Crime
Inside America’s Fastest-Growing Criminal Enterprise: Sex Trafficking

News release from the Free Press
Madeleine Rowley![]() |
Biden’s border policies have led to an explosion in the forced prostitution of migrant boys and girls in the U.S. ‘If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes. It’s that easy.’
Lisa slides a Hellcat pistol into her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder. She jumps out of the driver’s seat of her massive Ford F-250 as we head into a barbecue joint for lunch. Steel brass knuckles glint in the console beside a pencil-shaped, pronged object. She sees me looking at it.
“That’s my stabby-stick,” Lisa says before I even ask. “In case I can’t bring my gun somewhere. These guys are dangerous.”
“These guys” are sex traffickers, and dangerous doesn’t begin to describe them.
Many traffickers are members of Mexican or Salvadorian gangs, part of Cuban rings or the vicious Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. Their modus operandi is luring migrant women and girls across the southern border, promising them good jobs once they get to America, and then forcing them into prostitution once they’re here, ostensibly to pay off the debt they incurred to get into the U.S. Hunting down sex traffickers is not for the faint of heart, and Lisa is not about to take any chances.
An athletic, no-nonsense blonde in her 50s, Lisa runs a small nonprofit foundation called Shepherd’s Watch, dedicated to bringing down sex-trafficking rings. Prior to starting Shepherd’s Watch in 2016, Lisa had been a telecom engineer and an expert at analyzing cell phone data used in court cases. In that job, she says, she saw a “disturbing” amount of child exploitation. “I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”
Lisa, who asked that we not use her real name, calls herself “an informant.” She lacks the authority to arrest a trafficker, and any attempt to rescue the girls herself could well get her killed. Instead, Lisa and a small handful of other Shepherd’s Watch investigators work to locate victims and their pimps and then turn the information over to police departments, sheriff’s offices, and other law enforcement agencies. Because Lisa and her team have gained credibility with law enforcement over the years, the police usually follow up on the information the Shepherd’s Watch informants provide. Sometimes they hit pay dirt, arresting the traffickers and removing the girls to a safe place.
“Law enforcement is understaffed and stretched too thin,” says Lisa. “That’s where we come in.”
At the barbecue joint off Route 75 in Dallas, Lisa pulls out her phone to show me the dozen or so online platforms that traffickers and pimps use to sell girls for sex. The platforms—which include apps like TikTok, OnlyFans, and Facebook—are chockablock with ads of women, usually wearing lingerie, their faces covered to prevent anyone guessing their age. The sheer number of ads is astonishing. “Each week, we track over 12,000 ads for women in Houston, 2,600 in San Antonio, 3,500 in Austin, and 14,000 in Dallas,” says Lisa.
I ask her if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border, leading to 8 million migrants crossing the southern border since 2021. “Yes,” she says. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” Since the border opened, Lisa added, over 90 percent of the ads are for migrant girls.
![]() |
Many traffickers are members of Mexican or Salvadorian gangs, part of Cuban rings or the vicious Venezuelan group Tren de Aragua. (Robert Gauthier via Getty Images)
“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa says. “It’s that easy.”
And she’s right. After lunch, we drive around the seedier areas of the Dallas suburb of Plano. We’re guided by Jack, an intelligence contractor for Shepherd’s Watch who specializes in geospatial analysis. Jack, who also asked to remain anonymous, works from an office in California. Formerly in law enforcement, he tracks phones using the location data in the background of mobile apps, identifies patterns with cell phone numbers, and does tattoo and facial recognition work. Federal agencies often engage him.
Pretending to be a client, Jack texts a woman on a website called Escort13. She is described as a “new Latina in the city.” The woman tells Jack that she’s at Motel 6 off the North Central Expressway in Plano. Like a scene in a spy movie, Jack relays the information from his California office to Lisa in Texas through the truck’s crackling speakers.
In her profile photo, the woman is dressed in a black, long-sleeve, crop top shirt and short black skirt—modest compared to pictures of some of the other girls that Lisa has shown me. Her dark hair hangs straight below her waist, and her phone covers her face, which conceals her age and identity.
