Operation Toussaint: Operation Underground Railroad and the Fight to End Modern Day Slavery (2018) - full transcript
Tim Ballard and his special forces team go undercover in Haiti to bring a ring of sex traffickers who bribed their way out of jail, to justice.
(speaking foreign language)
- We have a story that
we love to talk about,
a young boy on a beach
who's throwing starfish into the ocean,
older man approaches the young boy
and says, boy what are you doing?
He says, tide is low, the sun is high
and if I don't get them
all back into the ocean
they're gonna shrivel up and die.
The man points to the boy and says,
look down the beach,
look down the shoreline,
there's millions of 'em
or thousands of 'em.
There's no way that you
can get them all back.
Do you think you can
really make a difference?
The young boy thinks for a moment
then just starts tossing starfish
back into the ocean.
Turns to the older gentleman and says,
I don't know, but I know I just
made a difference for that one.
- [Officer] Yeah it's right here you guys,
right here, okay.
Okay ready?
(speaking foreign language)
- [Officer] Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!
(speaking foreign language)
- [Unseen Man] This is on my baby.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you very much
ladies and gentlemen,
thank you.
Thank you, good morning.
It's great to see this many of you out.
Thank you each and every one of you
who came out today
to support Utah's efforts in the fight
against this horrible, evil institution
that we call human trafficking.
With over 40 million
modern day slaves world wide,
thousands of them throughout
the United States.
And many of you have known about
this issue and have been fighting
against it and working here for years.
Some even decades.
This is an institution that's been around
since the beginning of time.
But it's really only
now that the mainstream,
that the public is
starting to gain awareness
and so, a little over four years ago
a dear friend of mine who was a superstar
in the law enforcement community,
who was a specialized agent
with a very special set of skills
left his law enforcement career,
everything that he knew,
his pension, his security,
to start a non-profit called
Operation Underground Railroad.
They've done jumps everywhere throughout
the world, rescued kids,
and then helped them get to a safe place
with their aftercare programs.
Tim Ballard, are you here?
Can you come on up so we can
recognize you and Operation
Underground Railroad?
(applauding)
- I'll be very brief.
To invoke history, in 1791 when
the Haitian population rose up
and destroyed slavery in their country
that was led by Toussaint L'Ouverture
and then the abolitionists
in America were watching.
Frederick Douglass was watching
and used that inspiration
and when slavery was
finally eradicated legally,
because it has not been
eradicated in actuality,
Frederick Douglass said, let us not forget
the sons and daughters of Haiti
who are the true pioneer abolitionists
of the 19th century.
We'll turn the rest over to God
and pray for us all as we take our flights
in the 24, 48 hours
and execute this operation
and I am certain we will have success.
Thank you so much.
(applauding)
Well, I think we should
do two arrest teams.
I think we should do two arrest teams
and pick 'em up as
simultaneously as possible.
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
We're here to discuss preparations
for what we are so excited for.
It's a day that we've
waiting a long time for
and we want to thank my colleague,
Attorney General Ocnam who is here with
his team and then our friends at the DCPG,
the Judicial Police for Haiti.
Our philosophy is, it doesn't matter
what country the kids
belong to or were born in,
they're all our kids and we want
to protect all of them.
But sometimes people in
our own country ask us,
why are you going to Haiti?
Why does OUR or why would
the Attorney General
spend time in another
country, we need you here.
And our response is, on global crimes
like human trafficking,
we can't pretend that it just happens
in the United States so we work on it
here domestically so that we can protect
our friends and allies
and also protect ourselves
so it never comes in
to the United States borders.
- The U.S. creates the demand.
The highest producer and consumer
of child pornography
is right here in the United States.
So we know that it's our countrymen
that are causing this.
And because we look like
those evil countrymen of ours
we can get access quickly to the dark,
to the evil and so the police ask,
do you have operators
who can go undercover,
into the belly of the beast,
into the darkest places
and find these kids?
And I said, yes we do.
Something happened to me once.
This is after I'd quit the government
and I was already with
Operation Underground Railroad
and I was about to go into this compound
in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
It was a trafficking center.
It looked like an orphanage from outside.
It had orphanage on the wall.
So the police asked us to go in undercover
like we're going to go buy kids
and I remember sitting outside the gate
and I always fight with this, you know.
See, the problem with
me is I have seven kids
so any kid that we're looking to save,
the minute I see that kid,
oh, he's six, I got a six year old.
Oh, he's ten, I got a ten year old.
And so it's so easy for my mind
just to put, basically,
superimpose my kid's
face, my child's face,
on this victim's face.
And I'd fight and I'd
fight and I'd fight it.
And that's how I would move on
because of those first
couple of experiences
that just almost destroyed me.
But as I was standing
outside the orphanage
something happened, I looked in
and I saw 28 kids
and that was more than I'd ever seen.
And it happened again.
Oh my gosh, there's Blaine, there's Jimmy,
there's Sam, you know,
all my kids are here.
And I remember being outside that place
and I thought, I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to try to embrace this.
I've got to buy a kid.
These people think we're here to buy kids
and they made it very clear
within the first five minutes,
you know we don't adopt kids, right?
You know we sell kids.
I'm like, oh, of course yeah!
That's why we're here, you know?
And I see this little boy walk around
from this dark out building.
He walks into the yard of this place,
this dirty place,
it's stinky, it smells
like urine and feces
and it was just horrible
and I went up to this
kid and picked him up.
(laughing)
And he was my kid.
I saw my kid and he became my kid.
(laughing)
So I'm holding him and my partner
is negotiating with the
bad guys about the price
and oh, I think you guys
want that one, okay.
And these horrible people are trying to,
they're telling us tips on
how to evade the police
and how they've done this before,
how to get them out of the country.
So I pick the kid up and I want to
go into the dark out buildings
that are around this compound
but I don't want to look like
I'm being overly curious.
So I'm kind of, I have kids
so I know how to communicate with kids
so I get him to point
in the room as if he's
going to show me something
and I look over at the bad guys
and I can tell they're like,
oh, he's wants to show that guy whatever.
So it worked, so I got in there
and it just got stinkier and darker
and as I kind of walked into
the belly of this dark building
it got quieter and quieter
as I got further away from the sounds
of the street and the
other kids playing outside.
And the quieter it got
the better I was able to hear
what was always there, right behind me.
And it was the footsteps
of this little child
who was following me.
And I flip around and
there's this little girl.
And she's looking at me
and I don't want to cause more attention
so I give her a candy bar.
Now, again, these kids are starving.
She takes that candy bar
and she looks at me
and then looks at the
little boy in my arms
and without taking her eyes off him
breaks it, like muscle memory,
breaks it in half and gives it to him.
And I'm just thinking, this is not normal.
And then it hit me,
oh my gosh, they're brother and sister.
Say cheese please.
And she's horrified because
how many westerners have been here
and picked up a child
and that child disappeared
and was never seen again.
And this is all she has.
The only adults in her life
are trying to sell her.
How old is she?
Nine?
You're nine?
How long has she been here?
Four years.
Every 30 seconds a child is sold.
They're sold for sex.
They're sold for labor.
They're sold for organ harvesting,
which is something we're now getting into.
There's six million children
that are forced into one of those
three categories right now.
(police sirens blaring)
(speaking in a foreign language)
(police sirens blaring)
Modern day slavery really is
the plague of our generation.
I mean, when you consider there's more
people enslaved today than ever before
in the history of the world
and the world doesn't know.
We need to wake them up.
(police radio chatter)
(police sirens blaring)
- [Man] What's up guys?
- [Unseen Man] Make sure
you handle the victory.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Undercover Agent] He said, if there's
one girl that talks back, we call him.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Unseen Man] What the fuck is this?!
(intense music)
- It's a subject that nobody wants
to think about or talk about,
that's part of the problem, right?
It's so ugly, it's so,
it's the worst part of humanity
and yet you've got to
do something about it.
It's kind of a Catch-22,
nobody wants to talk about it,
nobody wants to happen,
nobody wants to talk about it,
nobody wants to do anything about it.
- Everybody, it just drives me crazy
how everybody is arguing on
they would be the biggest abolitionist
going back in time.
Well, would you?
Cause you're not doing it now.
And it's not that you wouldn't,
you just won't look at it.
- 'Cause I imagine a lot of people like,
oh yeah, that's good.
Man, that's awesome work they're doing
but they really, sit down man!
Like sit down, sit still for 10 minutes.
You know.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And really look at it.
If you did that.
- It rocked me to my core
to think about in this day and age people,
adults and children are being held
against their will and sold by the hour
to strangers to get raped.
And this is their life.
- People ask me like,
who are these dirt bags?!
Who are these people.
And I have to tell them it's anybody.
Anyone you can imagine,
anyone you see on the streets,
it's professionals, it's doctors, lawyers.
- Judgment day for former MSU doctor
Larry Nassar for sexually abusing
gymnasts under his care.
- You are a doctor.
You took an oath to do no harm
and you have harmed over 256 women
and that is beyond comprehension.
- [Reporter] The judge also said
Nassar was able to get away with his
criminal sexual conduct for 25 years.
- Here's the thing that's
mind boggling, right?
Is that it's estimated that there's over
two million children,
I'm not even talking about the adults,
two million children currently forced
to be sex slaves.
Raped for money.
Two million.
What kind of demand,
and this is a scary question,
what kind of demand justifies that number?
Two million kids.
That's a lot of sick, twisted, pedophiles.
- [Reporter] Jared Fogle arrived here
at the Federal Courthouse this morning.
He had nothing to say.
He is pleading guilty to conspiracy
for receiving and
distributing child pornography
and also traveling out of state
to engage in commercial
sex acts with minors.
- These guys want 10 year olds!
11 year olds!
That's who that want.
The answer to this
question is not popular.
People don't want me to say it.
They don't want me to talk about it.
But what is happening in this country,
especially in the this country!
The United States is the highest
consumer of child pornography
or what I call child rape videos,
'cause that's what they are.
And it's the western world--
- Sheriff's office!
We got a search warrant!
- The highest consumers, it's us.
(knocking)
- Let me get my pants.
- And this is why, they're sex addicts.
Their minds are twisted
and sick to want this.
I've interrogated dozens and dozens
and dozens of these guys
over the last 16 years
that I've working in this field.
No one wants to accept what it is.
They don't want to believe it.
How did you get here.
Why do you want this?
Why do you want kids?
And they all have the same story.
I picked up a Playboy Magazine
when I was 12 years old.
Then I got into more hardcore
and then more hardcore
and then the internet came along
in my thirties and oh my gosh!
Like, I could just,
with the click of a mouse
I could see anything I wanted.
And then the stuff that I had enjoyed
since I was a teenager
started to wear off.
I wasn't getting the fix.
I wasn't getting the feeling
that I used to get when
I was just watching
an adult man and an adult woman have sex.
Barely legal.
That's what they start
searching into the queue.
To the Google stream.
Well, that's not doing it for me anymore.
Okay, 16, I'm going to stop there.
I'm going to stop at 16, see what happens.
All of the sudden they're at 10.
They're at nine.
They're at eight.
They're at seven.
And you think you can
find this stuff online?
