Human Trafficking Statistics by State [Edited to add: 2/3/21]
2/2/21: 64 arrested in Riverside County anti-human trafficking operation
The following Coachella Valley residents were arrested for soliciting prostitution:
- Gabriel Alvarez, 28 of Coachella
- Douglas Ayala, 43 of Twentynine Palms
- Monte Bertoldo, 53 of Palm Springs
- Rutilio Brito, 33 of La Quinta
- Florencio Lopez, 50 of Thermal
- Rodrigo Macias-Leal, 21 of Cathedral City
- Ricardo Pachuca, 23 of Indio
- Juan Poblano-Martinez, 48 of Thermal
- Goldsborough Purnell, 62 of Palm Springs
- Eliuth Ramirez, 22 of Thermal
- Enrique Ramirez, 23 of Thermal
- Adam Sambrano, 39 of Indio
- Francisco Scott, 38 of Coachella
- Anthony Smith, 26 of Palm Desert
- Kyle Smith, 26 of Palm Desert
- William Spicknall, 37 of Palm Desert
- Thomas Stanford, 42 of Indio
- Manuel Vega, 44 of Thermal
All of the suspects were released after signing agreements guaranteeing they will appear at scheduled court hearings.
[Updated to add: 2/2/21]
January 2021: Jon Weaver, Never-Trumper, caught sending sexual messages to young boys
Jon Weaver was the chief strategist for RINOs like John McCain and John Kasich.
Weaver then founded the Lincoln Project with other failed Bush-era Republican strategists for the express purpose of making viral anti-Trump ads. Weaver resigned from the group after The American Conservative broke the story that for years, Weaver – who is married with kids – led a secret double life where sent sexually suggestive messages to young men to “groom” them for a sexual relationship.
1/29/21: At least 15 women come forward and accuse rapper and his wife of sex trafficking and more
Military members, teacher, and sex predators among 71 arrested in Hillsborough human trafficking sting
By FOX 13 News staff
Published January 11
Updated January 12
Hillsborough County FOX 13 News
Dozens arrested in Hillsborough County human trafficking bust
Josh Cascio reports
TAMPA, Fla. - There were 71 people arrested following a month-long human trafficking operation by Hillsborough County’s undercover detectives, the sheriff said, adding that the agency won’t slow down in tracking down "Johns" as Tampa becomes the Super Bowl host next month.
"All of these men have one thing in common: they did not care if the women they were going to have sex with were being exploited, forced to sell their bodies against their will," Sheriff Chad Chronister explained Monday.
During a press conference, he said "Operation Interception" involved undercover detectives posting online advertisements offering to meet up for sex. Female detectives posed as prostitutes.
"The reality is no one willingly chooses to enter the world of sexual exploitation," Chronister explained. "We have found that in many cases these individuals suffer from some type of victimization of rape or suffer from some type of substance abuse."
All suspects were men ranging from the ages of 20 to 62. The sheriff said they included active-duty military members, a Christian schoolteacher, a firefighter, a banker, construction workers, local business owners, and two registered sex offenders.
Detectives identified 28-year-old Ronnie Johnson III as a Hillsborough County firefighter. There is no word yet on his employment status with the agency.
They said Johnson had no previous arrest history within Hillsborough County.
Kevin Cameron, 43, was identified as a visual arts teacher with North Tampa Christian Academy. Officials said he had no prior arrest history in the county.
There is no word yet on his employment status with the agency.
Joshua Ellis, 39, was identified as a member of the Army Reserve and had no prior criminal history in the country.
Markas Williams, 40, was identified as a member of the Air Force and had a prior DUI arrest in Hillsborough County back in 2000.
John Teugh, 33, is one of the registered sex offenders arrested during the undercover operation. He was found guilty in 2011 for using the internet to solicit a child for sex and traveling to meet the minor for sex in Citrus County, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The announcement comes as law enforcement officials in the region promised to step up to prevent an increase in human trafficking before the Super Bowl.
