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Today I heard a very moving testimony from a woman missionary named Kimberly Smith on Focus for the Family. Mrs. Smith is a missionary who helps victims of human trafficking. While she was in Sudan she came upon a woman who had been raped by the Muslim janjaweed. She herself was also raped. This is an all too common occurence in Sudan along with human trafficking. Kimberly Smith wrote about her experience in her book "Passport Through Darkness". This mission seems like a very worthy work for churches that might like to adopt this ministry as their own. It doesn't...

This week, in Oakland, Calif., America saw yet another stellar example of the glories of diversity. At a taping of a rap music video in that fair city, eight people, including a one-year-old child, were shot. When a classical music video goes wrong, somebody busts a string. When a rap music video goes wrong, somebody busts a cap. Such observations, however, are now taboo. We're not supposed to suggest that the rap culture is any different from the classical music culture or that one is better than another. As white guy John Kerry put it, "I think there's a lot...

FORT WORTH, Texas (BP) -- The headlines stunned the nation. The accusations of child sexual abuse by former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky have outraged an entire country. We were shocked by the alleged evil of a seemingly respectable man, sickened by the unthinkable abuse of his victims, and incensed by the moral cowardice of those who didn't do enough to stop it. Like Israel in the time of the Judges -- in the dregs of their moral bankruptcy -- we too have asked, "What is this wickedness that has occurred among you?" (Judges 20:12). As reprehensible as the...

Carlos Martinez Gutierrez got caught smuggling three Mexican children into California. Now, his travails have reached the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the court agreed to hear Gutierrez's case and another that raise questions potentially crucial for other children of illegal immigrants. If Gutierrez wins, some immigrants may find it easier to avoid removal and stay in the United States.

Packed together in the tightest of cabins, with little air to breathe and no space at all in which to move, the migrants in this picture show just how far some will go to try to sneak into America. Mexican police found the 513 agonisingly squashed together in two trucks just outside Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas - an eye-watering 18-hour-drive away from the nearest US border. They were caught when the trucks sped through a vehicle scanner at a police checkpoint. After the astonishing X-ray image came up on screens, police gave chase, finding 240 people in one truck and 273...

The man accused of bringing young girls from Mexico to the Atlanta area and forcing them to become prostitutes was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday. Amador Cortes-Meza, 36, was the leader of a sex trafficking ring that brought 10 victims to Georgia, where they were beaten and forced to have sex with about 40 men a night, according to U.S. Attorney Sally Q. Yates. The victims testified that they lived in Norcross homes. One victim testified that when she refused to engage in prostitution, Cortes-Meza threw an iron at her head, then denied her medical care. Other victims...

Border Patrol agents recently arrested 13 illegal immigrants disguised as U.S. Marines and riding in a fake military van, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Tuesday. The illegal immigrants were clad in Marine uniforms when they were apprehended at the Campo Border Patrol Westbound I-8 checkpoint at 11 p.m. on March 14 near Pine Valley, Calif., border officials said. Two U.S. citizens in the van also were arrested.

When it comes to your own personal beliefs about slavery, sex traffic, and the exploitation of children, do you realize that you are involved in those practices? These are the most revolting realities in existence today and you are playing a significant role in keeping them going. It doesn't matter if you call yourself conservative, liberal, progressive, atheist, or evangelical, YOU are playing a role in the fate of nearly 3,000 children in New York City and tens of thousands most other cities across the United States. You are keeping them enslaved. You are insuring the depression, emotional stuntedness, and...

Today’s slaveryA unified effort to end human trafficking By Renée Loth January 29, 2011 IN NEWARK, 20 young women and girls from West Africa were discovered working in hair-braiding salons for 14 hours a day with no pay. Their employer ruled over the victims, some as young as 10, with beatings, sexual assaults, and voodoo curses. Closer to home, five people were indicted in Quincy for operating brothels in rented apartments using immigrant women kept in a state of debt bondage with threats of deportation. In Danvers, a 13-year old runaway girl was offered to a group of men at...

A document released by WikiLeaks described efforts by high-ranking Afghan officials to quash reports of police officers and other Afghans arrested for "purchasing a service from a child." The leaked diplomatic cable quoted former Minister of the Interior Hanif Atmar's concern that publicity about the arrests, which involved the hiring of "dancing boys," would "endanger lives." The author of the diplomatic cable fretted that the case would be "blown out of proportion, an outcome that would not be good for either the U.S. or Afghanistan." The vast gulf between U.S. and Afghan attitudes about homosexuality and pedophilia has generated concern...