Absolutely.
And that's what's creating this demand.
That's why John's get on a an airplane
and fly to Haiti and Columbia
and Thailand because pretty soon
the child porn isn't doing it for them.
And they need the child.
This is why there's two million children
forced into the commercial
sex trade today.
- People weren't talking about human
trafficking like they are now.
And really it's because of the work
and efforts by organizations
like Operation Underground Railroad.
He will never talk about himself
but Tim is a well respected author,
lecturer, professor, and he could have
a quiet life doing that,
kind of like Indiana Jones.
(laughing)
But he has another side to him
and that's his law enforcement career.
He's was a respected law enforcement agent
for many years
and because his heart is so big
and he's so compassionate
and wants to protect every child
and man and woman that he possibly can
in the world, he left the comfort
of his badge and his pension
and his way of life in law enforcement
to several years ago
step out with a lot of faith
to create Operation Underground Railroad.
At the time he and Katherine did it
they had no promise
that anybody was going to care.
- He'll just jump on a plane
and traipse into a country and say,
here I am, where can I go save somebody?
There are so many things that have
to be considered.
You're shedding your badge.
You're shedding your firearm.
You're shedding your authority.
You're shedding all
the jurisdictional limitations
that prohibit me from
doing that very thing.
But Tim had the courage to do that.
- I think there's something to say
about Tim's persistence,
I guess is the word I would use for him.
He wants to be a consistent influence
in your life and he's dedicated
and I noticed the same thing
as he got into government work.
That he wanted to get
in and make a difference
and shake things things up
and you could tell he wanted to
get in there and make something happen.
- I grew up in Southern California.
I always knew that I wanted to be
a federal agent.
I just wanted to do that,
I don't know why,
it was just like, inherent.
My family wasn't excited about it,
my parents thought it was crazy.
No one in our family had been military or,
even generations back, in law enforcement.
It was just something
that I just wanted to do.
So I pursued it, everything I studied,
I studied Political Science,
I studied International Relations.
My first job after
Graduate School was the CIA
and I worked in the Operations Center.
My study had been around
terrorism and weapons.
I graduated from Graduate School
in December of 2001, so the government
was wide open for terrorist experts
and that's what I wanted to do.
And as I was learning about what happened
at 9/11 I learned that
one of the terrorists
had come from Mexicali, Mexico
and came through the port of entry
into California and then he went
back east and then launch these attacks.
And I wanted to get on a border.
I spoke Spanish, I thought,
I want to help investigate and defend
against potential terrorists
that would hurt our country.
I got to the office in
Calexico, California,
I had my dream job.
I mean, I was sitting on the border.
My office was on the border.
I could see the Mexican flag waving
outside my window.
This was the time when we were finding
a bunch of tunnels through San Diego
and all the way through
the border on California.
I was crawling through
tunnels and we were,
it was great but it only lasted
for about six months.
I was called in by my boss
and he told me that we're starting
a new anti-child trafficking group.
- We knew that bad
people were transmitting
and receiving, exploitive information.
Very, very dangerous information
and they were violating children.
Literally, real time.
And exchanging those imagery's and videos
on cameras with their
cohorts around the world.
Realized how absolutely pervasive
the problem of child exploitation was.
- [Tim] Can you say hi to these guys?
Say hi!
Hey buddy!
Awe, sweet.
- A supervisor contacted him and said,
hey, we're thinking about starting
a child crimes group
and want you to do it.
He came home and told me about it
and we were both like,
there is no way that we will ever do that.
We had two little kids at the time.
It just sounds so horrific.
We didn't think that that was something
we wanted to bring into our home.
My husband has just this light.
He's able to see good
in the world, you know?
And he has a lot of
optimism, a lot of strength,
I didn't want to see that taken away.
We are raising a young family,
I didn't want to see that gone
and so we took it very seriously.
- My wife and I had vowed that
the one thing I wouldn't
do was child crimes.
So we said, no.
And I remember going home that night
to my wife and saying,
you won't believe what
they just asked me to do!
And she said, well you're not doing it.
I said, I'm not doing it, absolutely not.
And she said, we have
kids, you can't do it!
And I remember a
sleepless night that night
and then getting up the next morning
and kind of looking at
myself in the mirror,
practicing my rejection talk,
and as I was preparing my speech
my wife came up to me.
Emotional, tears in her eyes.
And she said, we're making a huge mistake.
She said, for the very reason I thought
we couldn't do this, or shouldn't do this,
is the reason we need to do this.
Because we have kids.
Because we know what
childhood is supposed to be
and if it's true that
there's millions of kids
that are forced into that hell,
how do we say no?
Because we're afraid of our own pain,
which is nothing relative to that pain.
- But I told him that I
had automatic veto power.
That if I ever saw anything in him,
that I didn't, just the
dimming of the lights
or anything that I got to automatically
pull the plug, no questions asked,
and he would leave that group.
- So I reluctantly went,
changed my speech and it
was just one word, yes.
And we got into it.
And then something happened
that was completely transformative for me.
We were doing these child pornography
investigations and one of the kids
from the video surfaced,
and happened to surface
right on the border
where I was working.
- Not long ago a horrific video
of a five year old boy
being sexually abused in the worst way
was discovered by U.S. Authorities.
The boy and his 12 year old sister.
They had been kidnapped and they had been
trafficked back and forth between
the U.S. and Mexico.
Both were sex slaves
to a monster of a man.
Well, something happened.
Divine providence stepped in
and it took place at
the U.S., Mexico border.
The boy was seen by a U.S. official
who knew who he was.
Identified the boy in the video.
- It was the first time
that I was actually seeing
one of the kids from the videos.
It was an American man
who lived in the L.A. area.
He had a big warehouse and inside
his warehouse was a house,
like a residential home
and inside that home there were cameras,
hidden cameras everywhere,
porn everywhere, toys everywhere.
And he'd bring these
kids in to desensitize
them he'd make child rape videos.
(sad solemn music)
And as the dust settled
in the investigation
this kid ran to me and I remember
he jumped into my arms and just held me
and he was shaking and he just said to me,
with tears in his eyes,
holding me and shaking,
he said, I don't belong here.
I came home and I walked through the door
and I saw my kids running around playing
and I couldn't handle the dichotomy.
My brain couldn't handle
it and I just shut down.
I mean, this is embarrassing
but this is what happened.
I remember my knees gave out.
As I sat there the room was spinning
and I collapsed, like I
fell down on the floor
and my wife thought I was having
a heart attack or something you know,
and she ran over to me and just wrapped
her arms around me and just held me.
- Had a knock on my door one day
and of course I usually keep my door open
but I think I was on a phone call
so I didn't answer the door immediately
but I went to the door and I saw
Tim leaving and I asked him,
hey Tim, I'm done, come on in.
He was very, very concerned.
I could tell he was perplexed.
I could tell his was emotionally drained.
I could tell that he was needing
someone to talk to.
And he said, listen I really feel like
I could do better leaving the government.
- Well, if you lost one of your children
to one of these evil people
you'd do anything to get even
and get your child back.
Which some of our folks are trying to do.
- Good afternoon Mr. Chair
and esteemed members of the committee.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
My name is Tim Ballard.
I'm the founder and CEO
of Operation Underground Railroad.
- You know, I think
our own law enforcement
in this country needs to get
more involved than they are right now.
- In 2006, with the passage of
the Adam Walsh Protect Act,
Congress opened the doors for U.S. agents
to better investigate these cases,
especially internationally.
- It's hard because a
lot of this is offshore
where they may not have jurisdiction.
- However I often felt helpless
by the fact that the vast majority
of the child victim's that we would find
fell outside the purview
of the United States.
- It's very difficult because
we in the United States
have a lot of protections for privacy,
especially when it comes to
financial transactions,
but how do we get the information
to see a pattern of sex trafficking?
- Before this law was passed,
it was passed in 2006,
in order to prosecute on the U.S. side
an American who was
sexually abusing children
in other countries you had to prove
that that person had intent
to rape that child while
standing on U.S. soil.
So you can imagine how many prosecutions
we had prior to this law, like zero.
Unless I could tie a
U.S. traveler to the case
I would not be able to
rescue the children,
even the ones that we were
able to identify as being victims.
But I could find the kids no matter what.
It's outside of the jurisdiction
and I understood that,
however that doesn't mean
that we couldn't be doing more.
- It takes a little bit of an effort
but that's what we've go to do
and we've got to fight like hell
to try and get these kids back
and get them back on track.
But in a lot of cases
once they're gone they're gone.
- [Glenn] We need to find some partners
that are like minded.
Is there a way that, you know,
we can help each other?
- Yeah.
- Cause we're in the
same kind of business.
You know, who's got big, big, lists
that we can leverage me
and say, we'll help you, you help us.
- [Tim] Have you ever connected--
- I met Tim through, I think,
a series of coincidence that led
me to one of his books,
he's a tremendous writer.
Tremendous researcher.
I mean, he's really bright.
So I knew him as an author
and we became friends and I didn't know
that he had this secret double life.
I was coming in,
I don't remember where it was,
I was coming into town and he was in town
and he said, hey do you
mind if we meet and talk?
I said, sure.
I said, I'm going to be
staying at the hotel,
you know this hotel why
don't you just come up
and he said, well,
why don't we meet in a conference room?
Okay.
- I'm wanting the world to wake up
to what's going on is
two million children are sex slaves.
- And he reached under his shirt
and he pulled a federal badge out
on the chain and he sat there.
I looked at everybody and said,
am I in trouble?
Am I going to prison, what is this?
- It's the fastest growing
criminal enterprise in the world.
I'd go back to 19th century America
to the slave problem
and we should congratulate ourselves.
We eradicated slavery.
It's bull crap.
We've not eradicated it.
- And he explained what he was doing
and explained that he needed to get out
of working with the government
and he had a way that we could really
make an impact but they needed
a million dollars to start.
- [Attorney] 10 thousand dollars to put
a jump team together, go,
(clapping)
on team, get this overseas I'm assuming.
- Yeah, we have jump teams that do this.
They're ex Navy Seals,
they're people like me who are
willing to do this.
- And I happen to be with an attorney
and he was sitting with me
and I asked a whole bunch of questions
and my attorney said,
no you can't, you can't.
What happens if something goes wrong,
blah, blah, blah.
If you're raising money
and it's on the border
and these guys are, you're in Texas.
- You're damn right I would.
I would do it through law enforcement
and I would do it exactly legal.
But, I mean, this is child trafficking.
Tim is the most sincere,
the most honest honorable man
I think I've ever met
and I said, I'm in.
We'll raise your first million.
- Bring it on.
I will promote, I will do,
I will develop with you.
I had a great, great, great uncle
and a great, great, grandfather
who both died in the notorious
concentration camp in the South.
They were fighting for the North.
I didn't know that.
Nobody in my family knew that.
They were fighting to free the slaves.
They did it.
Why can't I?
- You know, Abraham Lincoln,
when he was grappling with
the Emancipation Proclamation
the nation didn't want him to do it.
Even in the North, they
didn't want him to do it.
And he went through something.
In 1862 his son died.
And he got extremely empathetic
and he started even turning to God
and praying like he never had before.
