No, The Government Did Not Break Up A Child Sex Trafficking Ring In Georgia

Human trafficking has been having an eventful summer. In July, internet sleuths accused online retailer Wayfair of selling missing children in overpriced cabinets. In August, QAnon supporters (along with some well-meaning if ill-informed influencers) held nationwide Save the Children rallies.

And last week, there was the trailer story.

U.S. Marshals Find 39 Missing Children in Georgia During Operation Not Forgotten, proclaimed the governments official press release. Federal agents and local law enforcement, it said, had rescued 26 children, safely located 13 more and arrested nine perpetrators, some of whom were charged with sex trafficking.

The facts of the operation werent clear (what does safely located mean, exactly?), but it didnt stop media outlets from taking up the story. Missing Children Rescued in Georgia Sex Trafficking Bust wrote The Associated Press, a headline dutifully repeated in The New York Times. 39 Missing Children Located in Georgia Sex Trafficking Sting Operation was People magazines version. Few media outlets contributed any original reporting; the vast majority of stories were little more than rewritten versions of the U.S. Marshals Services press release.

Within hours, social media users continued the game of telephone. 39 kids were just recovered from traffickers in Georgia, Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, wrote in a tweet . Law enforcement officers saved their lives. How is this not the biggest story in America right now?

39 kids were just recovered from traffickers in Georgia. At least 15 were sexually abused.

Law enforcement officers saved their lives.

How is this not the biggest story in America right now?

Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 30, 2020","type":"rich","meta":{"author":"Charlie Kirk","author_url":"https://twitter.com/charliekirk11","cache_age":86400,"description":"39 kids were just recovered from traffickers in Georgia. At least 15 were sexually abused.Law enforcement officers saved their lives.How is this not the biggest story in America right now? 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39 kids were just recovered from traffickers in Georgia. At least 15 were sexually abused.

Law enforcement officers saved their lives.

How is this not the biggest story in America right now?
Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 30, 2020

Thousands of other social media users repeated the same information and asked the same rhetorical question: Why wasnt this a bigger deal?

The media is so hell-bent on demonizing the law enforcement profession that they have to find really weak excuses to not cover it when cops rescue 39 children from a sex trafficking ring, the National Fraternal Order of Police, the law enforcement union, told its followers.

How is finding 39 missing children in a double wide trailer here in Georgia NOT the biggest news story in America?

King Randall, I. (@NewEmergingKing) August 28, 2020","type":"rich","meta":{"author":"King Randall, I.","author_url":"https://twitter.com/NewEmergingKing","cache_age":86400,"description":"How is finding 39 missing children in a double wide trailer here in Georgia NOT the biggest news story in America? King Randall, I. 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How is finding 39 missing children in a double wide trailer here in Georgia NOT the biggest news story in America?
King Randall, I. (@NewEmergingKing) August 28, 2020

More than 150,000 people shared a single-sentence tweet from someone named King Randall, I: How is finding 39 missing children in a double wide trailer here in Georgia NOT the biggest news story in America?

Well, to answer a one-sentence question with a one-sentence answer, 39 kids being rescued from a trailer in Georgia is not the biggest news story in America because 39 kids were not rescued from a trailer in Georgia.

This is not the big trafficking bust everyone thinks it is, said Erin Albright, a human trafficking and law enforcement consultant who works with cities to develop anti-trafficking strategies. Any time a child is being harmed and is connected with meaningful support, thats good. But at the same time, we have to recognize that these stories are not what they look like at first.

Wait, So Was This A Trafficking Bust Or Not?

It wasnt.

This was not a designated anti-trafficking operation, Darby Kirby, a U.S. Marshals Service inspector involved with the operation, told HuffPost. Operation Not Forgotten, the name law enforcement gave the recovery effort, was a collaboration between state and federal authorities to locate 78 critically missing children. That term means they could be at risk for trafficking, but they could also be at risk of parental abuse or have medical conditions that make their recovery more urgent.

The operation was a success. Authorities found all but 13 of the 78 missing children. Of the 65 they located, 39 were recovered, meaning they were removed from whatever situation they were in which could be anything from living on the streets to crashing on a friends couch to staying with a parent who didnt have custody rights. The other 26 cases were closed without the child being recovered. Albright said this could mean that another agency, such as Child Protective Services, found them or that they had been home all along.

State authorities said they suspected that 15 of the 78 children were victims of trafficking (meaning they were engaging in commercial sex) but confirmed only six cases. Those children were transferred to a victims rehabilitation facility, and were going to talk about them later.

The operation netted only one new charge of sex trafficking against a perpetrator. Of the seven men and two women arrested, three were charged with probation violations, one was charged with unlawful possession of a firearm and two were accused of violating custody arrangements. One person was arrested on a warrant for a previous sex trafficking charge, and two more were arrested on warrants for sex crimes in other states.

We need to keep in mind that rescuing these kids is not the end. Theyre still incredibly vulnerable. A year from now the U.S. Marshals could do this again and pick up the same 39 kids.
- Erin Albright, law enforcement and human trafficking consultant

But What About All Those Kids They Found In The Trailer?

Yeah, there was no trailer.

Federal agents did not rescue a large number of children from a single location or even a single jurisdiction. Kirby told HuffPost that only two children were recovered together. The other kids were found individually across 15 Georgia counties and six other states: South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida, Kentucky and Michigan. The operation took place over two weeks, not one night.

In other words, the sex trafficking sting described in headlines and social media posts was neither a sex trafficking operation nor a sting. Kirby noted that the agency did not conduct any raids (she capitalized and underlined the word not in her email) during the effort to locate the 78 children. This was a knock-on-doors and question-suspects situation, not a bust-in-with-a-battering-ram kind of deal.

Its worth noting that the operation was also set up to arrest children, not just rescue them. Katie Byrd, the communications director for the Georgia attorney generals office, noted that two of the missing kids were suspects in homicide cases, and one was a person of interest in another.

Plus, 11 of the kids had, in Byrds words, some kind of gang affiliation. Byrd did not specify how many juveniles were arrested in connection with the operation, but, according to numbers her office provided, it appears that up to seven warrants were issued for underage offenders.