A Norcross man was arrested in Alabama last week for attempting to sell a Honduran immigrant to a restaurant there. According to Florence, Ala. police, 49-year-old Ming Zhang transported the unidentified man from Atlanta to the city in northwest Alabama with intent to sell him to a local restaurant as a laborer. When the 25-year-old victim realized what was going on, he called police. “He was approached and offered a job,” Florence police Det. Justin Wright said Tuesday. “He thought he was coming here for legitimate work. When he discovered he was being sold, he objected.” Zhang was arrested and...

Indian police said Friday they had arrested a man suspected of duping 60 women into marrying him before later selling them into prostitution. The 27-year-old suspect was arrested in a tea-growing district of the eastern state of West Bengal where he apparently charmed his victims over a five-year period by posing as a well-paid soldier in the Indian military. "He used to pose as an army man who had come home on holiday and wanted to get married before returning to work," district police chief Debendra Prasad Singh said. "He used to change bases frequently to lure girls from poor...

British women searching for clerical work got a startling response when they visited a government-run job center: applications for “sex line” jobs that would require them to strip naked on Web cams, according to Sky News Online. The women, who went to Jobcentre Plus offices in Birmingham, Warwickshire and Shropshire, were told that they could earn up to 700 pounds (a little more than $1,000) a week in the jobs, which also would require them to carry on sexually explicit chats with customers. The recruiting agency, Faceclick, which features pictures of its clients with titles like “fetish” and “just legal...

Convention delegates overwhelmingly adopt resolutions HOUSTON—Delegates to the 64th Regular Convention of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) endorsed Thursday resolutions to support efforts to end human trafficking/slavery and to uphold the sanctity of life. More than 98 percent of voting delegates supported a resolution that upholds efforts to end human trafficking/slavery. The resolution also directs the LCMS president to write a letter to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime expressing support for that office’s efforts to end trafficking/slave trade. It also directs the LCMS Board for National Mission to provide LCMS pastors and congregations with information about this...

“ The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of people who won’t do anything about it…” ~ Albert Einstein Myriad of topics were debated for my first foray into the blogging world, but ultimately my desire to share information on human trafficking won out. Of course when most people in the United States hear of human trafficking their first response is to relegate it to developing countries and espouse N.I.M.B.Y. (Not In My Back Yard). However, human trafficking knows no boundaries and outside of the drug trade is tied...

A U.S. media storm, generated primarily by cable news outlets Fox and CNN, has descended here, clouding the reputation of this former Dutch colony, many residents and longtime visitors say. Media critics say that what's missing is perspective. Beyond appreciation for the time it takes for an investigation to proceed, particularly under the nuances of Dutch law, statistics confirm Aruba is far safer than almost all other Caribbean islands. "Cable TV is treating this as the crime of the century, or at the least, the obsession of the moment," says Howard Kurtz, media critic for The Washington Post in an...

Increasing Coordination Between Mexican Drug Cartels, Human Smuggling Networks, and U.S.-Based Gangs Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials are witnessing a growing nexus between the Mexican drug cartels, illegal alien smuggling rings, and U.S. based gangs.The human smuggling networks that operate along the Southwest border cannot move their human cargo through drug cartel controlled corridors without paying a fee. The typical Mexican illegal alien now pays approximately $1,200 to $2,500. For aliens from countries other than Mexico this price is often considerably higher, and may even be more alluring for the cartels. Foreign nationals are often charged an exorbitantly...

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told CNSNews.com Thursday that illegal immigration has not contributed to his city’s budget problems, but, on the contrary, that illegal immigration adds to the "economic might" of California. "In California, I think there’s a real sense that these immigrants provide a great deal to the economic might of the state," said Villaraigosa. (Snip).........Daniel Nasaw, BBC News, Washington: The Los Angeles city council has voted to boycott Arizona businesses in one of the strongest moves yet against the state's new immigration law. Council members agreed to bar official travel to Arizona and avoid...

It's not just the Gambino crime family allegedly behind underage prostitution rings. In New York City "many of the underage prostitutes are managed by units of the Bloods gang," and "in other cases, the teenagers are undocumented aliens, smuggled into the country by Mexican and Chinese gangs": "They're forced into prostitution," said Christa Stuart, coordinator of the New York State Anti-Trafficking Unit of the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. "They think they're going to work at a regular job, but then the gang puts them to work," she said. "We had a 16-year-old Chinese girl smuggled into New York...

