2023-08-04 15:30:00
HUMAN TRAFFICKING – In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced that it has found more than 200 victims of sex trafficking, including several dozen minors, in an operation lasting several days last July by its agents against human trafficking and child sexual exploitation networks. A dragnet that also led to “identification or arrest” of more than 120 traffickers.
Called “Operation Cross County”, this annual offensive allowed “the identification and location of 200 victims of sex trafficking”. In a communiqué aired Tuesday, August 1, 2023, the FBI also announced that 126 suspects involved in the sexual exploitation of children and 68 suspects involved in human trafficking have been “identified or arrested”. In addition, the federal agency, which says it has mobilized all of its offices across the country and coordinated its efforts with other organizations such as state and local police and social services, reported 59 minor victims of sex trafficking localized and about 60 other missing children found.
The operation focused primarily on “the identification and location of victims of child sex trafficking and human trafficking”and, secondly, on “the arrest of the individuals and criminal enterprises involved”.
1,400 traffickers arrested between 2008 and 2017
According to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a child protection organization that participated in the FBI operation, 19,000 reports of possible cases of sex trafficking were received in 2022. On its site Internetthis center specifies that among the 25,000 children reported missing and who had fled child protection services, 18% of them were probably victims of sex trafficking. “Behind every statistic there is a person with dreams, aspirations and the right to live a life free from sex trafficking and exploitation”recalled Michelle DeLaune, president of the NCMEC.
The FBI, whose director Christopher Wray denounced child trafficking, a “serious violation of human rights that attacks the most vulnerable in our society”specified that the victims found during the 13th edition of the operation “Cross County” had received food and clothing, emergency services and assistance in finding shelter or accommodation. “The FBI’s actions against this threat will never waver and we continue to send our message: These atrocities will not be tolerated.”added Mr. Wray in the press release.
The details of this operation, such as the distribution of the States, have not been revealed, but local FBI offices communicate on the figures related to their region. That of San Francisco for example announced the identification and location of 21 victims of sex trafficking. At New Jersey, 5 minors were saved. The national number of victims found is close to that recent years. Between the first edition in 2008 and 2017, more than 900 children were found and about 1,400 traffickers were arrested.
If the scourge of child sex trafficking and human trafficking has been denounced for several decades, the issue has been particularly at the heart of attention in recent months in the United States. In April, a whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas, who worked with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) at an emergency migrant reception site in Pomona, California, openly accused Congress of the US government to be complicit, “intentionally or not”why traffic.
Child trafficking in the crosshairs
During of a hearing titled “Biden’s Border Crisis: The Exploitation of Unaccompanied Foreign Children”she testified stating that the US government had become “the middleman in a large-scale, multi-billion dollar child trafficking operation run by bad actors seeking to profit from the lives of children”. Tara Lee Rodas was mostly referring to the management by the Biden administrationjudged “lax” by Republicans, immigration at the southern border of the United States and the influx of unaccompanied minor migrants. In March, the New York Times reveals in an investigation the condition of these migrant children, who also find themselves forced to work.
According to federal report on human trafficking in 2022, 85% of victims trafficked to the United States are of foreign nationality. 69% of them are the object of sex trafficking and 15% are exploited. “I thought I was going to help place children into loving homes. Instead, I discovered they were being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruitment in their home country, a smuggled across the U.S. border and ends when the Office of Refugee Resettlement delivers a child to a sponsor – and some of them are criminals, traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations”, a declared Mme Rodas.
Recruitment is mainly done on social networks, as Florida State Attorney General Ashley Moody had pointed out. On July 10, she demanded in a letter made public explanations from Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Meta group, whose social networks Facebook and Instagram are favored by traffickers, according to several studies. The Californian giant had also been implicated by the United Kingdom and the European Union, which denounced the involvement of Meta applications in child trafficking.
An awareness to which many Hollywood stars join, who for many years have denounced the pedophile networks which target underage actors. At the beginning of July, the thriller “Sound Of Freedom” alerts us to child sex trafficking and the scale of the phenomenon. The feature film, directed by Alejandro Monteverde with Jim Caviezel in the lead role, traces the true story of Tim Ballard, a former US government agent who fought against this criminal activity, particularly in South America. The film shot to the top of the box office upon its release.
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