Her profile says she’s 24 years old and that her home base is Philadelphia—neither of which is necessarily true. Gang-led trafficking rings tend to move their victims all over the U.S.; it’s one way they try to stay ahead of the law. So it’s no surprise this young woman is now working out of a motel in Texas. According to Lisa, Latin American girls like her go for anywhere from $130 to $160 per half hour.
After Jack makes contact with the woman, he tells Lisa, “She says to take a photo of the motel’s entrance, and then she’ll give me the room number.” Lisa snaps a photo through the windshield and sends it to Jack, who texts it to the woman and gets the room number. It’s on the second floor of the two-story motel. We drive to the far end of the parking lot, where we have a clear view of the balcony.
A Latina girl pokes her head out the door and cautiously looks around. Realizing no one is there, she retreats inside. A few moments later, a shirtless man throws up the shades in the room directly below her and swivels his head to look around the parking lot.
“That’s probably her pimp or a trafficker,” Lisa says. “Time to go.”
We peel out of the lot and drive to a Studio 6 motel two miles down the road, where Jack is communicating with another migrant girl. This motel doesn’t have balconies, and when Jack asks her to come to the lobby, she says no. We have no choice but to drive away.
Still, it’s been a successful afternoon. With Jack’s help, Lisa has found two possibly sex-trafficked women and one likely trafficker. When Lisa picks me up the following day, she’s on the phone with Plano law enforcement recounting what we saw the day before at the Motel 6.
“She looked young to me,” says Lisa.
In a follow-up phone call, Lisa tells me the police went to the motel to check it out, but the girl was gone. They think she was part of a trafficking ring.
“She’ll resurface,” says Lisa. “They always do.”
![]() |
Gangs lure migrant women across the border with the promise of good jobs, and then force them into prostitution once they arrive. (Illustration by The Free Press, image via Getty)
Deep inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resides a tiny agency called the Office on Trafficking in Persons. A large part of its mission is to help survivors of sex and labor trafficking “rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient.” Among other things, it offers food assistance, medical benefits, and cash to migrant minors who have been trafficked but have managed to escape. Once their eligibility to obtain benefits is approved, they receive a document called the child eligibility letter.
Although the number of child eligibility letters the government issues is supposed to be public information, it became available on the trafficking office’s website only after I filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The numbers confirmed what Lisa had told me: Trafficking has increased—a lot—since Biden took office. During the four years of the Trump administration, the government issued an average of 625 letters per year to migrant minors who had managed to break free from their traffickers.
But in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, that number jumped to 1,143. In 2022 it jumped again, to 2,226. Last year, the number stood at 2,148, but that was only through September; the fourth quarter hadn’t yet been counted. To put it another way, forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants more than tripled under President Biden, reaching record highs. And that only counted the handful who had escaped—not the thousands who were still held by the traffickers, the ones Lisa was searching for.
“The sex trafficking of minors, and human trafficking as a whole, is one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises in the U.S.,” said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Mark Dawson after a big bust in Houston last year that saw the arrest of 10 traffickers, all of whom had gang connections.
Sex-trafficking victims often suffer horrific abuse, as I discovered when I spoke to Landon Dickeson, the 36-year-old executive director for Bob’s House of Hope in Denton, Texas, the only shelter for male sex-trafficking victims ages 18 and up in the country. Dickeson says they’ve seen teens from Central and South America who have been so tortured by their traffickers they can barely function.
Dickeson described caring for teens who have brain damage from being so heavily drugged—teens who have had their fingernails pulled out, and lemon juice poured on wounds. When I asked to interview one of their migrant residents, Dickeson said they simply weren’t in any condition to speak to anyone, much less a reporter.
“We think the cartels and gangs use torture as a control method for the males,” said Dickeson. “They’re not going to fight back if they chain their victims to a radiator, beat them up frequently, or drug them.”
The House of Hope residents often come branded or tattooed by the cartels and gangs who trafficked them, and most were cross-victimized—used as drug mules as well as for labor and sex.
Bob Williams, CEO and founder of Bob’s House of Hope, says they receive two to three calls a month to help minor males who have been sex trafficked. “There is not one shelter in the country for 12- to 17-year-olds,” he said. “This is a big problem because they get put in the system and don’t get the help they need.” Williams, who was sexually assaulted as a teen himself, says they’re working on procuring more funding to build a program for minors.
