'Sound of Freedom' Inspires Donald Trump's New Policy

Former President Donald Trump outlined his plans to combat child trafficking after watching Sound of Freedom.

The independent film about former Homeland Security officer Tim Ballard's efforts to stop child trafficking became the box office surprise of 2023. Starring Jim Caviezel as Ballard, Sound of Freedom has become the 10th-highest grossing movie of the year so far.

Trump referenced the film at a rally in Florida, where he vowed to use "Title 42 to end the child-trafficking crisis," if elected to the White House again.

Title 42 was a public health law to prevent communicable diseases, invoked to limit the spread of COVID-19, but some criticized it as an excuse to keep migrants out of the U.S.

The 2024 Republican presidential hopeful promised to use the law to return "all trafficked children to their families and their home countries immediately back to their parents where they were stolen from their parents [sic]."

"You saw the movie Freedom, they were stolen from their parents," Trump continued, incorrectly naming the movie.

Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked within the U.S each year, according to the State Department, with research estimating 72 percent of those people are immigrants.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended the repeal of Title 42, claiming there is little benefit to public health, as have other human-trafficking organizations.

"Expelling migrants back to their home countries where they faced persecution or forcing them to wait in Mexico increases trafficking and other violent crimes," argues the Human Trafficking Institute. "For a country staunchly opposed to human trafficking, the United States needs to take a closer look at how its immigration policies are aiding and abetting human trafficking."

Other organizations argued that when the Trump administration enacted Title 42, a number of trafficking victims, including children, were expelled from the U.S. without due process.

"There have been many reports of children being held for days in hotels, without access to advocates or lawyers, before being expelled under Title 42. Many of these children have still not been located after being expelled," wrote the Puente Human Rights Movement.

Another human rights expert previously told Newsweek that the trafficking of people "internationally is much less common," and the greater risk to children was "sex tourism" and trafficking within their own country.

This allows people to travel to a country where "children have less protection."

"There's a lot of misunderstanding around what the nature of human trafficking looks like," Rachel Lovell from the National Crime and Justice Research Alliance told Newsweek in October.

"There's a lot of spatialization of human trafficking in films to give a false perception of the extent of human trafficking in the numbers, scope and the nature of what it is.

"Labor trafficking is much more common than sex trafficking but it's often completely ignored."