When I was on the job, we had a little bit of pressure to find and identify any human trafficking going on. Frankly, we didn’t encounter too much of it. ICE had a section that focused on human trafficking and so did the FBI. Between the two, they took up the vast majority of prostitution cases. Because of movies like “Sound of Freedom”, the general public will focus on the prostitution angle, but don’t forget that human trafficking can happen in other ways too. It’s a little bit like modern slavery. The Department of Homeland Security defines human trafficking as “…the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.” Note that it is not just prostitution, but labor too.
I can remember our station once getting a phone call from an illegal alien at a WalMart. The alien was begging to be arrested. He was working at one of the area dairy farms. He worked something like 12 hour days six days a week. He was being paid, but in cash or by personal check. He wasn’t getting overtime pay or anything like that. Plus, he was stuck on a farm living in a trailer. This poor alien had enough of shoveling cow manure and wanted to go back to Mexico ASAP. I don’t know how he found our telephone number but he did and he snuck in the call when the farmer took a load of them to the local WalMart to go shopping. We took the information and passed it over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). I don’t know what they did with it. During the Obama administration, ICE was under pressure to do I9 audits. Employers are supposed to carry an I9 for any foreigner working for your business. The way it worked under Obama was that the employer was given a two week window to come up with the paperwork. The audit effectively let the employer know he was under suspicion, and gave him two weeks to get rid of anyone working illegally.
There was a case in Ohio where Guatemalan teens were held in virtual slavery working on egg farms. It seems like all the laws we put into place a century ago to prevent child labor and make life more bearable suddenly get trashed with immigration. I talked with a friend who used to work human trafficking cases for ICE. He said that a couple of times they had cases of Saudis or Bangladeshis who kept maids as virtual slaves. He told me that when they went after the one Saudi couple, they took the maid and flew back to Saudi Arabia. They came back later without the maid. That case died with the trafficking victim no where to be found. Something similar happened with the Bangladesh couple.
As I pointed out earlier, just because someone is from a poor background, that does not make them good. I think there is a liberal tendency to romanticize people from other non-western countries as somehow being good and noble. That’s simply not the case. They have just as many bastards as we do, maybe even more.
For the prostitution angle of things, I went to a training hosted in Canada with a guest speaker who had been sex trafficked from Hungary to Canada. The woman, Timea Nagy, managed to put a whole room full of cops in tears with her story. She was on the verge of losing her home with her mother in the hospital and answered an ad in the paper offering jobs with great pay in Canada. It was an illusion. When she got to Canada, she was threatened and put to work as a prostitute. Timea never did say much about her traffickers, except that they were Hungarians. I suspect that they may have been Roma Gypsies because so much crime in places like Hungary is controlled by them.
The talk she gave had a profound impact on me, and on a lot of my fellow law enforcement officers. Afterwards, some of the Canadian cops were telling me that the politically incorrect stuff about prostitution. One of the signs to look for was an older black man with a young white woman. That sparked a memory of mine. Prior to getting into intel, when I was still working as a uniformed BP Agent, I had gone to the Buffalo Bus station to search for illegals. After questioning a few people on a bus, I got to the back of the bus. There was a black man probably in his 40s with a young white girl who looked to be barely 20. She had on a beret with the pin of a playboy bunny logo stuck in it. It seemed odd. I asked for citizenship and the man said he was American, but he lowered his voice and scowled at me as he said it. At the BP academy, we were told that unless we were convinced someone was lying or being deceitful, to not get into confrontations with regular Americans. I left thinking there was something odd, but nothing I could do. In hindsight, I think it highly likely the man had been a pimp and I felt ashamed to have let the matter drop at that. The girl had never said a word. Pimps will tell their victims that the police are powerless to stop them, and I think I played into his game, albeit unintentionally. The pimp was right that I couldn’t do anything with him of my own authority, but there was almost always a cop at the bus station, and I could have grabbed him in order to run a criminal history on the pimp and find out if he had any outstanding warrants, or, previous arrests. Plus, we could have tried to identify if the girl was one of those missing ones. (Yes, I’m that convinced the guy was a pimp).
One of the other things the Canadian investigators enlightened us about was the dangers American girls faced going over to party in Canada. The Canadian drinking age is 18, so, a lot of American college kids and High School Seniors go over to Canada to the nightclubs in Niagara Falls, Ontario. They had a problem with girls getting “roofied”, or, having various other drugs slipped into their drinks. According to the Canadian authorities I spoke with, a lot of the guys doing it were South Asians, like Pakistanis. That was one of those politically incorrect truths that you learn about after the fact.
