Nine hundred dollars. That was the going rate to carry a child across the bridge from Juárez into El Paso, according to federal prosecutors. The children in question were five years old, and they were drugged to make the crossing work. That's the business model on the bridge, and it's thriving because Congress keeps treating child smuggling like a paperwork problem when it's abuse for profit.

Sit with that number for a second. A five-year-old, chemically shut down, for the price of a used iPhone. The source headline says it plainly: they drug five-year-olds to smuggle them for $900 a head. When prosecutors can put a price on that, this stopped being an isolated act of desperation a long time ago. I'll defend this take anywhere: drugging a child to get her across a port of entry is a rational business decision by smuggling organizations that treat children as cargo. Cargo gets sedated when it might cry at the wrong moment. You don't need a confession to recognize the logic of the operation.

The details prosecutors laid out should end any lingering naivety about who's running this trade. A going rate, quoted in court. Children moved for payment. And if the price list exists at all, the escort is improvising nothing; somebody upstream set that number and somebody downstream expects it paid.

The rate itself tells you everything. Smugglers don't publish prices for services they performed once. Nine hundred dollars a head means negotiation, means repeat business, means somebody on the other side of that bridge keeping books. A market with a rate card is a market with volume, and volume means this wasn't the first child and won't be the last.

So what do I want? Mandatory minimums for child smuggling that make the $900 not worth the ten years. Federal charges for the recruiters and financiers upstream, above and beyond the escort holding the kid's hand on the bridge. And hospitals reporting every sedated child who shows up with an adult whose story doesn't hold, the same way they report other signs of abuse. Because that's exactly what this is: abuse, invoiced.

We don't know where the children from these cases are tonight. Nobody's reporting on that, and the silence ought to bother you. What we do know is the rate still stands, which means somewhere out there another escort is counting cash, doing the math on a five-year-old who won't know what hit her until she wakes up somewhere she doesn't know.

Nine hundred dollars. That's what a child's silence costs in this trade. Congress has the gavel and the sentencing guidelines. Start acting like it.