Historians have called it
a Damascus Road experience for him.
Then he just said, you know,
come hell or high water I'm doing this.
No one in his cabinet really wanted him to
and he says, I'm doing it.
And he changed the course of the war
and changed the course of history.
By making the war about human freedom,
liberating the captive
and then the whole thing changed
which led to the 13th
Amendment and so forth.
This is what we all need to do.
Stop putting the walls up.
These are real kids and
they don't have anybody
and if we don't open up,
no one's going to open up.
But when you do open up,
it hurts a little bit.
But then you become so much more effective
in what you're trying to do
and ideas and inspiration,
I'd argue even miracles
start happening when you do that.
- Operation Underground Railroad
is a fairly new organization,
just over two years old
but it's captured a lot of media attention
with it's missions to rescue
child slaves throughout the world.
India, Haiti, Mexico.
They go into the darkest
corners of the world.
(speaking in a foreign language)
And work with law enforcement
to rescue children from slavery.
Since it's inception a
little over two years ago
they've helped authorities arrest
157 people in 12 different countries.
Most of that work--
- I never dreamed that
I would work in Haiti.
I didn't know anything,
really, about Haiti.
Until I learned about a little boy
who was born in Utah, a U.S. citizen
and was kidnapped in Haiti from his church
where his father was the pastor.
And that little boy was
taken, he was kidnapped.
I read about it in the local newspaper
and I just had to do something about it.
I thought that I could
make it into a U.S. case
and I couldn't because it wasn't.
It was a Haitian case.
The man, the father of this boy who I met
who changed my world is Guesno Mardy.
And Guesno's sitting right here,
Guesno just stand up.
This is Guesno Mardy.
- [Attendee] Hey Guesno.
- And I have so much to say about Guesno.
We went to Haiti to look for his son
but the only way for us to go to Haiti
would be to, we had to leave our jobs.
I had to leave my job because
I didn't have enough leave from work.
I love my job.
I love working for Homeland Security.
I mean, these are the
best people on the planet
doing the best work.
And all the colleagues I had floated
this idea to before, in
the weeks leading up,
said, you're crazy, don't
do this, you're crazy.
And John Lines looked at me
and he started off with, you're crazy.
And I'm like, here I go again, you know?
But he said something different,
he said, you're crazy
if you don't try this.
- I was encouraging overtly
but my in my heart of hearts I thought,
that's going to be a tough go.
That's a going to be a tough go
to leave the security
of the U.S. Government
and go save children around the world.
Three years old.
Gardy, his name is Gardy.
They kidnapped him from the church
where Guesno was the pastor.
They took him, this little boy,
and they trafficked him
and this happens all the time in Haiti.
I remember reading the story
and there was a picture of Guesno
and my heart just melted as a father.
Just melted for him and I thought,
I know, I have enough experience to know,
very little's being done
to find this little boy.
(solemn music)
- We got to Haiti and we worked with
law enforcement and we went in there
looking for Gardy and we never found him.
What we did find was two things.
We found that this child was trafficked
through what looked to
be like an orphanage.
It wasn't an orphanage
and we were asked by the Haitian Police
to go undercover with hidden cameras
and go into this place
that was selling children.
They were selling children for $10,000
and then they raised the price to $15,000.
The traffickers were selling kids
and we were able to
dismantle that organization
and we had to buy two
children in the process.
We had to buy two children
and they were the key
to getting the other kids out.
- What's that?
- You want this?
(laughing)
Be careful with this, okay?
After we got those kids out
and his son was not there.
And I said, Guesno I'm so sorry.
You're son's not there.
There's 28 children that were rescued
but his son was not there.
I started to cry and Guesno was crying
but he only cried for a little bit
and then he popped his
head up and he said,
don't you realize what just happened?
And I said, what?
Yeah, you know, what just happened?
And he's smiling now and I don't know
why he's smiling because
he's a very smiley guy
and he has a light about him
and I learned what that light was
because he said, he said,
if Gardy had never been kidnapped
then your team never would have come here
and these 28 kids would
be for sale or be sold.
And I said, yeah, I guess would have
thought of it that way and then he said
maybe the most profound thing
that anyone's ever said to me.
He said, if I have to sacrifice my son
so that these 28 kids can be rescued,
he said, that's a sacrifice
I'm willing to make.
And that's when I knew
that we would never leave Haiti
because of the spirit of that Haitian man
who then by the way, went
to the police station
the next day and he said,
I will take home any of those children
that were rescued in the name of my son,
I will take them home.
And he took eight of those
children home that day
and he is their father today in Haiti.
And so you see we could never
leave Haiti after that.
We decided we had to do more operations.
We had to dig deeper, look for Gardy.
Dig deeper, the more we
go looking for Gardy,
a funny thing happens,
every time we look for
him we find other kids.
Gardy is the kid who's story
created Operation Underground Railroad.
You been (beep) little girls too?
10 years old, love this guy!
(laughing)
I sat across from this guy, these guys,
as they told me about the children
that had been raping
and they laughed about it.
And they laughed and they scoffed.
And they said, you get to do it next.
It was horrifying, horrifying.
Now this was on Superbowl Sunday
and this is where
the story gets very interesting.
- On Superbowl Sunday a lot of Americans
having those Superbowl parties,
hot wings, watching the big game,
but a local non-profit organization
that fights human trafficking
spent their Superbowl weekend in Haiti.
- [Tim] I can take the 11 year old?
Can I take your youngest?
- [Reporter] Timothy Ballard and his team
at Operation Underground Railroad
worked undercover pretending to purchase
young girls for sex.
Ballard says the men sold him twenty
minors as young as 11 years old.
- It was Superbowl Sunday,
February 5th, 2017.
We had set up this operation that
what looked like it went flawless.
- In Operation Underground Railroad
we always want to ensure that if these
rescued children cannot go back
to their parents then they go into
vetted safe houses, orphanages,
rehabilitation centers.
So our aftercare team,
led by Miss Jessica Mass,
who is here with us today spent weeks
liaisoning with partners in Haiti.
Not just Guesno and his safe house
but others who's names cannot be shared
now for their own protection.
- We'll go into a country and the first
question we ask, if the police
or that government wants to work with us,
the first question we ask is, what kind
of aftercare capabilities
are you aware of?
These kids, there's so many of them.
There is no home to go home to.
It's not like this
happy story all the time
where it's like, oh, your loving family's
been waiting for you in the garden
and the trees are there
and the beautiful flowers
and just go hug them and all is well.
I mean, generally that's not the case.
I wish it were but generally the fact
that there was no family,
or the family was part of the problem,
that's how they got trafficked.
- And that's where
everybody else screws it up.
It's where we screwed up.
That's the reconstruction part.
The ending of the slavery was good.
Now, how do we make sure that we provide
the tools to be able to make it
and to able to have a
fair shot at something
that you've never experienced before?
I can't even imagine the scaring
that they have and to able to see them
turn their lives around, remarkable.
- We laid out the whole operation.
You saw from the video the beautiful
Kaliko Beach Club.
We have to play the role of very wealthy
sex tourists and so we had the whole
operation set up and it went beautifully.
- [Reporter] When police arrived,
they arrested nine men from three
separate human trafficking rings
and liberated 29 victims.
- Our Haitian partners did an amazing job.
We made the arrests.
We got the girls immediately to the area
where we were assured that they would
get the support they need.
- We were so excited, we were excited
that these girls were finally
going to have hope and healing.
It was just a couple days after
that I received a phone call.
- We unfortunately got
some very frustrating
news a few days after the operation.
- [Jessica] The traffickers
were being released
and not all the girls were released.
- They get released, they get freed.
They pay money to the right people.
To the judges.
I remember when we got that word,
I remember Jessica,
Matt, we were in tears.
We were in tears.
We couldn't believe that these kids
could be put in harm's way again.
- Half the girls had family members
that showed up and the other half
had traffickers that showed up for them.
- These guys who were laughing about
raping children were now
laughing their way home.
(laughing)
We didn't know what to do.
We had some long talks about it,
with Guesno and Dimitri
and they just said, please don't give up.
Don't give up, there are good people
in this government that want
this problem to go away.
And what happened was what we hoped
would happen, the good people
who didn't know what happened to us,
they came to us.
The good people came to us
and they said, we didn't know this truth.
We didn't know what had happened
but we will not stand for it.
And I'm looking at the good people
right now who came to us.
The job's not quite done
but it's almost done because now
we need to go back and we need
to re-arrest every single one
of these traffickers and it will be
a message to Haiti, to America,
to the whole world
that there are good people everywhere
that will stand up for this.
That there is light in this dark world.
There's light.
If we don't become that light
there is no light.
(applauding)
- [Interpreter] But I do
sometimes they try to.
(applauding)
(rock music)
- [Tim] Hey, crap this
guys coming up through--
- We finally have our eyes on what's
going on, we're shifting our mind set.
There's two of them that we have,
we still need to verify and we're going to
have reconnaissance teams running
the rest of the day.
It limits what we want
to do during the day.
We would rather not do a snatch
and grab on the side of the street
in the middle of the daytime.
It's very hard to sneak up to people
with the way this traffic is
and do that effectively.
It's a very low chance.
You're talking like 15% chance
of actually getting these guys.
Just so everything knows,
Andrew knows this area we're going to
better than anyone, he's lived there
for periods of his life
so honestly he knows this better
than the police that are putting us in it.
He knows this area.
- In a nutshell, top of
the trees perspective,
our activities tonight are going to
take place in Petion-Ville, which is a
wealthier part of Port-au-Prince where
there's several hotels.
So there's a lot of working,
there's a lot of prostitution going on.
That where--
For Haiti.
And it's the place where foreigners come.
If you're a foreigner
you're going to come here,
you're going to stay most
likely in Petion-Ville
so that's where to track
some of the nefarious activities.
- [Dave] So, any questions about the area?
We're going to pull up Google Maps,
we've dropped pins on everything
so everyone's going to get a good visual
of the area that we're looking at.
- [Dimitri] Okay guys as you're doing this
stay to the windows and hold there.
I seen lights back there,
there shouldn't be lights back there.
Okay, we are in an unmarked van.
It's a van that is used for taxis.
In a few minutes I'm going to have to
put my windows down because it's
not known to have taxis
having their windows up freezing.
- [Dave] I understand.
In a nutshell, the birds eye view here,
is we're going after
three different targets, okay?
And one of them's a female.
This is our ace in the hole mission.
If everything else fails
we are getting this chick tonight.
She's awful, Andrew can
go into more detail.
- [Dimitri] Okay, she's like a captain,
a captain in a mafia.
- Our hotel's right here,
Best Western, Petion-Ville, all right?
She's literally like two blocks away
and one down, typically.
But she kind of moves within like,
I would say a one block
radius of that spot.
- [Dimitri] She's crossing the street.
She's crossing the street.
That's her right there.
Crossing the street with the white pants.
That's her right there.
That's her right there.
That's the boss right there.
- [Andrew] She does not like this.
- [Dimitri] That's the boss right there.
- All those girls are working for her.
She's their pimp and show that
she is number one.
- Number one.
- She pimps out young girls
and she keeps, she has the over,
the legal girls on the street.
