I'm a former Child Migrant & TIM BALLARD doesn't SPEAK FOR US
In over 10 years, Tim Ballard has claimed to save thousands of children.
Numbers from Unchainedatlast
From Trump’s statements about his plan to persecute children at the border. Afterall, they’ll probably all become MS-13 murderers.
Data is from the Bureau of Justice
From immigrantjustice, full data available for download on their site
When I was 5-6 years old I made the journey to the US from Trujillo, Honduras. A smuggling organization that my parents had paid 10k was hired to bring me to Long Island, New York to be reunited with them. Many children don’t make it like I did. Many children die in the rough terrain, or along the journey and go missing. Many children are jailed like I was by border patrol who treat us like criminals. Pictured to the left side are Austin Crackers, which was all Border Patrol was allowed to feed us with after traveling through harsh terrain, with barely any food or water. Migrants, including children die from this treatment. And is exactly what the government wants to happen.
My parents wanted me to grow up in a safe suburban home, have access to quality education, meals, and a good life. The organization works like any other business, it hires people to temporarily house children, teens, and adults making their journey north. I was moved from house to house, some of them had families who were using a room to make money. They would cook me homemade meals, and treat me like family. At some point I was put into a group of other people who paid money to be smuggled over and we had a guide who walked us through the hardest part. These guides don’t usually know the higher ups in the organizations, they are higher by managers for the safety of the organization. I’m telling you this because there’s a man named Timothy Ballard who claims to speak “for the children”, children like me who were child migrants.
I crossed the Mexican and US border by going through the Sonora desert, and was caught by border patrol in Arizona. Tim was right that we didn’t go through a legal port of entry, there was no wall there, there was something much more deadly - desert, heat, lack of water or food, rough terrain. There are no estimates of how many children die on this journey, the government has
made this journey deadly intentionally. An unknown number of migrants go missing, or die from dehydration, or environmental reasons near the border. Some migrants are able to cross the border and end up dying in front of law enforcement. Everyone knows that government is willing trying to kill migrants, and cover up their deaths. The US government wants to send a message, that coming to the US is a life and death mission, and because Honduras has one of the deadliest records in the world, many people take the risk anyway. My parents were in the US making money and were dreaming of coming back to Honduras to provide a nice life for me from their savings. But one day a bunch of men came by the home I was staying in with my grandparents and murdered my grandmother in front of me. When word got back to my parents they decided to save to bring me over, no matter what. They could either let me stay in Honduras and hope that I wasn’t murdered, or bring me over and hope that maybe we could be reunited in a much wealthier and safer nation. I don’t think a single American would make a different decision if they didn’t have a chance of being allowed in legally.
Tim Ballard is a Mormon who has an extreme case of White Savior Complex. He believes that Christians are a persecuted minority in the world, and that the sex industry is equivalent to the slavery of children. Law enforcement, the US government, churches, and other organizations have been working together to crack down on immigration, drugs, and the sex industry. They have changed the language to create a false idea of what’s actually happening. Instead of calling what they’re targeting “prostitution” or “sex industry”, they use “sex trafficking” or “sexually exploited children” instead. Instead of calling us “asylum seekers” or “migrants”, they call us “illegal immigrants”, they call my parents “traffickers”, and they call me “a victim” or “potential sex slave”. We are both helpless, and criminals. We have no agency, we have no voice.
I want to be clear that Tim Ballard may have done some amazing things, but he is upholding a very toxic worldview and a very deadly system. Individual cases of good, and saving individual people, cannot overcome or overshadow the systemic oppression of minorities, migrants, and sex workers. What good is it to deny ALL MIGRANT FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS UNDER THE LAW but to turn around and say, you’ve saved thousands of kids over the course of over a decade of work? What about the hundreds of thousands of people that are imprisoned for prostitution charges every year? What about the several thousands of children that go to prison for prostitution charges or other charges every year? What about the legalized marriage of children ever year through immigration and US domestic laws? What about the legalized murder of migrants through prevention through deterrence policy every year?
