Today’s entry: You mentioned today that President Biden did away with a program that was very effectual against sex trafficking. Can't find the info or stats you mentioned. Can you pass it on or steer me to where I can find the information?
Bottom Line: Sadly, but gladly. Human trafficking is a critically topic which never seemly receives the attention it deserves. Based on data from the Human Trafficking Hotline, we had over 11,500 known cases of human trafficking in the United States last year. Be mindful these are just the known cases. In Florida, there were 896 victims lost daily to trafficking. It’s stunning and yet it seldom gets reported. Moreover, now the biggest federal resource we had to combat it was taken away. Last week, President Biden took executive action to end one of the most effectual initiatives to combat human sex trafficking in the United States, and more specifically within Florida.
Florida AG Ashley Moody joined 16 other AG’s calling on President Biden to resume ICE operations targeting sex offenders. Dubbed Operation Talon, the ICE initiative to crack down on human trafficking was ended by executive action. Operation Talon is credited with the arrest of 19,700 illegal aliens guilty of criminal sex offenses. According to the state of Florida, citing statistics from the Polaris Project, 77.5% of victims of human trafficking in the US are illegal aliens.
Here’s a link to the letter sent to President Biden.
Since my initial reporting, another state has formally joined the written request to the Biden administration calling on the reinstatement making 18 states who’ve joined the effort for the reinstatement of Operation Talon. So, what’s the back story with Operation Talon, and why in the world would the Biden administration end it?
ICE’s Operation Talon was an initiative that originated in 2014, during the Obama administration, aimed to curb the proliferation of Human trafficking within the United States. The reason it was deemed important to use ICE to combat trafficking nationally was the realization that 77.5% of all traffickers operating within the United States are themselves illegal immigrants according to the Polaris Project. Attorney General Moody in her request to the Biden administration asked to immediately reinstate Operation Talon, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, from October 2014 to May 2018, ICE arrested 19,752 illegal aliens with criminal convictions for sex-related offenses.
Operation Talon was an Obama-era ICE operation, continued by the Trump administration, which took approximately 15 illegal alien sex offenders, most commonly human traffickers, with an average of one being removed from Florida daily. Why did the Biden administration end it?
A February 3rd directive by the Biden administration was issued to ICE. Under the directive, an illegal immigrant should only be targeted and held for deportation by ICE if they’d been convicted of a felony. That remarkably eliminated all proactive enforcement by ICE nationally, even for victims of human trafficking. Especially chilling is the timing. As we came to learn, Operation Talon had been working for months to carry out a nationwide sting for illegal alien-human sex traffickers. The day of the sting was to be February 10th. The directive appears to have been issued with timing aimed at stopping this nationwide sting. A directive that clearly prioritized illegal immigrant human sex traffickers over the safety of our country, our families, and most specifically our children. But why would this happen? Politics of course.
It’s clear what the priorities are of the Biden administration. There are few issues in our society, if any, which are as abhorrent as human sex trafficking. The Biden administration’s efforts to end the most effective federal initiative to combat it is wrong. And if by chance you don’t believe it is, I’d like to hear the justification.
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