She has a little house back there
where one of our operators has seen
underage girls.
- We're now moving.
- [Andrew] Did you see how long
that car has been behind us?
- He just got behind us.
- Has he just came behind us?
- [Andrew] Just keep, pay attention to it.
It's possible we have a tail behind us.
- [Dimitri] Oh, okay.
- [Andrew] They turned right,
it's turning off.
- [Dimitri] So she didn't see us.
- If there's any like holes
in the logic right now.
Anything glaring that
anyone's thinking about.
This is like time to beat it to death
because there's gonna,
this is all coming together very quick
and guarantee there's more things.
- You know what I want to do
is start with a prayer.
What about,
what about your special prayer?
- You want me to pray that prayer?
- Yeah, I kind of do, yeah.
- All right, we'll just like bow our heads
and I'll sing it real quick.
(speaking in a foreign language)
May Jehovah bless you and keep you.
May Jehovah let his face shine upon you
and be gracious to you.
May Jehovah lift up his
countenance upon you
and give you shalom, amen.
- [Everyone] Amen.
(rhythmic drum music)
Okay, this is the part that nobody
really wants to talk about or do
but it's the part we probably
need to know the best.
Somebody gets shot or stabbed
or severely injured enough they have
to be taken to a higher level of care.
We've got a number of these kids
that are going to be
spread out in the vehicles.
These are called blow out kits.
Emergency?
Okay, so then none of this stuff
is going to matter to you,
however if that time
and somebody gets hurt
and if somebody yells medic
everything else needs to stop.
Nothing else matters because
we could lose a person
at that point, right?
So, the Haitians are going to do
whatever they're going to do
but this group in here,
we're going to keep that person alive.
- So our target's name is Cho
and she's a pimp who's going to be
on a street corner about two
or three blocks from here.
We intend to take Cho and try and get,
if we can, use her to get information.
We've got eight other targets
that are out there that
were stupidly released.
We know that she paid $80,000
to someone to get out of jail.
We really want to understand
where she got $80,000 from.
We believe a criminal
organization supports her.
We've been to her house,
she's not living large at all.
So she's back by so and so,
we want to find out who pays
you the 80,000 and who
within the government
did you give that 80,000 to?
In addition, we want to just
scare the living daylights out of her
and use the momentum and fear,
just listen, the next five minutes
of your life are going to determine
the next 50 years of your life.
This is our plan, once the Haitians come--
- It's their country, of course.
- Right.
- We do what they want.
- Perimeter one and perimeter two,
as long as we got eyes looking out board
with guns while we're in the middle,
that's the only goal here.
We're making these things really simple.
Look, we don't all rush to
the middle of the action here, you know?
And that's what rookies do.
That's what idiots do.
They have a job and even if they don't
like their job, even if
it's not the cool job,
this is their damn job.
- I think it goes without saying,
we don't want them to know
where we're staying tonight at all
and if we need to take different routes
or just be really familiar with who's
behind you and who could be following you.
Even if it's a little motorcycle,
those guys are the worst.
Motorcycle guys are bad.
And they're going to be the informants.
So we want to sleep safely
and those driving to the airport tomorrow,
we don't want any issues.
- Hey guys.
- Hey Jim.
- Of the guys down stairs there's--
- Perfect.
The recon one,
we're like three minutes to deploy.
(radio chatter)
(inspirational music)
(traffic sounds)
(motorcycle engines)
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Andrew] All right you guys,
up there where the lights are,
where the lights are is
about where she's at.
It's this car,
it's this car pulled over, okay?
(speaking in a foreign language)
- Are we close man?
- It's right here you guys.
- [Andrew] Right here, right here.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Agent] Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!
Go, go, go, go!
(speaking in a foreign language)
(motorcycle engine)
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Agent] Condoms, these are all from
a huge bag of condoms.
- [Agent] We need to
bag all this evidence.
There's minors on scene
and he's got condoms.
He's got sex toys, he's
got condoms in there.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- I'm a citizen of U.S.A.!
- [Agent] Matt, take a photo of them.
- Yo, I'm a citizen of U.S.A., okay!
I'm a citizen of U.S.A.!
- [Agent] Everyone, safe vehicles!
- [Agent] All right, roll out!
Safe vehicles!
- [Tim] How many guys got
wrapped up right there?
- Two or four.
- There was the American.
- He's saying he's an American, yeah.
- [Agent] I thought he was saying--
- I don't think he was--
- Americans.
- No, no, no, he was
saying, I'm an American.
So we got more than we bargained for
on that one for sure.
Hey, where are we,
are we at the precinct?
(speaking in a foreign language)
- This is very important.
I know he said it but these guys
are confirming again,
those were the girls, the same girls,
that she brought, same girls?
- Hm mm.
- And we think that they live with her.
She keeps them captive in her own home.
- I'd like to talk to somebody!
So can I talk to somebody out there!
I'm a citizen of United States!
Yes!
So can I talk to somebody
who can explain what's going on!?
I'm a citizen of United States.
- [Tim] Oh yes.
In Kaliko Bay.
And the girls, same girls
she brought to Kaliko.
Their minors, tell him.
Their 13, their 13,
12, 13, 14, years old.
You caught her red handed.
(speaking in a foreign language)
(light music)
- Thank you.
(soothing music)
(speaking in a foreign language)
- We get the kids out.
Before the kids are pulled out
of these dens of nightmares
and their in our safe house.
Jessica Mass, our director of aftercare's
with them and they start to open up,
they start to talk.
And the one little girl,
the youngest of them,
starts to cry, starts to tear up
and she said, this is the first time
that I've ever felt hope
that I can remember.
And she proceeded to tell us this story
about how when she was about
six or seven years old she was kidnapped
in the wake of the earthquake.
(police sirens)
Her parents were killed in the earthquake,
like so many parents were,
and she was left an orphan instantly
and this nice woman comes up,
tells her that she'll take care of her
and to come with her.
This was happening all over
in the wake of the earthquake.
In the case of Rosy, I mean,
she was six, seven years old,
Cho gets ahold of her,
promises to take care of her
and instead puts her into
a life of sex slavery.
And this was so crazy,
she said it's amazing that you guys came
and rescued me on January 12th.
She said, it was January 12th,
eight years ago, when
the earthquake struck.
Hey!
How are you?
This little girl was in the most
obscure country in the world.
Not only that she was in the most
obscure and darkest corner
of that most obscure country
just wallowing in hell,
far from anyone possibly could care.
You're so big.
(speaking in a foreign language)
It took her 24 hours after the rescue
to even talk because she said
she couldn't believe
that anyone would come for her.
Santa Claus?
Who's that?
- Santa Claus.
He came?
It's what we are trying to do.
We intentionally go to
the darkest corners of the Earth
where there is no hope
and find these kids.
And what that does,
apart from liberating children,
what that does is it provides hope
for everybody now.
I mean, where there was no hope
there's hope everywhere.
If we can continue to grow our operations
and continue to get the support we need
there is hope everywhere
for the first time.
Okay, scoot over, we got to have a talk.
We got to have a talk right here.
Okay, what's your name?
Hey?
- You got to talk to papa.
- Hey, hey, what's your name?
What's your name, not yet, not yet.
What's your name?
Coleen.
(gasp)
- Jean-Baptist Catel.
Yeah!
What's your name buddy.
(inspirational music)
We find these two things.
We found the traffickers were selling kids
and we were able to
dismantle that organization
and we had to buy two
children in the process.
We had to buy two children.
And they were the key to getting
the other kids out.
And we've told that story many times
but what's special
about those two children
is that I formed a special bond with them.
And when we were driving
from the orphanage
to the sting house, or the hotel,
this little boy jumped up into my lap
and I'm supposed to be this, you know,
hard criminal.
After the rescue was done we,
my wife and I couldn't stop thinking
about them, him and his sister,
they were the two kids
and so we started to work
towards adopting them.
That was almost four years ago
and I just got the email today.
The decree came out of Parke
and their names are now Ballard.
They're now, they're my children.
If I lived in Haiti.
(applauding)
If I lived in Haiti I could take
them home right now
so all we have to wait for now is
passports and visas and that
and then they come home to Utah.
Where's Cole and Coleen going to sleep?
We have one extra bedroom, right?
- Yeah, but where's Daniel going to sleep?
- He's going to bunk with the boys.
- Everything with me.
- With Rick.
- There are days that Tim and I are like,
what, why do we have all these kids?
But, but,
I just,
you look at this little guy
and he is so loved
and just by virtue of the fact
that he was born in a family
and that automatically
gives him access to this love.
That we don't even have to think about,
it's just there.
And there are so many
children around the world
that don't have that and that could.
There just shouldn't be this much excess
with that many children in need.
(soft slow piano music)
- I'll find him.
It is something I don't want to talk about
because I know I will find him.
I will find him.
One day something will happen,
I'll find him.
- Number one thing on my bucket list,
what I want to do is
I want to help stop human trafficking.
- Oh, that's beautiful.
(applauding)
- I belong to an organization called
Operation Underground Railroad.
There are over two million children
who are stolen
and they are abused sexually
and it's unbelievable what happens.
And I belong to that organization
and we are trying to stop that.
It's really--
- What do you do?
- A man called Tim Ballard,
and he used to work for the F.B.I.
but he's now gone on his own.
So he partners with governments
from other countries and they go in
and pretend to be traffickers
so they get people to get
people to bring kids in
and they pretend to buy those kids.
And then they catch the people
who are bringing the kids in.
- How much does it cost
them to free a child?
- Anywhere probably from 12,000
to 50,000 an operation.
- I'll give you 100,000 if you'll get me
10 children out of slavery.
- Awesome!
Thank you!
(audience cheers and applauds)
- Tony, when you did that,
$100,000, that just rocked me.
I was raised in a Catholic orphanage
from the time I was seven till I was 19
but out of our savings I can't match you
but I'd like to give
$10,000 with your gift.
- [Tony] Awesome, that's incredible.
That's awesome!
Thank you very much.
10,000 more, give her a hand
right here, 10,000 more.
♪ So be still ♪
One more?
Another 10,000, how about a hand for him?
Nice job!
♪ And sleep now ♪
10,000?
♪ And know that ♪
Go see her, there's another 10,000!
♪ There's no more fear ♪
♪ And maybe ♪
10,000?
5,000?
You got it, I'll match it!
♪ You'll stay here ♪
You too!?
Awesome!
♪ To hold on to ♪
Give these guys a hand!
♪ When things get bad ♪
Oh, this touches my heart!
That's awesome!
♪ So be still ♪
♪ And sleep now ♪
♪ And know that ♪
♪ There's no more fear ♪
♪ And maybe ♪
♪ You'll stay here ♪
♪ To hold on to ♪
How many are touched and inspired
by what these people have done
and what you've done?
♪ So be still ♪
Once you do something like this
you'll never go back,
it'll be part of your life forever.
♪ There's no more fear ♪
♪ And maybe ♪
♪ You'll stay here ♪
♪ To hold on to ♪
♪ There's one thing you should know ♪
♪ They won't come round here no more ♪
♪ They won't come round here ♪
♪ They won't come round here no more ♪
♪ They won't come round here no more ♪
- We have a story that
we love to talk about,
a young boy on a beach
who's throwing starfish into the ocean,
older man approaches the young boy
and says, boy what are you doing?