"With less than a month away from the big game, our covert operations continue and will continue seeking those who choose to sexually exploit others in our community," Chronister said. "The Super Bowl should not be a venue where these types of crimes occur on the sidelines whether it’s before the game, during the game, or after the game."
January is Human Trafficking Awareness Month and Florida ranks third in the country for the crime.
Sex offender who is facing human trafficking charges arrested again
By Pat Reavy, Deseret News | Posted - Jan. 10, 2021 at 5:28 p.m.
SALT LAKE CITY — A Kearns man currently charged with human trafficking has been arrested again in an online undercover investigation by police.
Police say when Craig Thomas Defa, 27, showed up to meet whom he thought was a 13-year-old girl, he was still wearing a GPS monitor on his ankle issued by a judge in his current case.
In November 2019, Defa pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and unlawful conduct with a 16- or 17-year-old, in exchange for 11 other counts of sexual exploitation of a minor being dismissed. He was given a suspended prison sentence and placed on probation. Defa was also required to register as a sex offender in Utah.
Less than a year later, in August, Defa was charged in 3rd District Court with human trafficking, a first-degree felony, and six counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, a second-degree felony. His next court hearing in that case is scheduled for Jan. 26.
On Thursday, Defa was chatting online with an undercover officer posing as a 13-year-old girl and Defa offered the girl money for a sexual act, according to a police affidavit. When the officer told him "she" was only 13, he replied, "Ooof that's risky," but then he stated "I'm game if you are," the affidavit states.
Defa agreed to meet the girl in a fast food parking lot in Salt Lake County. A team of FBI officers staged in the area in unmarked cars, according to the affidavit. Defa pulled into the parking lot, but then left and parked at a business down the street, Investigators ran the vehicle's license plate and learned it was Defa, a registered sex offender, the affidavit states.
Defa was taken into custody. He declined to speak to police but asked if he could call his mother.
"I dialed a phone number Mr. Defa provided to me and then placed the phone on speaker. An adult female answered and Mr. Defa said he was going to a jail," the affidavit states.
He was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for investigation of enticing a minor.
11/11/20: Massive child sex trafficking network with ties to US uncovered, 18 arrested
11/18/20: Nearly 200 arrested in sexual exploitation of a single Florida teen
Nearly 40 missing children rescued during Georgia sex trafficking bust
By: Tony Thomas, WSB-TV
Updated: August 28, 2020 - 10:57 AM
ATLANTA — More than three dozen children are now safe after being rescued during a sex trafficking bust involving state and federal agents.
Channel 2′s Gwinnett County Bureau Chief Tony Thomas learned that the bust, dubbed “Operation Not Forgotten” spanned 20 counties around metro Atlanta.
For two weeks, U.S.Marshals Fugitive Hunters and other agencies scoured north and middle Georgia looking for missing and exploited children. In all, 26 endangered children were recovered and another 13 missing children were found.
U.S. Marshals Service Director Donald Washington said that authorities fear the children were all already or potential victims of sex trafficking.
“These missing children were considered to be some of the most at-risk and challenging recovery cases in the area, based on indications of high-risk factors such as victimization of child sex trafficking, child exploitation, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and medical or mental health conditions,” authorities said. “Other children were located at the request of law enforcement to ensure their wellbeing.”
The operation spanned across 20 Georgia counties. Sources said children were found in Gwinnett, Fulton, Clayton, and Forsyth counties among other places. Nine suspects were arrested.
The suspects are now behind bars as state prosecutors step in to handle the cases and medical and social workers focus on helping traumatized kids.
“One missing child is worth thousands, in my mind, of fugitives that we go out and get,” Washington said.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said authorities will measure their success on “how many lives that we have saved and that will have a new and fresh start.”
Other major cities across the country have similar operations underway. Most of them have yet to be completed.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp issued a statement about the bust via Twitter Thursday night.
