Posted on October 16, 2024

Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking

Madeleine Rowley, Free Press, October 14, 2024

Lisa slides a Hellcat pistol into her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder. She jumps out of the driver’s seat of her massive Ford F-250 as we head into a barbecue joint for lunch. Steel brass knuckles glint in the console beside a pencil-shaped, pronged object. She sees me looking at it.

“That’s my stabby-stick,” Lisa says before I even ask. “In case I can’t bring my gun somewhere. These guys are dangerous.”

“These guys” are sex traffickers, and dangerous doesn’t begin to describe them.

Many traffickers are members of Mexican or Salvadorian gangs, part of Cuban rings or the vicious Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. Their modus operandi is luring migrant women and girls across the southern border, promising them good jobs once they get to America, and then forcing them into prostitution once they’re here, ostensibly to pay off the debt they incurred to get into the U.S. Hunting down sex traffickers is not for the faint of heart, and Lisa is not about to take any chances.

An athletic, no-nonsense blonde in her 50s, Lisa runs a small nonprofit foundation called Shepherd’s Watch, dedicated to bringing down sex-trafficking rings. Prior to starting Shepherd’s Watch in 2016, Lisa had been a telecom engineer and an expert at analyzing cell phone data used in court cases. In that job, she says, she saw a “disturbing” amount of child exploitation. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

Lisa, who asked that we not use her real name, calls herself “an informant.” She lacks the authority to arrest a trafficker, and any attempt to rescue the girls herself could well get her killed. Instead, Lisa and a small handful of other Shepherd’s Watch investigators work to locate victims and their pimps and then turn the information over to police departments, sheriff’s offices, and other law enforcement agencies. {snip}

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I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021. “Yes,” she says. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls.

“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa says. {snip}

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Deep inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resides a tiny agency called the Office on Trafficking in Persons. A large part of its mission is to help survivors of sex and labor trafficking “rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient.” Among other things, it offers food assistance, medical benefits, and cash to migrant minors who have been trafficked but have managed to escape. Once their eligibility to obtain benefits is approved, they receive a document called the child eligibility letter.

Although the number of child eligibility letters the government issues is supposed to be public information, it became available on the trafficking office’s website only after I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The numbers confirmed what Lisa had told me: Trafficking has increased—a lot—since Biden took office. During the four years of the Trump administration, the government issued an average of 625 letters per year to migrant minors who had managed to break free from their traffickers.

But in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, that number jumped to 1,143. In 2022 it jumped again, to 2,226. Last year, the number stood at 2,148, but that was only through September; the fourth quarter hadn’t yet been counted. To put it another way, forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants more than tripled under President Biden, reaching record highs. And that only counted the handful who had escaped—not the thousands who were still held by the traffickers, the ones Lisa was searching for.

“The sex trafficking of minors, and human trafficking as a whole, is one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the U.S.,” said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Mark Dawson after a big bust in Houston last year that saw the arrest of 10 traffickers, all of whom had gang connections.

Sex-trafficking victims often suffer horrific abuse, as I discovered when I spoke to Landon Dickeson, the 36-year-old executive director for Bob’s House of Hope in Denton, Texas, the only shelter for male sex-trafficking victims ages 18 and up in the country. Dickeson says they’ve seen teens from Central and South America who have been so tortured by their traffickers they can barely function.

Dickeson described caring for teens who have brain damage from being so heavily drugged—teens who have had their fingernails pulled out, and lemon juice poured on wounds. When I asked to interview one of their migrant residents, Dickeson said they simply weren’t in any condition to speak to anyone, much less a reporter.

“We think the cartels and gangs use torture as a control method for the males,” said Dickeson. “They’re not going to fight back if they chain their victims to a radiator, beat them up frequently, or drug them.”

The House of Hope residents often come branded or tattooed by the cartels and gangs who trafficked them, and most were cross-victimized—used as drug mules as well as for labor and sex.

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But sometimes an underage migrant doesn’t have a family sponsor, which gives the cartels and gangs their opening. They pretend to be legitimate sponsors, and with the pressure on the NGOs and the government to move the migrants through the system quickly, gang members—who usually have their hooks into the migrant well before they’ve crossed the border—are accepted as sponsors.

How do they get away with this? They fill out applications in illegible handwriting, guessing (often correctly) that no one will look at it closely. They coach the girl or boy to say that their sponsor is a cousin or an uncle. And they take advantage of the fact that the federal agency overseeing migrant relocation, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—or ORR—is notoriously negligent in vetting sponsors.

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In July, Republican senator Chuck Grassley hosted a roundtable on the trafficking crisis at the border. Tara Rodas, 55, a federal employee who in 2021 worked at an emergency intake shelter in California, testified that while she was there, a 13-year-old girl from El Salvador was released to a sponsor in Ohio who was affiliated with the MS-13 gang.

In an email Rodas sent to a colleague at the time, which was released by Grassley, she wrote that “our team discovered that human traffickers are exploiting the HHS Unaccompanied Children. ‘Bad actors’ are recruiting, harboring, and transporting minors; using force, fraud, and coercion; for the purpose of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, slavery, and potentially commercial sex.”

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