He says, tide is low, the sun is high
and if I don't get them
all back into the ocean
they're gonna shrivel up and die.
The man points to the boy and says,
look down the beach,
look down the shoreline,
there's millions of 'em
or thousands of 'em.
There's no way that you
can get them all back.
Do you think you can
really make a difference?
The young boy thinks for a moment
then just starts tossing starfish
back into the ocean.
Turns to the older gentleman and says,
I don't know, but I know I just
made a difference for that one.
- [Officer] Yeah it's right here you guys,
right here, okay.
Okay ready?
(speaking foreign language)
- [Officer] Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!
(speaking foreign language)
- [Unseen Man] This is on my baby.
(audience applauding)
- Thank you very much
ladies and gentlemen,
thank you.
Thank you, good morning.
It's great to see this many of you out.
Thank you each and every one of you
who came out today
to support Utah's efforts in the fight
against this horrible, evil institution
that we call human trafficking.
With over 40 million
modern day slaves world wide,
thousands of them throughout
the United States.
And many of you have known about
this issue and have been fighting
against it and working here for years.
Some even decades.
This is an institution that's been around
since the beginning of time.
But it's really only
now that the mainstream,
that the public is
starting to gain awareness
and so, a little over four years ago
a dear friend of mine who was a superstar
in the law enforcement community,
who was a specialized agent
with a very special set of skills
left his law enforcement career,
everything that he knew,
his pension, his security,
to start a non-profit called
Operation Underground Railroad.
They've done jumps everywhere throughout
the world, rescued kids,
and then helped them get to a safe place
with their aftercare programs.
Tim Ballard, are you here?
Can you come on up so we can
recognize you and Operation
Underground Railroad?
(applauding)
- I'll be very brief.
To invoke history, in 1791 when
the Haitian population rose up
and destroyed slavery in their country
that was led by Toussaint L'Ouverture
and then the abolitionists
in America were watching.
Frederick Douglass was watching
and used that inspiration
and when slavery was
finally eradicated legally,
because it has not been
eradicated in actuality,
Frederick Douglass said, let us not forget
the sons and daughters of Haiti
who are the true pioneer abolitionists
of the 19th century.
We'll turn the rest over to God
and pray for us all as we take our flights
in the 24, 48 hours
and execute this operation
and I am certain we will have success.
Thank you so much.
(applauding)
Well, I think we should
do two arrest teams.
I think we should do two arrest teams
and pick 'em up as
simultaneously as possible.
- Ladies and gentlemen, welcome.
We're here to discuss preparations
for what we are so excited for.
It's a day that we've
waiting a long time for
and we want to thank my colleague,
Attorney General Ocnam who is here with
his team and then our friends at the DCPG,
the Judicial Police for Haiti.
Our philosophy is, it doesn't matter
what country the kids
belong to or were born in,
they're all our kids and we want
to protect all of them.
But sometimes people in
our own country ask us,
why are you going to Haiti?
Why does OUR or why would
the Attorney General
spend time in another
country, we need you here.
And our response is, on global crimes
like human trafficking,
we can't pretend that it just happens
in the United States so we work on it
here domestically so that we can protect
our friends and allies
and also protect ourselves
so it never comes in
to the United States borders.
- The U.S. creates the demand.
The highest producer and consumer
of child pornography
is right here in the United States.
So we know that it's our countrymen
that are causing this.
And because we look like
those evil countrymen of ours
we can get access quickly to the dark,
to the evil and so the police ask,
do you have operators
who can go undercover,
into the belly of the beast,
into the darkest places
and find these kids?
And I said, yes we do.
Something happened to me once.
This is after I'd quit the government
and I was already with
Operation Underground Railroad
and I was about to go into this compound
in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
It was a trafficking center.
It looked like an orphanage from outside.
It had orphanage on the wall.
So the police asked us to go in undercover
like we're going to go buy kids
and I remember sitting outside the gate
and I always fight with this, you know.
See, the problem with
me is I have seven kids
so any kid that we're looking to save,
the minute I see that kid,
oh, he's six, I got a six year old.
Oh, he's ten, I got a ten year old.
And so it's so easy for my mind
just to put, basically,
superimpose my kid's
face, my child's face,
on this victim's face.
And I'd fight and I'd
fight and I'd fight it.
And that's how I would move on
because of those first
couple of experiences
that just almost destroyed me.
But as I was standing
outside the orphanage
something happened, I looked in
and I saw 28 kids
and that was more than I'd ever seen.
And it happened again.
Oh my gosh, there's Blaine, there's Jimmy,
there's Sam, you know,
all my kids are here.
And I remember being outside that place
and I thought, I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to try to embrace this.
I've got to buy a kid.
These people think we're here to buy kids
and they made it very clear
within the first five minutes,
you know we don't adopt kids, right?
You know we sell kids.
I'm like, oh, of course yeah!
That's why we're here, you know?
And I see this little boy walk around
from this dark out building.
He walks into the yard of this place,
this dirty place,
it's stinky, it smells
like urine and feces
and it was just horrible
and I went up to this
kid and picked him up.
(laughing)
And he was my kid.
I saw my kid and he became my kid.
(laughing)
So I'm holding him and my partner
is negotiating with the
bad guys about the price
and oh, I think you guys
want that one, okay.
And these horrible people are trying to,
they're telling us tips on
how to evade the police
and how they've done this before,
how to get them out of the country.
So I pick the kid up and I want to
go into the dark out buildings
that are around this compound
but I don't want to look like
I'm being overly curious.
So I'm kind of, I have kids
so I know how to communicate with kids
so I get him to point
in the room as if he's
going to show me something
and I look over at the bad guys
and I can tell they're like,
oh, he's wants to show that guy whatever.
So it worked, so I got in there
and it just got stinkier and darker
and as I kind of walked into
the belly of this dark building
it got quieter and quieter
as I got further away from the sounds
of the street and the
other kids playing outside.
And the quieter it got
the better I was able to hear
what was always there, right behind me.
And it was the footsteps
of this little child
who was following me.
And I flip around and
there's this little girl.
And she's looking at me
and I don't want to cause more attention
so I give her a candy bar.
Now, again, these kids are starving.
She takes that candy bar
and she looks at me
and then looks at the
little boy in my arms
and without taking her eyes off him
breaks it, like muscle memory,
breaks it in half and gives it to him.
And I'm just thinking, this is not normal.
And then it hit me,
oh my gosh, they're brother and sister.
Say cheese please.
And she's horrified because
how many westerners have been here
and picked up a child
and that child disappeared
and was never seen again.
And this is all she has.
The only adults in her life
are trying to sell her.
How old is she?
Nine?
You're nine?
How long has she been here?
Four years.
Every 30 seconds a child is sold.
They're sold for sex.
They're sold for labor.
They're sold for organ harvesting,
which is something we're now getting into.
There's six million children
that are forced into one of those
three categories right now.
(police sirens blaring)
(speaking in a foreign language)
(police sirens blaring)
Modern day slavery really is
the plague of our generation.
I mean, when you consider there's more
people enslaved today than ever before
in the history of the world
and the world doesn't know.
We need to wake them up.
(police radio chatter)
(police sirens blaring)
- [Man] What's up guys?
- [Unseen Man] Make sure
you handle the victory.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Undercover Agent] He said, if there's
one girl that talks back, we call him.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Unseen Man] What the fuck is this?!
(intense music)
- It's a subject that nobody wants
to think about or talk about,
that's part of the problem, right?
It's so ugly, it's so,
it's the worst part of humanity
and yet you've got to
do something about it.
It's kind of a Catch-22,
nobody wants to talk about it,
nobody wants to happen,
nobody wants to talk about it,
nobody wants to do anything about it.
- Everybody, it just drives me crazy
how everybody is arguing on
they would be the biggest abolitionist
going back in time.
Well, would you?
Cause you're not doing it now.
And it's not that you wouldn't,
you just won't look at it.
- 'Cause I imagine a lot of people like,
oh yeah, that's good.
Man, that's awesome work they're doing
but they really, sit down man!
Like sit down, sit still for 10 minutes.
You know.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And really look at it.
If you did that.
- It rocked me to my core
to think about in this day and age people,
adults and children are being held
against their will and sold by the hour
to strangers to get raped.
And this is their life.
- People ask me like,
who are these dirt bags?!
Who are these people.
And I have to tell them it's anybody.
Anyone you can imagine,
anyone you see on the streets,
it's professionals, it's doctors, lawyers.
- Judgment day for former MSU doctor
Larry Nassar for sexually abusing
gymnasts under his care.
- You are a doctor.
You took an oath to do no harm
and you have harmed over 256 women
and that is beyond comprehension.
- [Reporter] The judge also said
Nassar was able to get away with his
criminal sexual conduct for 25 years.
- Here's the thing that's
mind boggling, right?
Is that it's estimated that there's over
two million children,
I'm not even talking about the adults,
two million children currently forced
to be sex slaves.
Raped for money.
Two million.
What kind of demand,
and this is a scary question,
what kind of demand justifies that number?
Two million kids.
That's a lot of sick, twisted, pedophiles.
- [Reporter] Jared Fogle arrived here
at the Federal Courthouse this morning.
He had nothing to say.
He is pleading guilty to conspiracy
for receiving and
distributing child pornography
and also traveling out of state
to engage in commercial
sex acts with minors.
- These guys want 10 year olds!
11 year olds!
That's who that want.
The answer to this
question is not popular.
People don't want me to say it.
They don't want me to talk about it.
But what is happening in this country,
especially in the this country!
The United States is the highest
consumer of child pornography
or what I call child rape videos,
'cause that's what they are.
And it's the western world--
- Sheriff's office!
We got a search warrant!
- The highest consumers, it's us.
(knocking)
- Let me get my pants.
- And this is why, they're sex addicts.
Their minds are twisted
and sick to want this.
I've interrogated dozens and dozens
and dozens of these guys
over the last 16 years
that I've working in this field.
No one wants to accept what it is.
They don't want to believe it.
How did you get here.
Why do you want this?
Why do you want kids?
And they all have the same story.
I picked up a Playboy Magazine
when I was 12 years old.
Then I got into more hardcore
and then more hardcore
and then the internet came along
in my thirties and oh my gosh!
Like, I could just,
with the click of a mouse
I could see anything I wanted.
And then the stuff that I had enjoyed
since I was a teenager
started to wear off.
I wasn't getting the fix.
I wasn't getting the feeling
that I used to get when
I was just watching
an adult man and an adult woman have sex.
Barely legal.
That's what they start
searching into the queue.
To the Google stream.
Well, that's not doing it for me anymore.
Okay, 16, I'm going to stop there.
I'm going to stop at 16, see what happens.
All of the sudden they're at 10.
They're at nine.
They're at eight.
They're at seven.
And you think you can
find this stuff online?
Absolutely.
And that's what's creating this demand.
That's why John's get on a an airplane
and fly to Haiti and Columbia
and Thailand because pretty soon
the child porn isn't doing it for them.
