My name is Anna Paulina Luna
My entire mother's side of the family and father's side the family on both sides are from Mexico.
My mom made the decision at 20 years old to basically walk home from an abortion clinic.
She grew up in an environment that was really infected with drugs,
you know, it could've ended up very differently.
My mom's always been my guardian, my protector, but she knows she herself had me at a very young age.
We moved up to LA when I was in high school,
and she pretty much raised me on her own along with my brother and sister.
So my dad is a first generation American citizen.
I myself on my dad's side would be a second-generation American citizen.
He actually grew up going back and forth to Mexico City when he was younger,
but my father had a very bad drug addiction
so my dad, for as much as he loved me, was pretty much in and out of the picture my entire life.
So this is something that definitely means a lot to me.
It's one of the only things that I have from my grandma Emma,
and there's actually the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on it, so very Mexican. (laughs)
But, you know, for me, it's–it's the one piece that I have of her.
She taught my dad a lots and she's very much so a part of my history, my story,
and so I actually keep it in my nightstand with me and it reminds me of her every time I look at it. So.
In the neighborhood that we lived in, it was a neighborhood in Santa Ana, and
instead of having the ice-cream guy that a lot of kids remember growing up with, you know,
the music going on down the street, we had an elote guy.
And this guy would come around in a shopping cart and you'd honk his horn, spoke no English,
and my dad would go out there and order and it was two corns for a dollar and I'd sit there on the curb
with my dad, and we–we'd eat it.
For me, that's my cultural experience, my connection.
But again, when you live all these things, that's just kind of part of who I am.
I didn't realize that I was different, per se. There were some things that I saw growing up with my dad
that, you know, looking back on it now, just not something that...
Drugs really impacted my family.
And a lot of times I didn't see my dad,
it was because he was either using or in jail.
And
You know, I would come across things that no kid should come across.
I think at ten years old I came across a meth bag.
Sometimes, I...
like I found, um...
a Pookie, which is a,
basically a meth pipe.
My grandma Judy, her brothers, and her husband actually all ended up dying of AIDS due to heroin use.
And even though my dad loved me, he also was struggling with a form of addiction that, you know,
one of the places that I briefly lived at with my dad was actually–
they were trafficking, or they were selling drugs out of it. They were selling firearms. It ended up being raided.
And um, you know, looking back at that then,
you know, I–I definitely saw the gang mentality.
I saw what that environment was like and for someone like me, you know, my dad's not a perfect person,
but he's clean now.
And had it not been, I think, for the structure that the military really provided with me,
it would have probably been that my dad wouldn't have been able to get out of those situations
because I was at...the military enabled me to help my family
in a way that I think I wouldn't have been able to help them in it in–in that sense.
The military is one of the best things that a lot of times people can do to get out of really bad situations.
And it deeply almost angers me when I hear people say that the military targets minorities
and that it's not a good thing because not only was I able to help myself,
and really, as an adult, get the guidance and the structure that I needed to really excel,
But I was able to also help my family, and I think that for someone like myself, I mean,
what other place in the world can a young woman join the military and then help her family
to the point of, like, really, like, making changes that impact future generations.
And I think that that was something that
I will forever be grateful for the military for, and when I still talk to younger kids,
even kids in–from rougher areas, I'm like, hey, look you should consider joining
because for me it was life-changing and I don't regret that decision.
So Craig was a Navy SEAL, and he basically was the very first person that
exposed me to what was happening with sex trafficking of children at the U.S.-Mexico border.
It was through that that I really went down the rabbit hole and found out that
not only was my entire
demographic literally being lied to about what was happening at the border, but
for me it, and I don't know if it was because of how I grew up, like what I experienced, or...
But I just, I felt they need to speak up. I felt the need to
advocate for people that can't speak for themselves.
There's a market that's been created that's been run by organized crime on both sides of the border and that to me is disgusting.
There's children that are kidnapped and brought here to be trafficked for strictly sexual and/or labor purposes,
and there are literally children that are also rented so that people can exploit the
asylum process here in the United States by claiming that they're a family unit.
They gain entry into this country, and then they never show back up to court and then the kids are sent back and rerented.
I mean you're talking about
people being treated as less than human,
literally less than garbage, being made to have intercourse with random strangers,
not using protect–protection, being raped, sometimes to the point of where they're bleeding.
When you really see what happens to some of these kids, you know, they only hope that someone like
a police officer or Border Patrol agent or, you know, even an I.C.E. officer would find them,
because of what they go through. And I don't care where a child's from;
in no way shape or form should anyone turn a blind eye to some of the atrocities,
the rape, the trafficking, the kidnapping, and the torture of children.
