Trump: Human trafficking ‘worse than it’s ever been in the history of the world’

President Trump said Thursday that human trafficking has reached record levels, telling reporters it is now “worse than it’s ever been in the history of the world.”

In remarks to journalists during his tour of Joint Interagency Task Force South on Florida’s Key West island, Trump remarked on the need for tougher immigration measures to stop human trafficking as well as the flow of drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, according to pool reports.

{mosads}”Drugs are flowing into our country. We need border protection. We need the wall. We have to have the wall. The Democrats don’t want to approve the wall because they think it’s good politically, but it’s not,” he said.

“Human trafficking is worse than it’s ever been in the history of the world,” Trump added.

The president’s remarks Thursday echoed nearly verbatim his remarks from July of last year, when he told law enforcement officials in Long Island that human trafficking had reached record levels.

“Human traffickers. This is a term that’s been going on from the beginning of time, and they say it’s worse now than it ever was,” he said last year, according to CNN.

“You go back 1,000 years, where you think of human trafficking, you go back 500 years, 200 years, 100 years, human trafficking, they say — think of it, what they do — human trafficking is worse now, maybe, than it’s ever been in the history of this world,” Trump said last July.

U.S. administrations have sought to curb human trafficking in the U.S. for years without success. Under the Obama administration, U.S. officials began tracking human trafficking in the U.S. for the first time.

The National Human Trafficking Hotline estimates that about 8,500 cases of human trafficking were reported in 2017, an increase of nearly 1,000 cases from the year before.

Polaris, an international nongovernmental organization, estimated in 2016 there were 40 million victims of human trafficking worldwide.

— Updated at 2:40 p.m.