means to enter and stay in the U.S.? This criminal trafficking must be stopped.