Note: The following text is a quote: Heads of Canadian alien smuggling organization sentenced BURLINGTON, Vt. - On May 3, Jose Manuel Galdamez-Serrano, 56, Norvin Gonzalez-Morales, 29, Ruben Damas-Hernandez, 31, and Emmanuel Antonio Galdamez, 27, of Montreal, Quebec, were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Burlington following their guilty pleas to alien smuggling offenses. The defendants were extradited to the United States from Canada to face the charges contained in the indictment. Chief U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III sentenced Jose Manual Galdamez-Serrano to 60 months imprisonment and three years of probation following his guilty plea to one count...

South of the border, down Mexico way, a new and savage revolution rages just beyond our inspection lanes. After less than five years of fighting, estimates of the dead have reached 22,000. The rate of killing accelerates each month. And Washington covers its eyes like a kid at a scary movie. Well, the Mexican narco-insurgency, in which well-armed guerrilla forces confront the authority and presence of the state, is our No. 1 security challenge. The chaos in northern Mexico has far deeper implications for our country than Islamist terror or even an Iranian nuclear capability (as grim as those threats...

Obama amputates our nuclear arms By: Charles Krauthammer ...snippet...Under President Obama’s new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” explained Gates, then “the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.” Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker...

Fertility doctors offering a human egg as first prize in a raffle were last night accused of commercialising the miracle of life. One woman will win the chance to select their ideal donor egg based on its mother's profession, ethnic background, hair colour, qualifications and upbringing. As part of the free IVF cycle and egg prize - worth an estimated £13,000 - the winner of a raffle in London will also be able to view childhood pictures of potential donors before choosing one. The treatment will take place in America to get around British fertility laws. Critics have condemned the...

Breaking News: 8 American Missionaries Walk Free From Haitian Jail [This is the ticker on www.FoxNews.com]

Press Conference Los Angeles - Laura DeCrecenzo says she took her first Scientology course when she was six years old. She says she got married at sixteen, pregnant by seventeen, and was forced by the church to have an abortion. "I never agreed to have an abortion. Did I concede? Yes, I did. ... "

COLUMBUS, Ohio - About 1,000 American-born children are forced into the sex trade in Ohio every year and about 800 immigrants are sexually exploited and pushed into sweatshop-type jobs, a new report on human trafficking in the state said Wednesday. Ohio's weak laws on human trafficking, its growing demand for cheap labor and its proximity to the Canadian border are key contributors to the illegal activity, according to a report by the Trafficking in Persons Study Commission. "Ohio is not only a destination place for foreign-born trafficking victims, but it's also a recruitment place," said Celia Williamson, an associate professor...

The terrible earthquake that destroyed Haiti has also unmasked the “international aid community” especially the United Nations, as the frauds they actually are. Last month the media largely ignored a Pan American Development Foundation report that “at least 225,000 children in Haiti have been sold into slavery as unpaid household servants.” This sobering announcement came as no surprise to the phonies in the United Nations. They know what the conditions are in Haiti, but “after all it’s just Haiti – and we can always blame the United States” seems to be the way these people think. Now it’s worse The...

Ann Arbor, MI – “80% of the victims of human trafficking are females, and 50% are children,” said Josephine Nicholas, who, together with three of her siblings, is a successful local Arab-American entrepreneur, founding several companies; as well as the charity event group called Party with a Purpose (PWAP). “My siblings and I decided to turn our family’s Annual After New Year’s party into a fundraising event for Free to be Kids, an organization that has positively changed the lives of thousands of children sold into human trafficking,

Note: The following text is a quote: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEThursday, December 17, 2009 Guyanese National Charged with Smuggling Indian Nationals to the United States A Guyanese national has been indicted on charges of conspiracy and alien smuggling in connection with her role in the smuggling or attempted smuggling of four Indian nationals to the United States. Annita Devi Gerald, aka Annita Rampersad, 52, was charged in a nine-count indictment returned yesterday by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of Texas. Gerald was arrested by ICE special agents in Houston on Nov. 17, 2009, and has been held without...

In what is being seen as a shocking incident, a UK police surveillance photo has revealed one Albania national handing 3,000 pounds in cash to sell a woman as a sex slave to two others in London's Oxford Street.

