Never expected to see The New York Times make a forceful case for President Trump’s emergency order on border security. 

But an account in Sunday’s paper - “You Have To Pay With Your Body: The Hidden Nightmare of Sexual Violence On The Border” - detailed horrific cases of the abuse of women illegally entering the US and seemed to support what the president has been saying for several years: Women are being raped, drugged, beaten and forced into prostitution by the hairballs bringing them across the border.

If sexual slavery of indigent women by international smugglers isn’t an emergency situation, what is? 

One thing’s certain, a terrible side effect of our porous border and lax enforcement of immigration laws is a vast underground network of ruthless mercenaries trafficking in illegals.

Poor women desperate to get to the US - enticed perhaps by the promise of sanctuary cities - are forced to pay these predators with sex. Many are abused on the trip. Others are kidnapped, raped or used for prostitution once they’re here, the Times reports.

The newspaper found 100 documented cases of sexual abuse. A fraction of the actual cases.

“Interviews with migrant women and those working with them along the border point to large numbers of cases that are either unreported or unexamined, suggesting that sexual violence has become an inescapable part of the collective migrant journey,” reported the Times.

“Few of these crimes are ever reported because the powerless women are told they’ll be turned over to the American authorities and deported if they complain.”

The Times interviewed eight women with permission to stay in the US. They provide a damning look at the conditions along the border. Their stories seemed to support the Trump administration’s contention that sexual abuse of women is an epidemic.

“President Trump has used the threat faced by migrant women to make his case for a border wall. ‘One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico,’ he said in January — an estimate that appears to have originated from some limited surveys, one of them by Doctors Without Borders, of women traveling through Mexico.”

I know, I know, those on the left believe the way to cure this problem is to simply open the border. Let everyone in. That would be a disaster and lead to chaos.

The United States has a duty to control immigration and enforce existing laws.

I lived overseas for three years and learned quickly that immigration laws are serious business:

“You get caught speeding or smoking that marijuana and we’ll deport you the next day,” an unsmiling Irish official told me as he stamped my resident alien papers back in 1982.

I believed him. Call me old fashioned, but I also believed it was the right of the Irish government to expect non-citizens to come into their country legally and behave themselves once they were there.

Estimates of the cost of illegal immigration vary widely. In 2013, The Heritage Foundation estimated that households headed by illegal immigrants cost Americans about $54.5 billion per year.

That is a huge drain on our economy. But it’s not an emergency. It’s been going on for decades.

But sexual violence against women trying to enter the US illegally is not something for think tanks to ponder or for beard-tugging editorialists to debate endlessly.

It’s an emergency.

Just ask The New York Times.