I came across an article about a young woman named Karla Jacinto. Karla is was–was kidnapped.
She was, from my understanding,
initially brought into the trafficking world by someone that was pretending to be interested in her,
that would–by someone who wanted to be her boyfriend.
What really stuck out to me is as I'm pulling up this article, I see this number of forty-four thousand.
That was the number of times that she had been raped during her entire duration of being a trafficking victim.
This wasn't just something that, you know, you kind of listen to, think about, and then move on from.
I was actually sitting in a hotel room,
and I was in town for my friend Natasha's wedding in Florida, and I was working on my computer,
you know, I wasn't political at all,
and CNN was running a story on a train that had been stopped that was coming up from South America,
and I remember the anchor saying, you know,
federal–Mexican Federal Police have stopped a train and on board
there's women and children,
but they stopped the train due to MS-13 gang members,
being on it, and, you know, here at CNN we are raising money because these are refugees fleeing a country.
And I'm thinking in the back of my head that, one, when do you ever find women and children
with gang members, ever, and then also, two,
the fact that CNN was putting together, then, money to bring these people to the border,
I immediately stopped what I was doing and I just started watching this story.
And, you know, sometimes in your life
you'll have that moment of clarity where it just clicks.
It kind of hit me all at–all as a ton of bricks but I realized that there's something called propaganda, and it's used.
And I saw what's happening and I made a video and I put that video out there and I got pushback for it.
For me, it was me feeling like I was protecting,
um, also, too
I think tying back into how I grew up, but then also realized that I didn't see anyone
from my demographic that was saying anything about it. I didn't see anyone saying hey, no, I don't agree with this,
I'm not racist,
like, I am Hispanic. I'm Hispanic and I don't agree with this for these reasons, and so by me taking that
initial choice to speak up, I felt that I was helping to fix the problem and the problem was
making sure that people aren't getting hurt because an open border hurts people on both sides.
Any person that's advocating strongly against a wall is either grossly misinformed and completely ignorant as
to what's happening, or they're a criminal because they're part of the problem. What people don't realize
is that the policies we have here in effect in the United States
directly impact those other places. And if there's a physical barrier people are less inclined to
even try to make that journey in the first place, and it makes it very hard for people that are doing bad things,
trying to exploit innocent people to sell them into something like this,
it makes it very difficult for them to do that.
What they were failing to say is that these children are separated to confirm biological identity.
There's literally been border patrol
came out with stats saying that one third of the children that they tested that are brought to the border
in family units are not biologically related to the people claiming to be their family members; that is horrifying.
They've created something that I think should be a nonpartisan issue.
They're not giving it the respect–they're not giving it the attention that's deserved,
I think because it's a political...it's a political motive.
I would hands down rather have a child separated from someone claiming to be their parent
until they are biologically proved to be related to that person because of the fact that sex trafficking exists.
It is irresponsible for people to say
that we need–we need to reunite families because of this reasoning. These kids don't choose to be in this
circumstance; they're innocent in this. But if we're not protecting them through our legislative policies,
then we're part of the problem and I will never back down from that stance.
A lot of the Border Patrol officers that I've talked to are actually Hispanic.
um
A lot of the I.C.E. officers that I've spoken to are Hispanic. People doing that job are not racist, people
that know what's happening at the border. And the reason why you become so passionate about is because you're informed.
I don't think that people go to that job with the intention of wanting to hurt people,
I think you go into that job because you want to help the community.
It's our moral obligations as Americans, as Christians, as people that believe in God, to stand up against this.
The opportunities that I've had, um, to date I've traveled to over 25 countries around the world.
And I can say that the United States is one of the best countries in the world that currently exists,
and that in no way shape or form have I ever been held back because the fact that I am a Hispanic American.
The truth is one of the most powerful things that you have to make changes in a country, in a world that
desperately needs it. Of every single country that I've traveled to in the world, I can tell you that
being born here is basically like winning the lottery, because every opportunity that I've had,
as a woman coming from the background that I have, coming from the story that I have, the
opportunities that I have been given off of hard work is nowhere else in the world.
I feel absolutely grateful
every single day that I wake up at the fact that I was born here, that I've had the
opportunity to serve my country, and that because I'm an American, I have been given the opportunity
to flourish with as much hard work as I've put into it
and I've attained. So, yes, am I grateful for this country? Absolutely.
Will I continue to fight for it? Absolutely. And am I grateful to be an American? Absolutely.
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