There is no question that the border crisis is the primary reason for the increase in the sex trafficking of migrants. Here’s how it works: When underage migrants cross the border unaccompanied by a family member, they are sent to a temporary holding facility run by one of a number of nonprofit organizations operating at the border. The NGOs are expected to move the migrants out within a couple of weeks because there are so many more coming in right behind them. During the time the migrants are in the holding facility, both the NGOs and the government are supposed to vet the people who will take them when they depart. These people are called sponsors, and the vast preference of everyone in the system is that they be relatives already living in the U.S.
But sometimes an underage migrant doesn’t have a family sponsor, which gives the cartels and gangs their opening. They pretend to be legitimate sponsors, and with the pressure on the NGOs and the government to move the migrants through the system quickly, gang members—who usually have their hooks into the migrant well before they’ve crossed the border—are accepted as sponsors.
How do they get away with this? They fill out applications in illegible handwriting, guessing (often correctly) that no one will look at it closely. They coach the girl or boy to say that their sponsor is a cousin or an uncle. And they take advantage of the fact that the federal agency overseeing migrant relocation, the Office of Refugee Resettlement—or ORR—is notoriously negligent in vetting sponsors.
For instance, the ORR is supposed to send fingerprints of nonfamily sponsors to the FBI to see if they have a criminal record, and to do background checks for child abuse or neglect. But earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general conducted a study of 343 randomly chosen minors to see if their sponsors had been vetted properly. Their findings, issued in February, concluded that 19 percent of the children were released to sponsors before the fingerprint and background checks were completed—meaning that criminals could well have taken migrant children without the government realizing it.
In July, Republican senator Chuck Grassley hosted a roundtable on the trafficking crisis at the border. Tara Rodas, 55, a federal employee who in 2021 worked at an emergency intake shelter in California, testified that while she was there, a 13-year-old girl from El Salvador was released to a sponsor in Ohio who was affiliated with the MS-13 gang.
In an email Rodas sent to a colleague at the time, which was released by Grassley, she wrote that “our team discovered that human traffickers are exploiting the HHS Unaccompanied Children. ‘Bad actors’ are recruiting, harboring, and transporting minors; using force, fraud, and coercion; for the purpose of involuntary servitude, debt bondage, slavery, and potentially commercial sex.”
Deborah White, another whistleblower who worked at the same shelter, testified that migrant children were handed over to improperly vetted sponsors who used fraudulent IDs and different addresses to procure numerous unrelated children. “I had multiple cases that I reported on,” said White, meaning she reported suspicious sponsors to her supervisor. “One in particular where we sent 329 children to one address: two garden apartment [buildings] in Houston, Texas.” The supervisor, White told The Free Press in an interview, took no steps to investigate further, but instead told White that she wasn’t moving migrants out of the facility quickly enough.
Washington’s lack of interest in the sex-trafficking crisis is stunning. Sometimes it seems as though the only person in a position of power who cares about the issue is 91-year-old Senator Grassley. And he has been as passionate about it when Trump was president as he is now, during Biden’s presidency.
“I’ve been trying to protect unaccompanied children that are put in dangerous environments,” he told me in an interview. “These are the most vulnerable people, and somebody’s got to look out for them, and that’s me.”
As far back as 2014, when “just” 57,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border—less than half the current number—Grassley sounded the alarm that the Office of Refugee Resettlement was having trouble accommodating so many migrant children.
The next year, he wrote a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, saying that up to 3,400 unaccompanied children’s sponsors had criminal histories. Two years later, he urged the ORR to take responsibility for unaccompanied children who had ties to the gang. “Your agencies repeatedly pass the buck to each other. As a result, children are allowed to disappear. When these children disappear without any supervision, they are vulnerable to join dangerous gangs like MS-13,” he said.
Grassley reached across the aisle in 2019 and 2021, working with Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden, respectively, regarding allegations of sexual abuse and employee misconduct at ORR-funded shelters. Grassley and Wyden’s investigation found that between 2016 and 2020, ORR received nearly 7,500 reports of sexual misconduct involving an unaccompanied child staying at a shelter. Wyden attributed this to “years of mismanagement and poor oversight” by ORR.
