FBI Operation Identifies 84 Victims Of Child Sex Trafficking 

A multi-agency investigation led by the FBI  in cities across the U.S., has located 84 minor victims of child sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation, and 37 missing children, the Department of Justice announced Monday.

Investigators also identified or arrested 85 suspects of child sexual exploitation and 141 victims of human trafficking offenses.

“Human trafficking is among the most heinous crimes the FBI encounters,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray, according to the statement. “Unfortunately, such crimes—against both adults and children—are far more common than most people realize.

“As we did in this operation, the FBI and our partners will continue to find and arrest traffickers, identify and help victims, and raise awareness of the exploitation our most vulnerable populations.”

The interagency operation may mark the return of the bureau’s annual sex trafficking initiative. This is the twelfth iteration of  “Operation Cross Country,” shuttered after 2017. The relaunch follows nearly two decades of interagency collaboration on child sexual exploitation and sex trafficking.

In 2003, the FBI and the Justice Department Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and NCMEC, launched the Innocence Lost National Initiative to tackle domestic child sex trafficking.

In 2008, Innocence Lost kicked off Operation Cross Country, run at least once annually and sometimes multiple times per year with state and city agency partnerships across the country.

The first Operation Cross Country (OCC) targeted child trafficking in 16 cities at risk of child trafficking, including Boston, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dallas and Miami. The last Operation Cross Country was run in October 2017.

In 2019, the FBI revamped the initiative with longer investigative windows and modified investigative approaches. ‘Operation Independence Day’ relied on more than 400 agencies across interstate task forces. Independence Day was conducted over the course of a month, in contrast to the few day timeline of Operation Cross Country.

The 12th Operation Cross Country seems to be a hybrid of the Operation Cross Country programs of the past and 2019’s Operation Independence Day, splitting the difference between the 3-day and month-long programs and working over a period of two weeks.

Critics of the former Operation Cross Country and Operation Independence Day initiatives say that sting operations like these over target and punish willing and consensual — and adult — sex workers, charging them with felonies in the name of protecting children.

Through OCC, the FBI and police partners arrested thousands on prostitution charges unrelated to minors since the program’s launch, eclipsing the 1,374 count of trafficking arrests between 2007 and 2017.

In the last OCC in 2017, police and FBI arrested 996 “adult prostitution subjects” in 2017 alone, FBI Director James Comey stated in his Bureau Oversight Statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The FBI did not volunteer the count of people arrested on prostitution charges in the course of this year’s 391 operations across the country.

“Contrary to the supposed purpose of exposing and prosecuting trafficking of children in the sex trade, Operation Cross Country routinely punish adult women in prostitution to much greater degree than any other group,” Emi Komaya wrote in her 2011 book ‘War on Terror & War on Trafficking.’

In 2015 Katherine Koster, communications director for the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) criticized Operation Cross Country for HuffPost.

“As with many policies and tactics, Operation Cross Country began in 2003 as a response to an imagined victim and an imagined perpetrator,” Koster wrote.  “And even as this imaginary fell apart as new research emerged, Cross Country continued to grow in scale each year while its tactics and reception by the media remained largely the same.”

“The Justice Department is committed to doing everything in our power to combat the insidious crimes of human trafficking that devastate survivors and their families,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a Department of Justice release on the operation.

Audrey Nielsen is a contributing writer to The Crime Report.