Perhaps the most notorious pimps in all of Canada were/are North Preston’s Finest. (I hesitate to even share that video because it glorifies pimps. Yet, I think it’s important to realize who they are. The victims are not glorified by having a movie made about them, but the pimps get to have a movie made glorifying themselves). These were black Canadians, the legacy of slaves who had fled up the underground railroad to Canada prior to our Civil War. They formed a tight knit gang and were rather proud of their lifestyle.
With that background, I went off to see the movie “Sound of Freedom”. I couldn’t help but have a lot of respect for the ICE Special Agent depicted in the movie, Tim Ballard. Ballard was only 10 months away from being able to receive a pension when he decided to quit and go traipsing off on a crusade to save children in Third World hell holes from across Latin America and the Caribbean. While I think his quest is definitely noble, I couldn’t help but think of the White Savior complex. Here’s a white guy going to overwhelmingly non-white countries and trying to right wrongs. Yes, there is human trafficking and sexual slavery happening today in the United States. New York City and Las Vegas are hubs of it. “There’s whitey again, trying to save the world!”
Often, it does seem like it’s whitey trying to save the world. Recently, American Renaissance reposted an old article on Henry Morton Stanley titled “Into Darkest Africa“. What I found interesting about it was that someone like Stanley worked trying to stop the slave trade. He wasn’t very successful. It seems the Arabs and African Chiefs made so much money off the slave trade that they didn’t want it stopped. When you look at it, white people fought a civil war in America largely due to slavery. White people going out of their way to try to save the world. The Arabs and the Berbers never went to war with each other to try to release captive white people.
It seems like it was the white people coming into Africa who did things like setting up game preserves and parks. That was certainly the case in the United States with Teddy Roosevelt setting up the National Park Service.
I have to wonder if this same phenomenon of “White Savior Complex” isn’t manifested with the climate change activists or the white people parading around with BLM shirts. “Look at me! I’m a saint or martyr working to save the planet from racism and climate change!” Let me tell you that China doesn’t care about that, nor too does the vast majority of the Third World. This attempt to save the world seems to be limited to white people.
Unlike Tim Ballard, who put his life at risk by going to some of the most dangerous spots on the planet to rescue kids, you too can be a climate change activist by sitting on your butt and donating to causes that claim to reduce your carbon footprint. Or, you can be a Hollywood star who rants against climate change before getting on your private jet to go to Davos and hobnob with the other elites who seem themselves as the social betters of the planet. Perhaps, that is one of the reasons why this movie is so frightening to the Globalists.
One of the lectures I had in university about crime dealt with two poor neighborhoods. One neighborhood had a high crime rate and the other did not. The one with the low crime rate had older homes. However, the neighbors had been there for years. Many of them knew each other for a very long time. They knew who belonged in the area and who didn’t. The other poor neighborhood had a lot of rentals. It had people moving in and out constantly. The occupants there didn’t know each other and didn’t look out for each other. If someone was leaving an apartment with a TV, it was hard to say if the renter was moving out, or, if this was a burglary in progress.
When it comes to our wide open border, the same sort of phenomena exists. A man can rape a woman in one of the migrant camps in Mexico on one day and be in New York City a day or two later. El Salvador and Honduras might be cracking down on gangs, but that only means that a hardened criminal now has even more incentive to head north to America. The smugglers (polleros) will prey on the transient masses as they pass through their territory. At the end of “Sounds of Freedom”, they say that America is one of the top destinations for human smuggling. Transiency will make all that worse whether it’s women and girls being sold into prostitution, or, illegal aliens being forced to work under the table for less than minimum wage.
In America, a lot of prostitution goes on at rural farms. A pimp or madame will take a girl to a farm and have her in the trailer servicing the alien employees (legal or not).
Another place with a lot of prostitution were Chinese Massage Parlors. I can remember getting some Asian prostitutes turned over to us from a local police department. Someone had made a complaint against the massage parlor because it was apparently infected with lice. The city health inspector came by with some local cops for backup. It turned out the prostitutes had come into the United States claiming to Falun Gong and got political asylum. Technically, we couldn’t deport them. We had to write up a report on it and send it over to the liberals at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to see if they would get them for fraud.
With Open Borders, prostitution/human trafficking will get worse. But hey, it’s for a noble cause and allows liberals to think they are saving the world without having to risk their hides. They are more “holier than thou” then we are.
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century".
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