With the election of Joe Biden—and the border crisis that ensued—other Republicans have jumped on the trafficking bandwagon, but Grassley has continued to lead the charge, using his staff to conduct significant investigations. In January, for instance, he sent a detailed letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray, detailing evidence his staff had uncovered of unaccompanied children who were suspected of being in the hands of traffickers.
Democrats have been shamefully silent on the trafficking issue. At the roundtable Grassley held in July, not a single Democrat attended. Neither did Mayorkas. “Democrats didn’t come because they’re just too embarrassed to talk about the shortcomings of this administration on immigration,” Grassley told me. “Especially when you have HHS sending kids to MS-13 gang-related sponsors in Ohio. It’s hard to explain that.”
As for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, its track record remains abysmal. It has yet to do anything to reduce the sex trafficking that is taking place under its nose. On the contrary, it has lately been pushing through rules that will minimize the vetting of sponsors—for instance, making background checks optional instead of mandatory. This, of course, will allow the NGOs to push migrant children through the system even faster. But it will also make it easier for gangs and criminals to “sponsor” migrant girls after they’ve crossed the border. Grassley is trying to stop that from happening, but with the Democrats in control of the Senate, it’s an uphill fight.
That gangs are sex trafficking women and girls who cross the border—and that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is making it so easy for them—is an open secret to everyone who is part of the system. One proof point: An NGO operating at the border, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, started a program in 2022 specifically aimed at helping trafficked kids. Naturally, it is paid for by the Biden administration. Indeed, like all the NGOs at the border, the organization gets well over 95 percent of its revenue from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, in its case $292 million. Of that amount, $60 million goes to caring for unaccompanied children, including trafficked children, according to its 2023 federal filing.
The initiative for trafficked migrants is called the Aspire program. Aspire uses subcontractors to connect migrant children with immigration lawyers, food, clothing, and medical services. It also helps them get child eligibility letters so they’ll qualify for cash, which ranges from about $1,000 to $6,000, depending on the child’s needs and where they live.
Leah Breevoort, a supervisor for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants trafficking services department, told me that most of the children whose cases they manage represent the most extreme cases of trafficking. The Aspire program currently has 767 migrants, all of whom have child eligibility letters. Rather matter-of-factly, she said she had seen cases in which the sponsor was trafficking a child, or when “the child has a debt from their travel journey, and therefore are working to pay off that debt.”
Once the children are released from the temporary shelters, they’re no longer the federal government’s responsibility, so even kids with child eligibility letters wind up having to fend for themselves. “We try to find a safe placement for that minor,” said Breevoort. “Sometimes it’s a homeless runaway shelter or another migrant shelter. But it’s really, really difficult.”
Immigration lawyer Emma Hetherington, the director of the Wilbanks Child Endangerment and Sexual Exploitation (CEASE) Clinic at the University of Georgia School of Law, also confirmed that some of the migrant children she’s worked with were sex trafficked by their sponsors or by another adult living in the same home.
At CEASE, Hetherington has seen an overlap with migrant children who were trafficked for both labor and sex. “This is a very vulnerable population,” she said. “They’re easier to manipulate because their basic needs aren’t being met. These kids did not and cannot consent to being trafficked.”
![]() |
A California Border Patrol agent processes migrants after they crossed into the U.S. from Mexico near Jacumba, California. (Qian Weizhong via Getty Images)
With the federal government mostly looking the other way, it falls to people like Lisa and local law enforcement to bust up sex-trafficking rings. And there have been some success stories.
In March, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department rescued a teen girl and four other women who were being held in a house in the suburbs near a golf course by a sex-trafficking ring run by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
In April, police in Socorro, Texas, near El Paso, raided a house where seven young girls were being sex trafficked. “We’re here to rescue those that otherwise might not have a voice,” said Chief David Burton at the time.
In May, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana busted a sex-trafficking ring run by Tren de Aragua. There were up to 30 victims who were allegedly stashed in homes throughout Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida.
In August, the San Antonio Police Department, aided by Homeland Security, arrested two Venezuelan illegal immigrants for sex trafficking two women. The alleged traffickers forced the women to work up to 20 hours a day providing sexual services, under the threat of violence. The suspected traffickers took 60 percent of the money.