The people arrested include:
Moradeyo Amos Bandele – Arrested in Port St Lucie, FL – Warrant for Rape out of Conyers, GA
Trayon Moore – Dekalb County – Sex Trafficking and Probation Violation warrants
James Garcia - Arrested at a Motel in Clearwater, Fl - Warrants out of Whitfield County, GA - Aggravated Child Molestation, Aggravated Sodomy and Incest with a Minor
Faye Smith – Arrested at a motel in Clearwater, Fl – Warrant for Probation Violation
Sally Garcia – Arrested at a motel in Clearwater, Fl – Interference with Child Custody
Zachary Bailey Arrested in Columbus, GA – Human trafficking, Enticing of a Minor for Indecent Purposes, and Enticement of a Minor for Solicitation
Stanson Causey – Arrested in Jasper, GA – Registered Sex Offender arrested for Probation Violation
Kirk Waters – Arrested in Newton County, GA – Felon in Possession of a Firearm
Trevonte Shareef – Arrested in Newton County, GA – Interference with custody and obstruction
The Hidden War on Sex Trafficking
By Larry Schweikart -July 18, 2020
There is much to be disappointed in with Christopher Wray, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His inaction in assisting Senate investigations of the “muh Russia” coup attempt, his heel-dragging on any kind of arrests for rioters and Black Lives Matters terrorists, and his overall seeming reluctance to even admit there was a coup or that his own Bureau was up to its earlobes in it. However, while he has continued to bang the “Russia-a-threat-to-elections” drum, he has recently correctly identified China as the greatest threat to the United States today. Well, that’s something.
Wray has been doing something, at least. Indeed, that “something” is nothing less than the most aggressive campaign in American history to nab rings of child exploitation and trafficking that, in 2016, had some 5,500 cases reported nationwide. One reason we know so little about this campaign is that it is spread out across the United States, with hundreds of different raids at different times. It has encompassed at least three main operations: “Operation Safe Summer” in 2018, “Operation Cross Country XI,” in January 2019, and “Operation Safe Summer 2″ in mid-2019. It appears, however, that the crackdown began in October 2017, in an unnamed operation that involved 55 field offices.
An Indianapolis raid on October 18 was part of what the FBI called a nationwide crackdown. It captured 120 alleged traffickers and rescued 84 children. Nationwide, agents raided hotels, casinos, and truck stops. In that same crackdown, 54 perps were arrested in Detroit and 8 kids rescued.
The FBI-led multi-agency law enforcement effort is focused on recovering children and holding sex traffickers accountable.
California may have set the ball in motion in early 2017 when nearly 500 people were arrested on human trafficking charges, rescuing 28 children and 27 adults who had been “coerced into prostitution”. Human trafficking was rampant in California, which had more cases of human trafficking than any other state.
At the end of 2017, President Trump issued an executive order blocking all transactions involving private property of persons involved in human rights abuse. The order could have serious financial consequences on people who exploited or abused children in human trafficking. But it also had the potential to the shutdown of companies such as Craigslist, MySpace, Backpage, and other online service providers where ads for selling adults and children for sex were regularly found. This was followed in 2018 by legislation called the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), also referred to as SESTA, which would cut into the broad protections websites have from legal liability for content posted by their users. Those protections found in the Communications Decency Act (1996) would be amended to create an exception for sex trafficking. On April 11, 2018, President Trump signed FOSTA into law (with, of course, the Washington Post calling it “controversial”).
The signing was timely, as the FBI kicked off “Operation Safe Summer” in May 2018 that was heavily focused on the Atlanta, Georgia region. In those raids, the FBI announced it had rescued 150 exploited or missing children.
In January 2019, another national sting, “Operation Cross Country XI,” rescued 84 children in “multiple states” and arrested 120.
With Operation Safe Summer deemed a success, it was repeated in May 2019 with “Operation Safe Summer II,” which rescued 231 more children in Atlanta. By that time, the FBI estimated that more than 23,500 runaways reported, with one in seven believed to be part of child sex trafficking across the country. In Florida, Operation Safe Summer saw 15 arrested for crimes against children.