And they need the child.
This is why there's two million children
forced into the commercial
sex trade today.
- People weren't talking about human
trafficking like they are now.
And really it's because of the work
and efforts by organizations
like Operation Underground Railroad.
He will never talk about himself
but Tim is a well respected author,
lecturer, professor, and he could have
a quiet life doing that,
kind of like Indiana Jones.
(laughing)
But he has another side to him
and that's his law enforcement career.
He's was a respected law enforcement agent
for many years
and because his heart is so big
and he's so compassionate
and wants to protect every child
and man and woman that he possibly can
in the world, he left the comfort
of his badge and his pension
and his way of life in law enforcement
to several years ago
step out with a lot of faith
to create Operation Underground Railroad.
At the time he and Katherine did it
they had no promise
that anybody was going to care.
- He'll just jump on a plane
and traipse into a country and say,
here I am, where can I go save somebody?
There are so many things that have
to be considered.
You're shedding your badge.
You're shedding your firearm.
You're shedding your authority.
You're shedding all
the jurisdictional limitations
that prohibit me from
doing that very thing.
But Tim had the courage to do that.
- I think there's something to say
about Tim's persistence,
I guess is the word I would use for him.
He wants to be a consistent influence
in your life and he's dedicated
and I noticed the same thing
as he got into government work.
That he wanted to get
in and make a difference
and shake things things up
and you could tell he wanted to
get in there and make something happen.
- I grew up in Southern California.
I always knew that I wanted to be
a federal agent.
I just wanted to do that,
I don't know why,
it was just like, inherent.
My family wasn't excited about it,
my parents thought it was crazy.
No one in our family had been military or,
even generations back, in law enforcement.
It was just something
that I just wanted to do.
So I pursued it, everything I studied,
I studied Political Science,
I studied International Relations.
My first job after
Graduate School was the CIA
and I worked in the Operations Center.
My study had been around
terrorism and weapons.
I graduated from Graduate School
in December of 2001, so the government
was wide open for terrorist experts
and that's what I wanted to do.
And as I was learning about what happened
at 9/11 I learned that
one of the terrorists
had come from Mexicali, Mexico
and came through the port of entry
into California and then he went
back east and then launch these attacks.
And I wanted to get on a border.
I spoke Spanish, I thought,
I want to help investigate and defend
against potential terrorists
that would hurt our country.
I got to the office in
Calexico, California,
I had my dream job.
I mean, I was sitting on the border.
My office was on the border.
I could see the Mexican flag waving
outside my window.
This was the time when we were finding
a bunch of tunnels through San Diego
and all the way through
the border on California.
I was crawling through
tunnels and we were,
it was great but it only lasted
for about six months.
I was called in by my boss
and he told me that we're starting
a new anti-child trafficking group.
- We knew that bad
people were transmitting
and receiving, exploitive information.
Very, very dangerous information
and they were violating children.
Literally, real time.
And exchanging those imagery's and videos
on cameras with their
cohorts around the world.
Realized how absolutely pervasive
the problem of child exploitation was.
- [Tim] Can you say hi to these guys?
Say hi!
Hey buddy!
Awe, sweet.
- A supervisor contacted him and said,
hey, we're thinking about starting
a child crimes group
and want you to do it.
He came home and told me about it
and we were both like,
there is no way that we will ever do that.
We had two little kids at the time.
It just sounds so horrific.
We didn't think that that was something
we wanted to bring into our home.
My husband has just this light.
He's able to see good
in the world, you know?
And he has a lot of
optimism, a lot of strength,
I didn't want to see that taken away.
We are raising a young family,
I didn't want to see that gone
and so we took it very seriously.
- My wife and I had vowed that
the one thing I wouldn't
do was child crimes.
So we said, no.
And I remember going home that night
to my wife and saying,
you won't believe what
they just asked me to do!
And she said, well you're not doing it.
I said, I'm not doing it, absolutely not.
And she said, we have
kids, you can't do it!
And I remember a
sleepless night that night
and then getting up the next morning
and kind of looking at
myself in the mirror,
practicing my rejection talk,
and as I was preparing my speech
my wife came up to me.
Emotional, tears in her eyes.
And she said, we're making a huge mistake.
She said, for the very reason I thought
we couldn't do this, or shouldn't do this,
is the reason we need to do this.
Because we have kids.
Because we know what
childhood is supposed to be
and if it's true that
there's millions of kids
that are forced into that hell,
how do we say no?
Because we're afraid of our own pain,
which is nothing relative to that pain.
- But I told him that I
had automatic veto power.
That if I ever saw anything in him,
that I didn't, just the
dimming of the lights
or anything that I got to automatically
pull the plug, no questions asked,
and he would leave that group.
- So I reluctantly went,
changed my speech and it
was just one word, yes.
And we got into it.
And then something happened
that was completely transformative for me.
We were doing these child pornography
investigations and one of the kids
from the video surfaced,
and happened to surface
right on the border
where I was working.
- Not long ago a horrific video
of a five year old boy
being sexually abused in the worst way
was discovered by U.S. Authorities.
The boy and his 12 year old sister.
They had been kidnapped and they had been
trafficked back and forth between
the U.S. and Mexico.
Both were sex slaves
to a monster of a man.
Well, something happened.
Divine providence stepped in
and it took place at
the U.S., Mexico border.
The boy was seen by a U.S. official
who knew who he was.
Identified the boy in the video.
- It was the first time
that I was actually seeing
one of the kids from the videos.
It was an American man
who lived in the L.A. area.
He had a big warehouse and inside
his warehouse was a house,
like a residential home
and inside that home there were cameras,
hidden cameras everywhere,
porn everywhere, toys everywhere.
And he'd bring these
kids in to desensitize
them he'd make child rape videos.
(sad solemn music)
And as the dust settled
in the investigation
this kid ran to me and I remember
he jumped into my arms and just held me
and he was shaking and he just said to me,
with tears in his eyes,
holding me and shaking,
he said, I don't belong here.
I came home and I walked through the door
and I saw my kids running around playing
and I couldn't handle the dichotomy.
My brain couldn't handle
it and I just shut down.
I mean, this is embarrassing
but this is what happened.
I remember my knees gave out.
As I sat there the room was spinning
and I collapsed, like I
fell down on the floor
and my wife thought I was having
a heart attack or something you know,
and she ran over to me and just wrapped
her arms around me and just held me.
- Had a knock on my door one day
and of course I usually keep my door open
but I think I was on a phone call
so I didn't answer the door immediately
but I went to the door and I saw
Tim leaving and I asked him,
hey Tim, I'm done, come on in.
He was very, very concerned.
I could tell he was perplexed.
I could tell his was emotionally drained.
I could tell that he was needing
someone to talk to.
And he said, listen I really feel like
I could do better leaving the government.
- Well, if you lost one of your children
to one of these evil people
you'd do anything to get even
and get your child back.
Which some of our folks are trying to do.
- Good afternoon Mr. Chair
and esteemed members of the committee.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.
My name is Tim Ballard.
I'm the founder and CEO
of Operation Underground Railroad.
- You know, I think
our own law enforcement
in this country needs to get
more involved than they are right now.
- In 2006, with the passage of
the Adam Walsh Protect Act,
Congress opened the doors for U.S. agents
to better investigate these cases,
especially internationally.
- It's hard because a
lot of this is offshore
where they may not have jurisdiction.
- However I often felt helpless
by the fact that the vast majority
of the child victim's that we would find
fell outside the purview
of the United States.
- It's very difficult because
we in the United States
have a lot of protections for privacy,
especially when it comes to
financial transactions,
but how do we get the information
to see a pattern of sex trafficking?
- Before this law was passed,
it was passed in 2006,
in order to prosecute on the U.S. side
an American who was
sexually abusing children
in other countries you had to prove
that that person had intent
to rape that child while
standing on U.S. soil.
So you can imagine how many prosecutions
we had prior to this law, like zero.
Unless I could tie a
U.S. traveler to the case
I would not be able to
rescue the children,
even the ones that we were
able to identify as being victims.
But I could find the kids no matter what.
It's outside of the jurisdiction
and I understood that,
however that doesn't mean
that we couldn't be doing more.
- It takes a little bit of an effort
but that's what we've go to do
and we've got to fight like hell
to try and get these kids back
and get them back on track.
But in a lot of cases
once they're gone they're gone.
- [Glenn] We need to find some partners
that are like minded.
Is there a way that, you know,
we can help each other?
- Yeah.
- Cause we're in the
same kind of business.
You know, who's got big, big, lists
that we can leverage me
and say, we'll help you, you help us.
- [Tim] Have you ever connected--
- I met Tim through, I think,
a series of coincidence that led
me to one of his books,
he's a tremendous writer.
Tremendous researcher.
I mean, he's really bright.
So I knew him as an author
and we became friends and I didn't know
that he had this secret double life.
I was coming in,
I don't remember where it was,
I was coming into town and he was in town
and he said, hey do you
mind if we meet and talk?
I said, sure.
I said, I'm going to be
staying at the hotel,
you know this hotel why
don't you just come up
and he said, well,
why don't we meet in a conference room?
Okay.
- I'm wanting the world to wake up
to what's going on is
two million children are sex slaves.
- And he reached under his shirt
and he pulled a federal badge out
on the chain and he sat there.
I looked at everybody and said,
am I in trouble?
Am I going to prison, what is this?
- It's the fastest growing
criminal enterprise in the world.
I'd go back to 19th century America
to the slave problem
and we should congratulate ourselves.
We eradicated slavery.
It's bull crap.
We've not eradicated it.
- And he explained what he was doing
and explained that he needed to get out
of working with the government
and he had a way that we could really
make an impact but they needed
a million dollars to start.
- [Attorney] 10 thousand dollars to put
a jump team together, go,
(clapping)
on team, get this overseas I'm assuming.
- Yeah, we have jump teams that do this.
They're ex Navy Seals,
they're people like me who are
willing to do this.
- And I happen to be with an attorney
and he was sitting with me
and I asked a whole bunch of questions
and my attorney said,
no you can't, you can't.
What happens if something goes wrong,
blah, blah, blah.
If you're raising money
and it's on the border
and these guys are, you're in Texas.
- You're damn right I would.
I would do it through law enforcement
and I would do it exactly legal.
But, I mean, this is child trafficking.
Tim is the most sincere,
the most honest honorable man
I think I've ever met
and I said, I'm in.
We'll raise your first million.
- Bring it on.
I will promote, I will do,
I will develop with you.
I had a great, great, great uncle
and a great, great, grandfather
who both died in the notorious
concentration camp in the South.
They were fighting for the North.
I didn't know that.
Nobody in my family knew that.
They were fighting to free the slaves.
They did it.
Why can't I?
- You know, Abraham Lincoln,
when he was grappling with
the Emancipation Proclamation
the nation didn't want him to do it.
Even in the North, they
didn't want him to do it.
And he went through something.
In 1862 his son died.
And he got extremely empathetic
and he started even turning to God
and praying like he never had before.
Historians have called it
a Damascus Road experience for him.
Then he just said, you know,
come hell or high water I'm doing this.