One law enforcement official who has focused on sex trafficking is Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida. His experience is proof that something can be done about trafficking if law enforcement makes it a priority. The Polk County Sheriff’s Department frequently conducts operations in which, like Lisa and Jack, investigators pose online as clients to locate potential victims.
Their largest bust to date, which took place last March, yielded 228 arrests, with 13 potential trafficking victims rescued—10 of whom were migrants.
Although most of those arrested were “johns,” Judd’s office also nabbed several dozen traffickers, most of whom were illegal immigrants from Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Since the bust, trafficking in Polk County has decreased, Judd told me.
“Traffickers think, ‘We’re not going to Polk County. We know what happened there. That sheriff don’t play,’ ” Judd said.
In many of my interviews, people told me that trafficking has become so widespread that I could find it anywhere in the country. I was skeptical about these claims, but Lisa wasn’t.
“I’ll show you,” she says one morning after filling her tank with gas. She pulls up a website on her phone—its tagline is “Where Fantasy Meets Reality”—and clicks on the profile of a foot spa in Dallas. In the description, the masseuse is described as “Asian, Chinese,” and it’s cash only, with a 60-minute massage priced at $60.
We drive into a strip mall and park in front of the foot spa. The business’s windows are tinted, making it impossible to see inside. There’s a hair salon next door, and a mother holds her toddler’s hand as they walk toward an adjacent grocery store. We watch as men enter and exit the spa.
We decide to enter ourselves, and the first thing I see are five security cameras trained on us. The front desk is unmanned, and there’s a small waiting area with a couch to the left. After a few minutes, a woman slowly opens a door that separates the front entryway from the massage area. Her bright pink silk robe hangs open, revealing black lingerie underneath.
“Do you have gift cards?” Lisa asks—pretending she wants to buy one for a male friend.
The woman looks confused and shakes her head, shooting us a furtive glance before closing the door.
Back in the truck, Lisa explains that there are sex-trafficking rings being run out of illicit massage parlors—basically brothels—all over the country.
After I return to my home near Baltimore, Maryland, I go online to see if there are any illicit massage parlors and foot spas near me.
I found one two miles away.
Madeleine Rowley is an investigative reporter. Follow her on X @Maddie_Rowley, and read her piece “Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis.”
Reports like this one require time and resources. To support more of our independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:
Crime
U.S. Missile Strike on Alleged Narco-Boat Tied to Maduro and Ohio Indictment of Chinese Firms Signal Dramatic Escalation in War on Fentanyl

From Maduro’s Venezuela to Chinese precursor companies, the administration widens its whole-of-government crackdown on synthetic drugs.
The United States has dramatically escalated its war on fentanyl traffickers this week, with a missile strike on a suspected Venezuelan narco-vessel and a sweeping indictment naming numerous Chinese nationals, chemical precursor companies, and dealers in Ohio.
The Justice Department on Wednesday unveiled an Ohio grand jury indictment charging four China-based chemical companies, 22 Chinese nationals, and three U.S. defendants in a scheme that allegedly pumped potent cutting agents—including Schedule I nitazenes—into southern Ohio’s fentanyl market. The action landed as the administration pressed forward with its “whole-of-government” offensive on synthetic-drug supply lines and newly terror-designated cartels, including a high-profile military strike just hours earlier on a vessel Washington linked to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
In an interview before this week’s U.S. government strikes on fentanyl networks, Derek Maltz, the recently retired DEA chief, told The Bureau that chemicals like nitazenes are amplifying the existing threat from Chinese-supplied fentanyl, which he and many U.S. experts view as an intentional, war-like attack from Chinese state-linked networks aligned with Latin cartels.
“We’re getting crushed with carfentanil, xylazine, etizolam, isotonitazene—all those different new psychoactive substances which are coming out of China. So it’s just another phase of the attack,” Maltz said. “I believe that the Chinese criminal networks, Chinese Communist Party, have developed an innovative strategy, long-term strategy, to destabilize and destroy American families and communities using synthetic drugs, operating under the radar from this ongoing drug addiction crisis in America.”