Authorities Find Body of Missing 5-Year-Old North Carolina Girl Monday, November 16, 2009 SANFORD, N.C. — A missing 5-year-old whose mother was accused of offering her for sex was found dead off a heavily wooded road in a rural area Monday, ending a weeklong search, police said. Searchers found Shaniya Davis' body southeast of Sanford, in central North Carolina, Fayetteville Police spokeswoman Theresa Chance told The Associated Press. Police did not say how she died. "We were hoping that someone could carry her home," said Syd Severe, 42, a volunteer who came from Raleigh to help with the search. "It's...

MEXICO CITY -- When the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez penned his most recent novel, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," he was being provocative. The book begins with this line: "The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." But there is art and there is life. And so just as an international cast and crew were about to begin filming a movie adaptation of the 2004 novella, the plug was pulled as the filmmakers and García Márquez were denounced as aiding and abetting perverts....

EL CENTRO, Calif. (AP) - Esteban Contreras had a bad feeling when his daughter and her husband said they were going to sneak across the border with their children. He remembers telling his son-in-law: "You're going to put your children's lives in danger. You're going to put your wife's life in danger, your own life." "He replied that he found a good smuggler, that everything would be all right, nothing would happen," Contreras said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press.

Hundreds of minors flown out to Gulf to dance in bars, provide sex, as Ramzan month of abstinence ends For three days now, 2,000 girls, almost all minors, have left for the Middle East, particularly Dubai, to feed the needs of a population starved of entertainment and sex post the rigours of Ramzan. The girls have been told they are being taken to dance in bars, but it is implicit that they will double up as prostitutes for well-paying clients. Another 1,000 will leave by tomorrow. Sources say there has been an approximate 20 per cent rise in the trafficking...

The Powerfully Stunning, Shocking, yet Redemptive Human Trafficking Conference San Diego, Ca. September 29th, 2009 Tony Nassif, founder and President of the Cedars Cultural and Education Foundation hosted the recent 7th Annual Preventing Abuse Conference in Irvine California. We are deeply in debt to him for his vision and desire to expose, educate and activate a truly godly response to one of the worst crimes against humanity. It is estimated that there are currently over 27 million who are trapped in the bondage of modern day slavery. An estimated 800,000 annually are trafficked across borders, who are mostly women and...

The journalists at the center of an embarrassing scandal for the grass-roots organization ACORN also paid a visit to the ACORN office in San Diego County. Grass-roots organizing has gotten a black eye on the national stage after undercover videos involving ACORN, a controversial group with a local office, were released that were shot during a series of visits from a hidden-camera crew. At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, a video was broadcast on Fox's "Hannity" that purported to show a San Diego ACORN staffer discussing human trafficking with two people who were undercover. Earlier in the day, local ACORN officials,...

U.S. charges three men with molesting children in Cambodia They are the first to be charged under an international law-enforcement operation that targets U.S. citizens who travel to Cambodia for illicit sex. They could face 30 years in jail for each victim. Raja Abdulrahim September 1, 2009 Three American men who are suspected of traveling to Cambodia to molest children have been charged in federal court as part of a new initiative aimed at cracking down on the child sex tourism business there, authorities said Monday. Ronald Gerard Boyajian, 49, of Menlo Park, Calif.; Erik Leonardus Peeters, 41, of Norwalk;...

Now that Al Gore’s two jailed employees have been retrieved by Bill Clinton from North Korea, there’s talk of a seven-figure book deal for their story, with the U.K’s Daily Mail speculating about a movie deal to follow. It would be interesting to hear in full the tale of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. But from the little we have heard so far, it seems at least one of them – Laura Ling — did deliberately cross into North Korea. This was folly of enormous magnitude. That act has already cost Americans, by way of winning for Kim Jong Il...

This just in from Holocaust survivor and world famous author Jack Engelhard ***************************************** TRADE IN GRANDMA AND OTHER CLUNKERS by Jack Engelhard Hello, I’m from the government and I’m here to help. Our “cash for clunkers” has proven to be so successful that we’ve decided to extend the program for cars – and for people. Of course there is no place to trade in your elderly, people, in other words, that have too much mileage on them. You cannot simply dump and deposit seniors in some lot, get cash for them, and then go home. So as part of our...

(San Antonio)-Sean Michael Block broke down crying, but it didn't help. Sean Block, the northside bartender who was convicted of trying to sell his girlfriend's five year old daughter for sex, today was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison, 1200 WOAI news reports. "It's thirty years that children will be safe from Sean Block," Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Thompson Braun said following the sentence. "There is no doubt that he is a sexual predator, and we can stop him from harming children for thirty years." Block, 40, tearfully told U.S. District Judge Henry Hudspeth that his problems stem from...