No one in his cabinet really wanted him to
and he says, I'm doing it.
And he changed the course of the war
and changed the course of history.
By making the war about human freedom,
liberating the captive
and then the whole thing changed
which led to the 13th
Amendment and so forth.
This is what we all need to do.
Stop putting the walls up.
These are real kids and
they don't have anybody
and if we don't open up,
no one's going to open up.
But when you do open up,
it hurts a little bit.
But then you become so much more effective
in what you're trying to do
and ideas and inspiration,
I'd argue even miracles
start happening when you do that.
- Operation Underground Railroad
is a fairly new organization,
just over two years old
but it's captured a lot of media attention
with it's missions to rescue
child slaves throughout the world.
India, Haiti, Mexico.
They go into the darkest
corners of the world.
(speaking in a foreign language)
And work with law enforcement
to rescue children from slavery.
Since it's inception a
little over two years ago
they've helped authorities arrest
157 people in 12 different countries.
Most of that work--
- I never dreamed that
I would work in Haiti.
I didn't know anything,
really, about Haiti.
Until I learned about a little boy
who was born in Utah, a U.S. citizen
and was kidnapped in Haiti from his church
where his father was the pastor.
And that little boy was
taken, he was kidnapped.
I read about it in the local newspaper
and I just had to do something about it.
I thought that I could
make it into a U.S. case
and I couldn't because it wasn't.
It was a Haitian case.
The man, the father of this boy who I met
who changed my world is Guesno Mardy.
And Guesno's sitting right here,
Guesno just stand up.
This is Guesno Mardy.
- [Attendee] Hey Guesno.
- And I have so much to say about Guesno.
We went to Haiti to look for his son
but the only way for us to go to Haiti
would be to, we had to leave our jobs.
I had to leave my job because
I didn't have enough leave from work.
I love my job.
I love working for Homeland Security.
I mean, these are the
best people on the planet
doing the best work.
And all the colleagues I had floated
this idea to before, in
the weeks leading up,
said, you're crazy, don't
do this, you're crazy.
And John Lines looked at me
and he started off with, you're crazy.
And I'm like, here I go again, you know?
But he said something different,
he said, you're crazy
if you don't try this.
- I was encouraging overtly
but my in my heart of hearts I thought,
that's going to be a tough go.
That's a going to be a tough go
to leave the security
of the U.S. Government
and go save children around the world.
Three years old.
Gardy, his name is Gardy.
They kidnapped him from the church
where Guesno was the pastor.
They took him, this little boy,
and they trafficked him
and this happens all the time in Haiti.
I remember reading the story
and there was a picture of Guesno
and my heart just melted as a father.
Just melted for him and I thought,
I know, I have enough experience to know,
very little's being done
to find this little boy.
(solemn music)
- We got to Haiti and we worked with
law enforcement and we went in there
looking for Gardy and we never found him.
What we did find was two things.
We found that this child was trafficked
through what looked to
be like an orphanage.
It wasn't an orphanage
and we were asked by the Haitian Police
to go undercover with hidden cameras
and go into this place
that was selling children.
They were selling children for $10,000
and then they raised the price to $15,000.
The traffickers were selling kids
and we were able to
dismantle that organization
and we had to buy two
children in the process.
We had to buy two children
and they were the key
to getting the other kids out.
- What's that?
- You want this?
(laughing)
Be careful with this, okay?
After we got those kids out
and his son was not there.
And I said, Guesno I'm so sorry.
You're son's not there.
There's 28 children that were rescued
but his son was not there.
I started to cry and Guesno was crying
but he only cried for a little bit
and then he popped his
head up and he said,
don't you realize what just happened?
And I said, what?
Yeah, you know, what just happened?
And he's smiling now and I don't know
why he's smiling because
he's a very smiley guy
and he has a light about him
and I learned what that light was
because he said, he said,
if Gardy had never been kidnapped
then your team never would have come here
and these 28 kids would
be for sale or be sold.
And I said, yeah, I guess would have
thought of it that way and then he said
maybe the most profound thing
that anyone's ever said to me.
He said, if I have to sacrifice my son
so that these 28 kids can be rescued,
he said, that's a sacrifice
I'm willing to make.
And that's when I knew
that we would never leave Haiti
because of the spirit of that Haitian man
who then by the way, went
to the police station
the next day and he said,
I will take home any of those children
that were rescued in the name of my son,
I will take them home.
And he took eight of those
children home that day
and he is their father today in Haiti.
And so you see we could never
leave Haiti after that.
We decided we had to do more operations.
We had to dig deeper, look for Gardy.
Dig deeper, the more we
go looking for Gardy,
a funny thing happens,
every time we look for
him we find other kids.
Gardy is the kid who's story
created Operation Underground Railroad.
You been (beep) little girls too?
10 years old, love this guy!
(laughing)
I sat across from this guy, these guys,
as they told me about the children
that had been raping
and they laughed about it.
And they laughed and they scoffed.
And they said, you get to do it next.
It was horrifying, horrifying.
Now this was on Superbowl Sunday
and this is where
the story gets very interesting.
- On Superbowl Sunday a lot of Americans
having those Superbowl parties,
hot wings, watching the big game,
but a local non-profit organization
that fights human trafficking
spent their Superbowl weekend in Haiti.
- [Tim] I can take the 11 year old?
Can I take your youngest?
- [Reporter] Timothy Ballard and his team
at Operation Underground Railroad
worked undercover pretending to purchase
young girls for sex.
Ballard says the men sold him twenty
minors as young as 11 years old.
- It was Superbowl Sunday,
February 5th, 2017.
We had set up this operation that
what looked like it went flawless.
- In Operation Underground Railroad
we always want to ensure that if these
rescued children cannot go back
to their parents then they go into
vetted safe houses, orphanages,
rehabilitation centers.
So our aftercare team,
led by Miss Jessica Mass,
who is here with us today spent weeks
liaisoning with partners in Haiti.
Not just Guesno and his safe house
but others who's names cannot be shared
now for their own protection.
- We'll go into a country and the first
question we ask, if the police
or that government wants to work with us,
the first question we ask is, what kind
of aftercare capabilities
are you aware of?
These kids, there's so many of them.
There is no home to go home to.
It's not like this
happy story all the time
where it's like, oh, your loving family's
been waiting for you in the garden
and the trees are there
and the beautiful flowers
and just go hug them and all is well.
I mean, generally that's not the case.
I wish it were but generally the fact
that there was no family,
or the family was part of the problem,
that's how they got trafficked.
- And that's where
everybody else screws it up.
It's where we screwed up.
That's the reconstruction part.
The ending of the slavery was good.
Now, how do we make sure that we provide
the tools to be able to make it
and to able to have a
fair shot at something
that you've never experienced before?
I can't even imagine the scaring
that they have and to able to see them
turn their lives around, remarkable.
- We laid out the whole operation.
You saw from the video the beautiful
Kaliko Beach Club.
We have to play the role of very wealthy
sex tourists and so we had the whole
operation set up and it went beautifully.
- [Reporter] When police arrived,
they arrested nine men from three
separate human trafficking rings
and liberated 29 victims.
- Our Haitian partners did an amazing job.
We made the arrests.
We got the girls immediately to the area
where we were assured that they would
get the support they need.
- We were so excited, we were excited
that these girls were finally
going to have hope and healing.
It was just a couple days after
that I received a phone call.
- We unfortunately got
some very frustrating
news a few days after the operation.
- [Jessica] The traffickers
were being released
and not all the girls were released.
- They get released, they get freed.
They pay money to the right people.
To the judges.
I remember when we got that word,
I remember Jessica,
Matt, we were in tears.
We were in tears.
We couldn't believe that these kids
could be put in harm's way again.
- Half the girls had family members
that showed up and the other half
had traffickers that showed up for them.
- These guys who were laughing about
raping children were now
laughing their way home.
(laughing)
We didn't know what to do.
We had some long talks about it,
with Guesno and Dimitri
and they just said, please don't give up.
Don't give up, there are good people
in this government that want
this problem to go away.
And what happened was what we hoped
would happen, the good people
who didn't know what happened to us,
they came to us.
The good people came to us
and they said, we didn't know this truth.
We didn't know what had happened
but we will not stand for it.
And I'm looking at the good people
right now who came to us.
The job's not quite done
but it's almost done because now
we need to go back and we need
to re-arrest every single one
of these traffickers and it will be
a message to Haiti, to America,
to the whole world
that there are good people everywhere
that will stand up for this.
That there is light in this dark world.
There's light.
If we don't become that light
there is no light.
(applauding)
- [Interpreter] But I do
sometimes they try to.
(applauding)
(rock music)
- [Tim] Hey, crap this
guys coming up through--
- We finally have our eyes on what's
going on, we're shifting our mind set.
There's two of them that we have,
we still need to verify and we're going to
have reconnaissance teams running
the rest of the day.
It limits what we want
to do during the day.
We would rather not do a snatch
and grab on the side of the street
in the middle of the daytime.
It's very hard to sneak up to people
with the way this traffic is
and do that effectively.
It's a very low chance.
You're talking like 15% chance
of actually getting these guys.
Just so everything knows,
Andrew knows this area we're going to
better than anyone, he's lived there
for periods of his life
so honestly he knows this better
than the police that are putting us in it.
He knows this area.
- In a nutshell, top of
the trees perspective,
our activities tonight are going to
take place in Petion-Ville, which is a
wealthier part of Port-au-Prince where
there's several hotels.
So there's a lot of working,
there's a lot of prostitution going on.
That where--
For Haiti.
And it's the place where foreigners come.
If you're a foreigner
you're going to come here,
you're going to stay most
likely in Petion-Ville
so that's where to track
some of the nefarious activities.
- [Dave] So, any questions about the area?
We're going to pull up Google Maps,
we've dropped pins on everything
so everyone's going to get a good visual
of the area that we're looking at.
- [Dimitri] Okay guys as you're doing this
stay to the windows and hold there.
I seen lights back there,
there shouldn't be lights back there.
Okay, we are in an unmarked van.
It's a van that is used for taxis.
In a few minutes I'm going to have to
put my windows down because it's
not known to have taxis
having their windows up freezing.
- [Dave] I understand.
In a nutshell, the birds eye view here,
is we're going after
three different targets, okay?
And one of them's a female.
This is our ace in the hole mission.
If everything else fails
we are getting this chick tonight.
She's awful, Andrew can
go into more detail.
- [Dimitri] Okay, she's like a captain,
a captain in a mafia.
- Our hotel's right here,
Best Western, Petion-Ville, all right?
She's literally like two blocks away
and one down, typically.
But she kind of moves within like,
I would say a one block
radius of that spot.
- [Dimitri] She's crossing the street.
She's crossing the street.
That's her right there.
Crossing the street with the white pants.
That's her right there.
That's her right there.
That's the boss right there.
- [Andrew] She does not like this.
- [Dimitri] That's the boss right there.
- All those girls are working for her.
She's their pimp and show that
she is number one.
- Number one.
- She pimps out young girls
and she keeps, she has the over,
the legal girls on the street.
She has a little house back there
where one of our operators has seen
underage girls.
- We're now moving.
- [Andrew] Did you see how long
that car has been behind us?