Maltz also pointed to Canada’s failure to cooperate with the DEA on investigations into a massive superlab in British Columbia, which some U.S. sources said contributed to President Trump’s decision earlier this year to levy a 35 percent tariff on Canadian goods. In announcing that tariff, a White House statement warned: “Mexican cartels are increasingly operating fentanyl- and nitazene-synthesis labs in Canada.”
On Tuesday, the administration took its most kinetic step yet: a precision strike from international waters in the Caribbean that destroyed a suspected narco-vessel from Venezuela, killing 11 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua. Washington has accused the gang of operating under President Nicolás Maduro, who U.S. officials say is intentionally trafficking cocaine laced with fentanyl into the United States in concert with the Sinaloa cartel.
President Donald Trump announced the strike from the White House—remarkably, in near real time—saying, “We just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat.”
Footage released by the Pentagon showed an explosive strike eerily reminiscent of drone attacks on terrorist vehicles in the Middle East—only this time, the target was described as a narco-terror vessel tied to the Maduro regime. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said more such operations could follow, adding on Fox: “We knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua … trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.”
Caracas has disputed the strike, and analysts are already debating its legal basis under U.S. and international law.
Before the strike, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan told Fox that if cartels threatened U.S. forces, the administration would “take [them] on,” explicitly suggesting military force outside the United States.
On Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the Ohio prosecution as part of a broader push to “dismantle the international pipelines that bring deadly drugs and precursor to our shores,” vowing “swift, complete justice” for actors in China shipping “poison to our citizens.” FBI Director Kash Patel called it a “first-of-its-kind international operation,” saying agents had already seized enough fentanyl powder “to kill 70 million Americans” and pills sufficient “to kill another 270,000.”
Attacking new chemical precursors and lethal narcotics
A superseding indictment in the Southern District of Ohio alleges that, since at least 2022, Tipp City resident Eric Michael Payne bought kilogram shipments of cutting agents from China-based vendors purporting to be pharmacies or chemical companies, then mixed and resold those agents—at times directly with fentanyl—for street distribution in southern Ohio. Two alleged U.S. co-conspirators are named: AuriYon Tresean Rayford, 24, of Tipp City, and Ciandrea Bryne Davis, 39, of Atlanta.
Prosecutors say the Chinese companies openly marketed “protonitazene” and “metonitazene”—Schedule I nitazenes with estimated potencies roughly 100 and 200 times morphine—and pushed veterinary agents such as medetomidine and xylazine as “cut.” Payments flowed via cryptocurrency to wallets controlled by overseas brokers, then through layered accounts to foreign banks. The filing also details sales of tablet presses and other equipment to facilitate fentanyl cutting and pill-making.
Charged companies are Guangzhou Tengyue Chemical Co., Ltd.; Guangzhou Wanjiang Biotechnology Co., Ltd.; Hebei Hongjun New Material Technology Co., Ltd.; and Hebei Feilaimi Technology Co., Ltd. Named individual brokers include Xiaojun Huang and Zhanpeng Huang, who Treasury simultaneously sanctioned under counternarcotics authorities.
Counts include conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 400 grams or more of fentanyl mixture, possession with intent to distribute, maintaining a drug-involved premises, evidence tampering, and international money-laundering conspiracy. Payne and Rayford made initial appearances Wednesday and pleaded not guilty.
Minutes after DOJ’s announcement, the Treasury Department rolled out sanctions on Guangzhou Tengyue and representatives Xiaojun Huang and Zhanpeng Huang, underscoring a synchronized law-enforcement and financial-pressure playbook against China-based suppliers feeding U.S. overdose deaths.
That campaign has widened in 2025: In February, the State Department —implementing Executive Order 14157 — designated eight “international cartels and transnational criminal organizations,” including CJNG, Sinaloa, and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The move unlocked material-support charges and expanded sanctions. In May, DOJ brought the first material-support-to-terrorism case tied to CJNG, alleging grenade supply and smuggling.
Dayton sits at the junction of Interstates 70 and 75—a central distribution hub for the Midwest—suggesting the new indictment is aimed at severing Chinese cutting-agent pipelines that turn kilogram-scale fentanyl into mass-market pills bound for American communities.