Some statistics downplayed the number of missing, abducted and runaway children and are to be used cautiously. In 1990, the Justice Department published its first comprehensive study (called “NISMART-1″) and its follow-up NISMART-2, which is the most recent, in 2002. The NISMART-2 study estimated that 797,500 children were reported missing in that year, of which only 115 were labeled kidnappings, of whom 40 were killed. Since 1997, through 2011, the FBI noted that the number of missing persons had fallen 31%. For perspective, in 2014, with an American population of 318 million, of whom 74 million were children, that would mean that under this analysis, only about 115 of the victims would have actually been victims of kidnappings. The rest were taken by family members in divorce disputes, erroneously reported as missing by caregivers, ran away, or were told by their families never to return (due to drug use or alcoholism).
Those estimates seem incredibly low and were easily topped in a single sting in Atlanta, which, appeared to be a center for trafficking operations. For example, in March 2019, the FBI estimated about 419 missing or runaway children were believed to be on the streets of the five-county metro region. Employing 27 different Georgia law enforcement agencies headed up by the FBI’s Metro Atlanta Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking (MATCH) task force, the FBI in May 2019 rescued 231 children in the metro Atlanta area, which by itself challenged the numbers provided from NISMART estimates. The offensive continued in September 2019 when the Franklin Co., Ohio Sheriff’s Office arrested over 100 in a single sting, including the youth director at the Courtright Church in Columbus and an ER doctor. Among those arrested were 24 men caught “when they showed up at an undisclosed location with the intention of meeting a child for sex, Major Steven Tucker of the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office said.”
There was no letup either: in August 2019, the FBI staged nation-wide busts, rescuing another 100 victims. Once again, California led the way with more child exploiters than any other state, and the state was targeted again in February 2020 when “hundreds” were arrested. The majority of the arrests (over 50) were in Stanislaus County in the sting dubbed “Operation Reclaim and Rebuild.” Then, in April 2020, another 58 suspects were arrested in Minnesota, with 28 children rescued.
I could go on and on. A fairly comprehensive list of worldwide news about individuals charged or convicted of child trafficking appears here. Nor is the attack on child trafficking confined to the United States: In June 2016 a massive sting in Barcelona, Spain resulted in 12 arrests and “identified” over 1,000 victims (though the report did not say how many were actually rescued).
Many who suspect there is an international conspiracy in human trafficking with central connections thought that the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in July 2019 on sex trafficking would shed light on the network. That, of course, was temporarily sidetracked by his “suicide” until the early July 2020 arrest of his accomplice (and, some say, procurer) Ghislane Maxwell in New Hampshire. She apparently seemed nonchalant about the arrest, as though she were expecting it.
The significance of the Epstein/Maxwell arrests is that they go straight to some very big names in elite circles and in the world of politics. Maxwell, who purportedly kept a copy of Epstein’s records, allegedly has information on England’s Prince Andrew and on former President Bill Clinton, among others. But there were plenty of names on the flight manifest for Epstein’s plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express’ because it supposedly took “clients” for sex with underage girls on Epstein’s Caribbean Island. Now, it appears, Maxwell has the keys to the Epstein evidence locker, and there remains a suspicion that once the locker is opened, there will be an earthquake in Washington D.C. as well as Hollywood.
Meanwhile, those who have waited in vain for indictments of the “muh Russia” coup plotters, such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, and others have held out hope that the iceberg may be approached from the bottom, and that the pedo arrests will eventually wind their way to, perhaps, the Clinton Foundation. Whatever Christopher Wray has not been doing when it comes to indicting the coup plotters, it appears at least the FBI has been engaged in a war on human trafficking. We can all be thankful for that.
Larry Schweikart is the co-author with Michael Allen of the New York Times #1 bestseller, A Patriot’s History of the United States, author of Reagan: The American President, and founder of Wild World of History, a history curriculum website for grades 9-12 (www.wildworldofhistory.com)
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