I also want to be clear that when anti-sex work people say that they’re “saving” people from “sex trafficking”, they really mean they are trying to convert them into Christianity, or they’re going to send police. If the police are called on you, they will either put in jail, deport you, or (best case scenario) you’ll end up in an orphanage or in HHS custody. No matter what, you’ll have intimidating law enforcement screaming, with guns, and bulletproof vests arresting you (even if you are 100% a victim. This is also the reason that I have seen people suffer abuse and refuse to call police because they are sex workers, or undocumented. When your ability to work and live is criminalized, even if you are exploited and are a victim it is VERY UNLIKELY, that law enforcement will help you. I have met sex workers with stories of police beating them and raping them, or forcing back with abusive parents, homes, and situations. I have met teenagers who were working in the sex industry fleeing abusive households - THEY WOULD NEVER WANT THE POLICE INVOLVED. They didn’t want to end up in an orphanage or in prison or dead. Like Tim Ballard, I believe we need to speak the truth about these issues.
I’ve been avoiding getting to the part about his organization and op-ed because everything I read of his is disturbing to me.
Like most sex trafficking organizations, Tim Ballard named his organization Operation Underground Railroad after the abolitionist movement of African Americans. Considering that I had to hide from Mexican police while staying in underground locations (police didn’t seem to care about me even when they saw me), and I was put behind bars from US border patrol, this is completely out of touch with immigrant’s current reality. Worst of all it’s disrespectful of African American’s fight against chattel slavery, and the continued fight for voting rights and prison slavery.
His website is full of photos of very young children, which DHS, ICE, and other sex trafficking organizations also do. It takes away from the reality that their operations very rarely come across children, and when they do find underage people in the industry they’re usually in their late teens. O.UR. says that in the past 4 years of their several million dollar funded organization, they’ve rescued 1, 765 victims. These numbers seem to be consistent, even the government doesn’t seem to manage to take up more than around 2, 000 cases of human trafficking every year. My guess is that they’ve criminalized sex, drugs, and immigrants to such a high degree, that victims don’t want to come forward because this system usually ends up criminalizing them as well.
I read about one of his “rescue missions” and everything about it left me uneasy. In this story Tim Ballard claims to have “rescued 24 victims”, but I find that narrative doubtful.
Twenty-four young women were rescued in this operation in Latin America. Only one was a minor. But that one minor is key in the potential punishment of the five traffickers. Because of that 16-year-old girl, they are now facing 15-30 years in prison. That's a good day's work.
The way these stories are written you can tell they don’t make any distinction between consenting adults, and non-consensual, between sex work and sex trafficking. The part that really made me cringe was the quote below.
Negotiations never seem to go smoothly. When there is a lot of money involved and the stakes are high, emotions run high too. "They were trying to get the maximum price from us for the girls," said the team leader. "They believed we were stupid tourists. They were trying to get $1000 U.S. per girl. That is the highest price we've been charged. Normally it's between $200 to $300. One thousand dollars is the price of a virgin. And they lied to us saying many were under age."
They were negotiating over pricing. It’s considered disrespectful to negotiate a sex worker’s pricing. Believe it or not, there are sex worker’s that charge $1000/hr or more. And I felt disgusted that they said “normally it’s between $200 to $300/hr.” This tells me that they only target on the low end, in order words, they target poor people. Like most crimes of drugs, sex, or immigration it’s usually the poor people who suffer with fines, and imprisonment. The wealthier classes are free to sin and break laws without much worry. They refused to pay $1000 for a girl because according to these undercover agents, “one thousand is the price of a virgin”……*WTF* Why would they say “many were underaged” unless they weren’t trying to give the impression that they were sick fucks trying to molest children? The fact the person negotiating price didn’t tell them they have one underaged girl, and instead told them that they have “many”, gives a hint that the person probably didn’t know, and was probably trying to make a sale.
"They were sad, crying, and scared when the police came in," said the ops leader, "but the social workers quickly helped them to feel safe." The 16-year-old was taken to a shelter where O.U.R. will be able to follow up with her care and get her the help that she needs. She has since been returned to her family, but O.U.R. will continue to monitor her progress. So far, none of the adult women have chosen to take advantage of the shelter but that could change.
