Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking
Biden’s border policies have led to an explosion in the forced prostitution of migrants in the U.S. ‘If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes.’
By Madeleine Rowley
October 14, 2024
DALLAS, TEXAS — Lisa slides a Hellcat pistol into her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder. She jumps out of the driver’s seat of her massive Ford F-250 as we head into a barbecue joint for lunch. Steel brass knuckles glint in the console beside a pencil-shaped, pronged object. She sees me looking at it.
“That’s my stabby-stick,” Lisa says before I even ask. “In case I can’t bring my gun somewhere. These guys are dangerous.”
“These guys” are sex traffickers, and dangerous doesn’t begin to describe them.
Many traffickers are members of Mexican or Salvadorian gangs, part of Cuban rings or the vicious Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. Their modus operandi is luring migrant women and girls across the southern border, promising them good jobs once they get to America, and then forcing them into prostitution once they’re here, ostensibly to pay off the debt they incurred to get into the U.S. Hunting down sex traffickers is not for the faint of heart, and Lisa is not about to take any chances.
An athletic, no-nonsense blonde in her 50s, Lisa runs a small nonprofit foundation called Shepherd’s Watch, dedicated to bringing down sex-trafficking rings. Prior to starting Shepherd’s Watch in 2016, Lisa had been a telecom engineer and an expert at analyzing cell phone data used in court cases. In that job, she says, she saw a “disturbing” amount of child exploitation. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”
Lisa, who asked that we not use her real name, calls herself “an informant.” She lacks the authority to arrest a trafficker, and any attempt to rescue the girls herself could well get her killed. Instead, Lisa and a small handful of other Shepherd’s Watch investigators work to locate victims and their pimps and then turn the information over to police departments, sheriff’s offices, and other law enforcement agencies. Because Lisa and her team have gained credibility with law enforcement over the years, the police usually follow up on the information the Shepherd’s Watch informants provide. Sometimes they hit pay dirt, arresting the traffickers and removing the girls to a safe place.
“Law enforcement is understaffed and stretched too thin,” says Lisa. “That’s where we come in.”
At the barbecue joint off Route 75 in Dallas, Lisa pulls out her phone to show me the dozen or so online platforms that traffickers and pimps use to sell girls for sex. The platforms—which include apps like TikTok, OnlyFans, and Facebook—are chockablock with ads of women, usually wearing lingerie, their faces covered to prevent anyone guessing their age. The sheer number of ads is astonishing. “Each week, we track over 12,000 ads for women in Houston, 2,600 in San Antonio, 3,500 in Austin, and 14,000 in Dallas,” says Lisa.
I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021. “Yes,” she says. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls.
“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa says. “It’s that easy.”
And she’s right. After lunch, we drive around the seedier areas of the Dallas suburb of Plano. We’re guided by Jack, an intelligence contractor for Shepherd’s Watch who specializes in geospatial analysis. Jack, who also asked to remain anonymous, works from an office in California. Formerly in law enforcement, he tracks phones using the location data in the background of mobile apps, identifies patterns with cell phone numbers, and does tattoo and facial recognition work. Federal agencies often engage him.
Pretending to be a client, Jack texts a woman on a website called Escort13. She is described as a “new Latina in the city.” The woman tells Jack that she’s at Motel 6 off the North Central Expressway in Plano. Like a scene in a spy movie, Jack relays the information from his California office to Lisa in Texas through the truck’s crackling speakers.
In her profile photo, the woman is dressed in a black, long-sleeve, crop top shirt and short black skirt—modest compared to pictures of some of the other girls that Lisa has shown me. Her dark hair hangs straight below her waist, and her phone covers her face, which conceals her age and identity.
Her profile says she’s 24 years old and that her home base is Philadelphia—neither of which is necessarily true. Gang-led trafficking rings tend to move their victims all over the U.S.; it’s one way they try to stay ahead of the law. So it’s no surprise this young woman is now working out of a motel in Texas. According to Lisa, Latin American girls like her go for anywhere from $130 to $160 per half hour.
After Jack makes contact with the woman, he tells Lisa, “She says to take a photo of the motel’s entrance, and then she’ll give me the room number.” Lisa snaps a photo through the windshield and sends it to Jack, who texts it to the woman and gets the room number. It’s on the second floor of the two-story motel. We drive to the far end of the parking lot, where we have a clear view of the balcony.
A Latina girl pokes her head out the door and cautiously looks around. Realizing no one is there, she retreats inside. A few moments later, a shirtless man throws up the shades in the room directly below her and swivels his head to look around the parking lot.
“That’s probably her pimp or a trafficker,” Lisa says. “Time to go.”
We peel out of the lot and drive to a Studio 6 motel two miles down the road, where Jack is communicating with another migrant girl. This motel doesn’t have balconies, and when Jack asks her to come to the lobby, she says no. We have no choice but to drive away.
Still, it’s been a successful afternoon. With Jack’s help, Lisa has found two possibly sex-trafficked women and one likely trafficker. When Lisa picks me up the following day, she’s on the phone with Plano law enforcement recounting what we saw the day before at the Motel 6.
“She looked young to me,” says Lisa.
In a follow-up phone call, Lisa tells me the police went to the motel to check it out, but the girl was gone. They think she was part of a trafficking ring.
“She’ll resurface,” says Lisa. “They always do.”
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https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-americas-fastest-growing-criminal?