In a few days, the national day of remembrance for the victims of sex trafficking is on July 30th. The blight of sex traffickers around the world is a dark stain on all civilized people. Here in Minnesota due to lax laws regarding sanctuary status for undocumented workers and our proximity to Native American populations as well as areas devoid of frequent activity, we are a hub for the international trafficking of Native American boys and girls, as well as other people who have been lost for a long time.
Law enforcement tries to be on top of these things but the simple fact is that when the people in power are often the people using these traffickers for their own pleasures, it’s hard to get anything done.

Yesterday after 18 months of work from volunteers and retired special operations individuals across the country a well-coordinated assault took place here and elsewhere. This was the classic sting operation as one might see in a movie, a public official who had been arrested for receiving services from an undercover agent posing as a sex-trafficked woman set up a meeting with several traffickers in the southwestern part of the metropolitan area, a group of individuals from Operation Underground Railroad, Operation Child Safe, the FBI, local law enforcement, and a few volunteers surrounded and assaulted a home in the suburbs. the attack netted several low-level individuals that with luck may yet flip on their bosses in exchange for leniency, one memorable soul was a six-foot five-inch male who was nearly as big around as he was tall, who balled like a starving child in the back of the van.

This sting brought back six young women from the Ojibwa and Cheyenne tribes all of whom were under the age of 23, as well as two Caucasian girls who were listed as missing for several weeks. All of them had been given sedatives to make them more malleable, all but one had the trafficking groups Chop tattooed on them much like a rancher might mark cattle.
Me, because of my involvement with some of these groups, I was tasked with providing on-site medical care for the victims in the event they needed emergency care. Normally the local EMS agency would have provided standby but because of the individual who was being used to set this meeting up, operational security required that no one outside of the mission be given any details. I don’t know who the person was and I am not sure I would recognize them if I saw them again. I did get to wear my new MICH helmet, which is about half the weight of the one I had twenty-five years ago.

I also have realized that unless I can dramatically change my physical and mental health I can’t do this type of thing again. Let’s see if my depression will let me.