One of things I hate about these organizations is the very real lack of information, and the fact that the people running them have a anti-sex work mentality. This creates a situation where they almost never tell you what happens after arrests, or any details of the situation besides their own narrative. We aren’t told if the 16 year old runaway from home and entered the industry knowingly, or whether she was kidnapped or tricked into it. We don’t know if her household was abusive. What we do know is that none of the other women they “rescued” wanted their help when they offered. Offering someone shelter is a big deal, and the fact that they refused is pretty telling.
Tim Ballard has recently come out on the News and in the White House demanding that a border wall be built…. to protect child migrants. I know for a fact that this will increase border militarization and will cause more people to die, be detained, and civil rights overrides. Two children died in border patrol custody recently. Jakelin Caal Maquin died on December 8, 2018, she was 7 years old. Felipe Gomez Alonzo died on December 24, 2018, he was 8 years old. This journey is already deadly for children, and the reasoning that Tim Ballard gives for making it more deadly is because it’ll make it harder for traffickers, and maybe they’ll think twice about trying to sell children or something. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic. These stories hit me personally because I made this journey myself at the age of 6 years old, I could have died but I survived. I suffer trauma from my experiences, and many of the other undocumented immigrants who had to cross the border like I did. We grew up being hated by our communities, and the media. We grew up apart from our families, and as second class citizens from our childhood into adulthood. Tim Ballard has never experienced this, and his 9 children never will either. Watching the news has been a flood of emotions for me listening to constant cries, and death stories. One of the worst ones I read was about a border agent who was a serial killer. He killed four women, Melissa Ramirez, Guiselda Alicia Cantu, Claudine Luera and Humberto "Janelle" Ortiz. He was going to kill a fifth woman but she managed to escape and tell authorities. In January 2019, he plead not guilty:
Prosecutors say that Ortiz thought it was his duty to clean up the streets of Laredo, a border town in Southwest Texas. So he began picking up alleged sex workers, driving them to remote areas, and then shooting them in the head, prosecutors say.
"He deemed them to be the scum of the earth, and he wanted to move forward and clean the streets of these types of people,"
Because sex work is criminalized, our society has a huge stigma against sex workers. People who seek to harm others tend to target the most marginalized and hated in our society. This is important because Tim Ballad has not only said that a wall would save child migrants like myself, but that it would prevent sex trafficking. Donald Trump has spent the last few weeks going on about sex trafficking, women being duct tapped into fast moving vehicles to justify his wall and harsh immigration policy. Tim Ballad came to his defense, angrily scolding people for laughing when it was discovered that Trump’s ideas came from a movie.
Tim Ballard’s MAIN ARGUMENT is that the US is the main consuming nation of child pornography and child sex. He talks about American citizens being the number one producers of child porn, and consumers of it. He talks about American citizens being the number one exploiters of child sex trafficking victims, and even being the traffickers in many cases.
Americans are the main consumers of all vice (drugs, sex, and migrant’s labor) because they have the most wealth in the world. So why doesn’t he recommend rights for migrants themselves? Or perhaps a crackdown on Americans abusing migrants? Or better yet, wealth redistribution, and open borders? Migrants are often treated like second class citizens, and have adversarial relationship with law enforcement because our very existence is criminalized. It’s infuriating to me that children have to be detained, and denied entry because some Americans are child molesters. His reasoning sounds like victim blaming in the most extreme degree. It leads me to wonder if building another barrier for children, families, and people to survive through is to “protect the children”, why does he allow his children to live in the US? He knows the US is the hotbed of child porn and sex, and California is the capital of porn, so why does he raise his 9 children here? If his reasoning is that the best way to protect child migrants is to deny them entry, and deport them, shouldn’t he want that for all American children as well? Wouldn’t it be easier for child molesters to abuse the children around them, rather than having them shipped over and risking that they die on an already deadly journey?
Americans need to deal with their drug addiction, and mental health issues (pedophilia). They have too much wealth and power that it ends up having a ripple effect on the world. And all too often others are expected to pay the price. The Trump administration has lost track of thousands of children because of their “zero tolerance/child separation policy”, that should be their focus right now. Building a wall will lead to more deaths, more separation, more trauma, and misery.