Operation Underground Railroad Has Another Murky Rescue Story

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Anna Merlan
@annamerlan
Operation Underground Railroad claims they dramatically rescued 10 women, brought them to the US through visas secured by the Trump White House, and that they recently graduated from a university. Here’s what @timmarchman and I could determine was true.

Operation Underground Railroad Has Another Murky Rescue Story
The anti-trafficking group tells a tale about saving 10 women from sexual slavery and bringing them to the U.S. with the help of Trump’s White House and Tony Robbins. The full story is even stranger.
vice.com
6:15 AM · Aug 12, 2021

https://www.vice.com/en/article/akgq8a/anti-trafficking-charity-operation-underground-railroad-has-another-murky-rescue-story


"It was a spiritual connection, truly," Tim Ballard told Glenn Beck, his voice brimming over with emotion. It was a warm May day, and Ballard, a former ICE agent and the founder of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad as well as the CEO of the Beck-founded Nazarene Fund, was inside a recording studio, using Beck's radio show to recount what he presented as yet another triumph for the anti-slavery cause.

Ballard was there to tell the inspiring and cinematic story of a paramilitary operation he said OUR had carried out several months prior, in which it rescued 10 women from captivity in a Caribbean brothel and spirited them to freedom—and, eventually, the United States—with the assistance of motivational speaker Tony Robbins and Donald Trump's White House.

Ballard is a regular guest on Beck's show and a renowned figure in Utah who may have his eye on a Senate run in his adopted home state, according to multiple people VICE World News has spoken with. Appearing on Beck's show allowed him to sidestep the less camera-ready aspects of OUR's current reality: The organization has been under a widening criminal investigation led by a Utah county attorney named Troy Rawlings since last year. ("The investigation is still very active and fruitful," Rawlings said in June; OUR said it "has complied with all laws that regulate nonprofits and intends to cooperate fully with any official inquiry, if asked.&quot Just weeks before, Ballard had also received torrents of bad publicity for appearing at a conference devoted to conspiracy theories and COVID denialism, where the actor Jim Caviezel, who plays Ballard in an upcoming movie, promoted QAnon doctrines about the murder of children. His appearance on Beck's show would promote a friendlier narrative.

As Ballard told it, 10 women in an unnamed Latin American country had been recruited for jobs at a high-end resort in the Caribbean. These were professional and "praying" women, he emphasized, not sex workers, a distinction that seemed important to him. Upon arrival, they were drugged. They woke up naked, and were immediately raped and told that their new lives would be as sex slaves, held "literally in a jail cell behind the brothel." After some of the women had been in captivity for several years, they were discovered, almost accidentally, by undercover OUR operators carrying out a sting operation. That was the spiritual connection Ballard had spoken of with Beck. In the same conversation, he described one of the women slipping a note to the operators reading, "Help us, please" in Spanish.

*snip*

[hadEnuf]

1. You can almost smell the bullshit coming from the link.

And help for these Latino women came from the Trump White House too? Uh huh.




Glenn Beck is always good for a delusional Conservative bedtime story or two.

[JHB]

2. They apparently were Venezualen, so it's not (as) odd that the Trump WH might help

...but it reeks of a story with little bits of truth mixed with a mountain of bullshit to stir the hearts and open the wallets of its target audience. Televangelist have been working that field for decades, and it never goes barren.

[hadEnuf]

3. Agreed.

When it's all said and done the end result is always another fleecing of the willing rubes.

Maybe Beck can peddle some more gold too. Greedy bastards without a lick of shame.