Egads! I'm with Hillary on this one.I've been laughing at both HRC and BO all along. While they have pretended to have made all nice, you just know that there is a bitterness pervading their working relationship. I've laughed at Hillary, knowing that she envisioned something bordering on a "co-presidency" -- at least on foreign matters. Does she honestly think that BO is going to let her run the show outside our borders?And I've laughed at BO, knowing that he thought that since he's the President, she'll have to do as he says. Does he honestly think that he -- or...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the State Department will pass judgment on the United States in the same way it judges foreign countries when the department issues its next annual report on victims of global human trafficking. Each year the State Department issues a “Trafficking in Persons” report that assesses the performance of foreign countries in combating human trafficking. The report, which is mandated by the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, ranks foreign nations in four “tiers,” depending on how well they combat trafficking in persons. Nations judged to be in the worst tier are...

The Washington Examiner’s Freeman Klopott is reporting that dozens of wealthy Beltway families have employed illegal immigrants as domestic employees in what Federal prosecutors have said amounts to slave labor. Sentencing was scheduled to be held for naturalized citizen and Indonesian native Soripada Lubis for harboring up to 24 Indonesian women, and profiting from their labor. Lubis’ wife, Siti Chadidjah Siregar, an Indonesian citizen, has also entered a guilty plea to making false statements, and faces up to 5 years in prison. This is interesting: Klopot says, “The list of Lubis’ 50 clients divulged in court filings by federal prosecutors...

Pakistan's top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say. A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 - huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year. "[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars," a U.S....

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The global recession is pushing workers to become more vulnerable to human trafficking, and employers to seek cheaper and/or forced labor. Trafficking, which affects 12.3 million people worldwide, includes forms of involuntary labor that don't involve the physical transport of victims such as the illegal trade of human organs. "The last year was marked also by the onset of a global financial crisis, which has raised the specter of increased human trafficking around the world," the State Department said in its annual Trafficking in Persons Report. "As a result of the crisis, two concurrent trends-a shrinking...

OMAHA, Neb. — Nebraska officials have taken custody of an 18-month-old after the child's mother tried sell the boy online at Craigslist. Sarpy County Attorney Lee Polikov says charges have not yet been filed against the mother. But state officials took the child into foster care late Friday to make sure the boy's safe.

Tina Frundt was 13 when it began. The man smiled. He said nice things to her. He pretended to help her. "He was a pimp," Frundt, now 35, said Friday night. "I didn't know what a pimp was. He didn't walk up and say, 'Hi. I'm a pimp.'" So began a decade of hell for the Chicago native. She was raped, beaten, forced into the sex industry, sold and traded like a used car to an out-of-state outfit so she couldn't run back home. This happens every day. Here, in Las Vegas. So went the message at a rally and...

Some of those in conservative circles predicted chirping crickets from the liberals regarding the incarceration of Laura Ling and Euna Lee by the North Korean government. They made snide remarks that the libs cared more about foreign terrorists being pampered by the U.S. than two Americans being sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for unspecified crimes.Thankfully, this is not true, and it seems that there is bipartisan support for the immediate release of these two women. But the question will be, how will the current administration handle the situation? As Gotham Chopra wrote on the Huffington Post:"Considering the unprecedented stakes and...

Note: The following text is a quote: Eight Uzbekistan Nationals Among 12 Charged with Racketeering, Human Trafficking & Immigration Violations in Scheme to Employ Illegal Aliens in 14 States Twelve defendants, including eight Uzbekistan nationals, have been charged in a 45-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Kansas City, Mo., on May 6, 2009, on RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges related to labor racketeering, forced labor trafficking and immigration and other violations in 14 states. Abrorkhodja Askarkhodjaev, 30, Nodir Yunusov, 22, Rustamjon Shukurov, 21, citizens of Uzbekistan residing in Mission, Kan.; Ilkham Fazilov, 44, Nodirbek...

CHILD-TRAFFICKING gangs were moving pregnant women from country to country, then waiting for them to give birth before selling their babies, Australia's chief federal magistrate said yesterday. John Pascoe said the infants were being sold mainly for illegal adoption but also for sexual exploitation, slavery and begging. He said demand for babies who only knew their adoptive parents was high. "More importantly, the children have no official identity or proven nationality and, therefore, an identity can be easily forged to suit the purpose for which they are intended," Mr Pascoe said in Singapore, addressing a conference on the trafficking in...