"For weeks, President Trump has been criticized for exaggerating the brutality experienced by migrant women on the border as he makes his case for a wall."

"A Rose Garden address in January was only one of the times when Mr. Trump has made the claim: 'Women are tied up. They’re bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases, they can’t even breathe. They’re put in the backs of cars or vans or trucks.' If the president was suggesting that such savagery occurs daily on America’s southern border, then he was indeed exaggerating.... But there is some truth to the president’s descriptions of the threat of sexual assault and of women who have been duct-taped and bound. Undocumented women have been duct-taped and tied up before, during and after their migration to the United States, The Times discovered while reporting a story that will soon be published. Maybe not frequently, but it has happened. 'Because I didn’t want to let them, they tied my feet together and my hands behind my back,' a 45-year-old Honduran woman told us in an interview. She said she was raped after her smugglers forced her into prostitution shortly after she illegally crossed the border in Texas.... In one trailer home in Carrizo Springs, Tex., smugglers raped a Salvadoran woman and tortured two men — covering the men’s hands with plastic bags, putting their hands on a stool and pounding their fingers with a hammer — all because their relatives failed to pay the fees...."

From "Yes, There Was Duct Tape: The Harrowing Journeys of Migrants Across the Border" (NYT).