- He just got behind us.
- Has he just came behind us?
- [Andrew] Just keep, pay attention to it.
It's possible we have a tail behind us.
- [Dimitri] Oh, okay.
- [Andrew] They turned right,
it's turning off.
- [Dimitri] So she didn't see us.
- If there's any like holes
in the logic right now.
Anything glaring that
anyone's thinking about.
This is like time to beat it to death
because there's gonna,
this is all coming together very quick
and guarantee there's more things.
- You know what I want to do
is start with a prayer.
What about,
what about your special prayer?
- You want me to pray that prayer?
- Yeah, I kind of do, yeah.
- All right, we'll just like bow our heads
and I'll sing it real quick.
(speaking in a foreign language)
May Jehovah bless you and keep you.
May Jehovah let his face shine upon you
and be gracious to you.
May Jehovah lift up his
countenance upon you
and give you shalom, amen.
- [Everyone] Amen.
(rhythmic drum music)
Okay, this is the part that nobody
really wants to talk about or do
but it's the part we probably
need to know the best.
Somebody gets shot or stabbed
or severely injured enough they have
to be taken to a higher level of care.
We've got a number of these kids
that are going to be
spread out in the vehicles.
These are called blow out kits.
Emergency?
Okay, so then none of this stuff
is going to matter to you,
however if that time
and somebody gets hurt
and if somebody yells medic
everything else needs to stop.
Nothing else matters because
we could lose a person
at that point, right?
So, the Haitians are going to do
whatever they're going to do
but this group in here,
we're going to keep that person alive.
- So our target's name is Cho
and she's a pimp who's going to be
on a street corner about two
or three blocks from here.
We intend to take Cho and try and get,
if we can, use her to get information.
We've got eight other targets
that are out there that
were stupidly released.
We know that she paid $80,000
to someone to get out of jail.
We really want to understand
where she got $80,000 from.
We believe a criminal
organization supports her.
We've been to her house,
she's not living large at all.
So she's back by so and so,
we want to find out who pays
you the 80,000 and who
within the government
did you give that 80,000 to?
In addition, we want to just
scare the living daylights out of her
and use the momentum and fear,
just listen, the next five minutes
of your life are going to determine
the next 50 years of your life.
This is our plan, once the Haitians come--
- It's their country, of course.
- Right.
- We do what they want.
- Perimeter one and perimeter two,
as long as we got eyes looking out board
with guns while we're in the middle,
that's the only goal here.
We're making these things really simple.
Look, we don't all rush to
the middle of the action here, you know?
And that's what rookies do.
That's what idiots do.
They have a job and even if they don't
like their job, even if
it's not the cool job,
this is their damn job.
- I think it goes without saying,
we don't want them to know
where we're staying tonight at all
and if we need to take different routes
or just be really familiar with who's
behind you and who could be following you.
Even if it's a little motorcycle,
those guys are the worst.
Motorcycle guys are bad.
And they're going to be the informants.
So we want to sleep safely
and those driving to the airport tomorrow,
we don't want any issues.
- Hey guys.
- Hey Jim.
- Of the guys down stairs there's--
- Perfect.
The recon one,
we're like three minutes to deploy.
(radio chatter)
(inspirational music)
(traffic sounds)
(motorcycle engines)
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Andrew] All right you guys,
up there where the lights are,
where the lights are is
about where she's at.
It's this car,
it's this car pulled over, okay?
(speaking in a foreign language)
- Are we close man?
- It's right here you guys.
- [Andrew] Right here, right here.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Agent] Go, go, go, go, go, go, go!
Go, go, go, go!
(speaking in a foreign language)
(motorcycle engine)
(speaking in a foreign language)
- [Agent] Condoms, these are all from
a huge bag of condoms.
- [Agent] We need to
bag all this evidence.
There's minors on scene
and he's got condoms.
He's got sex toys, he's
got condoms in there.
(speaking in a foreign language)
- I'm a citizen of U.S.A.!
- [Agent] Matt, take a photo of them.
- Yo, I'm a citizen of U.S.A., okay!
I'm a citizen of U.S.A.!
- [Agent] Everyone, safe vehicles!
- [Agent] All right, roll out!
Safe vehicles!
- [Tim] How many guys got
wrapped up right there?
- Two or four.
- There was the American.
- He's saying he's an American, yeah.
- [Agent] I thought he was saying--
- I don't think he was--
- Americans.
- No, no, no, he was
saying, I'm an American.
So we got more than we bargained for
on that one for sure.
Hey, where are we,
are we at the precinct?
(speaking in a foreign language)
- This is very important.
I know he said it but these guys
are confirming again,
those were the girls, the same girls,
that she brought, same girls?
- Hm mm.
- And we think that they live with her.
She keeps them captive in her own home.
- I'd like to talk to somebody!
So can I talk to somebody out there!
I'm a citizen of United States!
Yes!
So can I talk to somebody
who can explain what's going on!?
I'm a citizen of United States.
- [Tim] Oh yes.
In Kaliko Bay.
And the girls, same girls
she brought to Kaliko.
Their minors, tell him.
Their 13, their 13,
12, 13, 14, years old.
You caught her red handed.
(speaking in a foreign language)
(light music)
- Thank you.
(soothing music)
(speaking in a foreign language)
- We get the kids out.
Before the kids are pulled out
of these dens of nightmares
and their in our safe house.
Jessica Mass, our director of aftercare's
with them and they start to open up,
they start to talk.
And the one little girl,
the youngest of them,
starts to cry, starts to tear up
and she said, this is the first time
that I've ever felt hope
that I can remember.
And she proceeded to tell us this story
about how when she was about
six or seven years old she was kidnapped
in the wake of the earthquake.
(police sirens)
Her parents were killed in the earthquake,
like so many parents were,
and she was left an orphan instantly
and this nice woman comes up,
tells her that she'll take care of her
and to come with her.
This was happening all over
in the wake of the earthquake.
In the case of Rosy, I mean,
she was six, seven years old,
Cho gets ahold of her,
promises to take care of her
and instead puts her into
a life of sex slavery.
And this was so crazy,
she said it's amazing that you guys came
and rescued me on January 12th.
She said, it was January 12th,
eight years ago, when
the earthquake struck.
Hey!
How are you?
This little girl was in the most
obscure country in the world.
Not only that she was in the most
obscure and darkest corner
of that most obscure country
just wallowing in hell,
far from anyone possibly could care.
You're so big.
(speaking in a foreign language)
It took her 24 hours after the rescue
to even talk because she said
she couldn't believe
that anyone would come for her.
Santa Claus?
Who's that?
- Santa Claus.
He came?
It's what we are trying to do.
We intentionally go to
the darkest corners of the Earth
where there is no hope
and find these kids.
And what that does,
apart from liberating children,
what that does is it provides hope
for everybody now.
I mean, where there was no hope
there's hope everywhere.
If we can continue to grow our operations
and continue to get the support we need
there is hope everywhere
for the first time.
Okay, scoot over, we got to have a talk.
We got to have a talk right here.
Okay, what's your name?
Hey?
- You got to talk to papa.
- Hey, hey, what's your name?
What's your name, not yet, not yet.
What's your name?
Coleen.
(gasp)
- Jean-Baptist Catel.
Yeah!
What's your name buddy.
(inspirational music)
We find these two things.
We found the traffickers were selling kids
and we were able to
dismantle that organization
and we had to buy two
children in the process.
We had to buy two children.
And they were the key to getting
the other kids out.
And we've told that story many times
but what's special
about those two children
is that I formed a special bond with them.
And when we were driving
from the orphanage
to the sting house, or the hotel,
this little boy jumped up into my lap
and I'm supposed to be this, you know,
hard criminal.
After the rescue was done we,
my wife and I couldn't stop thinking
about them, him and his sister,
they were the two kids
and so we started to work
towards adopting them.
That was almost four years ago
and I just got the email today.
The decree came out of Parke
and their names are now Ballard.
They're now, they're my children.
If I lived in Haiti.
(applauding)
If I lived in Haiti I could take
them home right now
so all we have to wait for now is
passports and visas and that
and then they come home to Utah.
Where's Cole and Coleen going to sleep?
We have one extra bedroom, right?
- Yeah, but where's Daniel going to sleep?
- He's going to bunk with the boys.
- Everything with me.
- With Rick.
- There are days that Tim and I are like,
what, why do we have all these kids?
But, but,
I just,
you look at this little guy
and he is so loved
and just by virtue of the fact
that he was born in a family
and that automatically
gives him access to this love.
That we don't even have to think about,
it's just there.
And there are so many
children around the world
that don't have that and that could.
There just shouldn't be this much excess
with that many children in need.
(soft slow piano music)
- I'll find him.
It is something I don't want to talk about
because I know I will find him.
I will find him.
One day something will happen,
I'll find him.
- Number one thing on my bucket list,
what I want to do is
I want to help stop human trafficking.
- Oh, that's beautiful.
(applauding)
- I belong to an organization called
Operation Underground Railroad.
There are over two million children
who are stolen
and they are abused sexually
and it's unbelievable what happens.
And I belong to that organization
and we are trying to stop that.
It's really--
- What do you do?
- A man called Tim Ballard,
and he used to work for the F.B.I.
but he's now gone on his own.
So he partners with governments
from other countries and they go in
and pretend to be traffickers
so they get people to get
people to bring kids in
and they pretend to buy those kids.
And then they catch the people
who are bringing the kids in.
- How much does it cost
them to free a child?
- Anywhere probably from 12,000
to 50,000 an operation.
- I'll give you 100,000 if you'll get me
10 children out of slavery.
- Awesome!
Thank you!
(audience cheers and applauds)
- Tony, when you did that,
$100,000, that just rocked me.
I was raised in a Catholic orphanage
from the time I was seven till I was 19
but out of our savings I can't match you
but I'd like to give
$10,000 with your gift.
- [Tony] Awesome, that's incredible.
That's awesome!
Thank you very much.
10,000 more, give her a hand
right here, 10,000 more.
♪ So be still ♪
One more?
Another 10,000, how about a hand for him?
Nice job!
♪ And sleep now ♪
10,000?
♪ And know that ♪
Go see her, there's another 10,000!
♪ There's no more fear ♪
♪ And maybe ♪
10,000?
5,000?
You got it, I'll match it!
♪ You'll stay here ♪
You too!?
Awesome!
♪ To hold on to ♪
Give these guys a hand!
♪ When things get bad ♪
Oh, this touches my heart!
That's awesome!
♪ So be still ♪
♪ And sleep now ♪
♪ And know that ♪
♪ There's no more fear ♪
♪ And maybe ♪
♪ You'll stay here ♪
♪ To hold on to ♪
How many are touched and inspired
by what these people have done
and what you've done?
♪ So be still ♪
Once you do something like this
you'll never go back,
it'll be part of your life forever.
♪ There's no more fear ♪
♪ And maybe ♪
♪ You'll stay here ♪
♪ To hold on to ♪
♪ There's one thing you should know ♪
♪ They won't come round here no more ♪
♪ They won't come round here ♪
♪ They won't come round here no more ♪
♪ They won't come round here no more ♪