5.5 million children worldwide are victims of the illegal human trafficking. Operation Underground Railroad wants to put an end to it.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Here in the United States, there are close to 300,000 children
00:04currently being forced into the commercial sex trade.
00:06That number continues to grow.
00:14My name is Tim Ballard.
00:15I'm the CEO of Operation Underground Railroad.
00:18We provide the technology, we provide the training,
00:20and in some cases outside the United States,
00:22we'll provide the undercover operators
00:24to go in and infiltrate these organizations
00:28that sell children for profit.
00:44OUR exists to combat human trafficking.
00:48That's the selling of people, of children who are sold for sex,
00:52who are sold for labor and organ harvesting.
00:55It's the fastest growing criminal enterprise on the planet,
00:58human trafficking.
01:09In 2013, I learned about a little boy in Haiti who was kidnapped.
01:13And I learned about his father who was looking for him
01:16without the assistance of law enforcement
01:18because his country didn't have the resources
01:20to combat this kind of crime.
01:21I met him as a government agent and I promised him
01:25that I would never stop until I found his son,
01:28only to find out a few weeks later
01:29that I could not make it a U.S. case.
01:31And so the only way for me to fulfill the promise
01:33I had made to this suffering father
01:35would be to quit my job
01:37and go in and help him as a private organization.
01:48The key really to combat it is online.
01:50A lot of what happens here in the U.S. is online in the dark net.
01:54Law enforcement is more sophisticated here
01:56and the traffickers know that.
01:57So they have to keep the kids kind of hidden.
01:59They're not selling them on the beaches
02:01or on the street corners like they do in developing countries.
02:14One of our early operations we did was in Colombia.
02:18There was all these children who were being sold for sex
02:20and we were able to liberate them
02:22and arrest all their traffickers.
02:24It was the largest rescue operation
02:26that we know of ever documented.
02:28Over 120 kids were rescued.
02:29Now these kids are now becoming adults.
02:32And one of the kids who's now,
02:34he's now a 17, 18-year-old boy
02:36and he wants to go to college.
02:37He has these dreams.
02:38And we were able to go and provide him a scholarship
02:43for his schooling.
02:44When you know the trajectory of their lives,
02:47where they were heading five years ago,
02:49into the abyss,
02:51and now to see that our intervention
02:54and the rehabilitation that our partners provided,
02:58that's the thing that makes it all worth it
02:59when you see that there is hope.