https://www.thefp.com/p/inside...est-growing-criminal

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

Biden’s border policies have led to an explosion in the forced prostitution of migrants in the U.S. ‘If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes.’

DALLAS, TEXAS — 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. Because Lisa and her team have gained credibility with law enforcement over the years, the police usually follow up on the information the Shepherd’s Watch informants provide. Sometimes they hit pay dirt, arresting the traffickers and removing the girls to a safe place.

“Law enforcement is understaffed and stretched too thin,” says Lisa. “That’s where we come in.”

At the barbecue joint off Route 75 in Dallas, Lisa pulls out her phone to show me the dozen or so online platforms that traffickers and pimps use to sell girls for sex. The platforms—which include apps like TikTok, OnlyFans, and Facebook—are chockablock with ads of women, usually wearing lingerie, their faces covered to prevent anyone guessing their age. The sheer number of ads is astonishing. “Each week, we track over 12,000 ads for women in Houston, 2,600 in San Antonio, 3,500 in Austin, and 14,000 in Dallas,” says Lisa.

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.

Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking
Many traffickers are members of Mexican or Salvadorian gangs, part of Cuban rings or the vicious Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. (Robert Gauthier via Getty Images)
“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa says. “It’s that easy.”

And she’s right. After lunch, we drive around the seedier areas of the Dallas suburb of Plano. We’re guided by Jack, an intelligence contractor for Shepherd’s Watch who specializes in geospatial analysis. Jack, who also asked to remain anonymous, works from an office in California. Formerly in law enforcement, he tracks phones using the location data in the background of mobile apps, identifies patterns with cell phone numbers, and does tattoo and facial recognition work. Federal agencies often engage him.

Pretending to be a client, Jack texts a woman on a website called Escort13. She is described as a “new Latina in the city.” The woman tells Jack that she’s at Motel 6 off the North Central Expressway in Plano. Like a scene in a spy movie, Jack relays the information from his California office to Lisa in Texas through the truck’s crackling speakers.

In her profile photo, the woman is dressed in a black, long-sleeve, crop top shirt and short black skirt—modest compared to pictures of some of the other girls that Lisa has shown me. Her dark hair hangs straight below her waist, and her phone covers her face, which conceals her age and identity.

Her profile says she’s 24 years old and that her home base is Philadelphia—neither of which is necessarily true. Gang-led trafficking rings tend to move their victims all over the U.S.; it’s one way they try to stay ahead of the law. So it’s no surprise this young woman is now working out of a motel in Texas. According to Lisa, Latin American girls like her go for anywhere from $130 to $160 per half hour.

After Jack makes contact with the woman, he tells Lisa, “She says to take a photo of the motel’s entrance, and then she’ll give me the room number.” Lisa snaps a photo through the windshield and sends it to Jack, who texts it to the woman and gets the room number. It’s on the second floor of the two-story motel. We drive to the far end of the parking lot, where we have a clear view of the balcony.

A Latina girl pokes her head out the door and cautiously looks around. Realizing no one is there, she retreats inside. A few moments later, a shirtless man throws up the shades in the room directly below her and swivels his head to look around the parking lot.

“That’s probably her pimp or a trafficker,” Lisa says. “Time to go.”

We peel out of the lot and drive to a Studio 6 motel two miles down the road, where Jack is communicating with another migrant girl. This motel doesn’t have balconies, and when Jack asks her to come to the lobby, she says no. We have no choice but to drive away.

Still, it’s been a successful afternoon. With Jack’s help, Lisa has found two possibly sex-trafficked women and one likely trafficker. When Lisa picks me up the following day, she’s on the phone with Plano law enforcement recounting what we saw the day before at the Motel 6.

“She looked young to me,” says Lisa.

In a follow-up phone call, Lisa tells me the police went to the motel to check it out, but the girl was gone. They think she was part of a trafficking ring.

“She’ll resurface,” says Lisa. “They always do.”

Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking
Gangs lure migrant women across the border with the promise of good jobs, and then force them into prostitution once they arrive. (Illustration by The Free Press, image via Getty)
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.

Bob Williams, CEO and founder of Bob’s House of Hope, says they receive two to three calls a month to help minor males who have been sex trafficked. “There is not one shelter in the country for 12- to 17-year-olds,” he said. “This is a big problem because they get put in the system and don’t get the help they need.” Williams, who was sexually assaulted as a teen himself, says they’re working on procuring more funding to build a program for minors.

there is more but way too long!