Crime
Rep. Luna suggests Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was ‘a lot bigger’ than expected

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)
From LifeSiteNews
‘It is very much (a) possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset working for our adversaries,’ Rep. Paulina Luna said.
Republican U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida said Tuesday that Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation was “a lot bigger” than anyone anticipated.
“There are some very rich and powerful people that need to go to jail,” Luna said in a statement after she and other lawmakers met with Epstein’s victims. “I think everyone’s frustrated as to why that hasn’t happened before.”
Luna then suggested potential government involvement in Epstein’s sex trafficking — previously alleged by U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta — that many observers believe helps explain the lack of transparency and accountability for those involved in Epstein’s criminal activities.
“It is very much so a possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset working for our adversaries but also, the question we have is, ‘How much did our own government know about it?’” Luna continued.
Epstein’s involvement in U.S. intelligence was suggested by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta, when he explained why he agreed to a non-prosecution deal in the lead-up to Epstein’s 2008 conviction of procuring a child for prostitution. Acosta told Trump transition team interviewers that he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” adding that he was told to “leave it alone,” The Daily Beast reported.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released 33,295 pages of Epstein-related documents on Tuesday after issuing a subpoena to the Department of Justice. However, the files reveal minimal new information, according to Politico. They include public court documents, photos, and video footage, including police footage of Epstein’s Palm Beach home, and a clip of a woman recounting her time as one of Epstein’s masseuses.
Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky filed a petition Tuesday “to force a vote on binding legislation to release” the full Epstein files. A White House official subsequently told NBC News that supporting Massie’s effort would be “viewed as a very hostile act to the administration.”
“They’re threatening anyone who helps bring true transparency and justice for the survivors,” Massie remarked on X. “This is a tacit admission the Oversight Committee data release is woefully incomplete.”
The FBI triggered a public outcry earlier this year when it released an incomplete set of Epstein files. Some Epstein flight records had been released in previous litigation, but they remain limited, as does other information regarding Epstein’s associates. Republican U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn filed a subpoena in late 2023 to obtain the complete flight logs, and in January 2025 accused Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of blocking her request.
The Epstein saga has drawn international headlines for years after it became apparent the billionaire sex offender had ties to the Clintons, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, and other high-profile elites.
In her book “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime That Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” investigative journalist Whitney Webb explained how the intelligence community leverages sex trafficking through operatives like Epstein to blackmail politicians, members of law enforcement, businessmen, and other influential figures.
Webb cited as evidence of this Acosta’s statement that he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”
While Epstein himself never stood trial, as he allegedly committed suicide while under “suicide watch” in his jail cell in 2019, many have questioned the suicide and whether the well-connected financier was actually murdered as part of a cover-up.
These theories were only emboldened when investigative reporters at Project Veritas discovered that the major news outlets of ABC and CBS News quashed a purportedly devastating report exposing Epstein.
A full list of the names of people mentioned in the previously released Epstein files, including many who have not been accused of any crimes, can be found here. Previously published Epstein flight logs show that former President Bill Clinton along with Secret Service members, actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Chris Tucker, and British model Naomi Campbell all flew on Epstein’s private plane central to his sex-trafficking case, dubbed the “Lolita Express” by the media.
In one batch of unsealed documents, Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre said he paid her $15,000 in 2011 to have sex with Britain’s Prince Andrew, and that she had sex multiple times with retail mogul Leslie Wexner, who was a financial client of Epstein’s for at least 20 years. Giuffre has since reportedly died by suicide.
-
Artificial Intelligence2 days ago
When A.I. Investments Make (No) Sense
-
Automotive23 hours ago
Canadians rejecting Liberal’s EV mandates because consumers are rational
-
Bruce Dowbiggin9 hours ago
Mic Drop: The Thought Police Are Coming To Take You Away
-
Business1 day ago
Canada Is Sleepwalking Into A Cartel-Driven Security Crisis
-
C2C Journal9 hours ago
Canada’s Health-Care Monopoly is Killing Us
-
Censorship Industrial Complex23 hours ago
Canadian gov’t claims privacy provision in online censorship bill was “accidentally” removed
-
Business2 days ago
Poilievre calls on Carney to immediately scrap the Temporary Foreign Worker Program
-
Business1 day ago
Canada Is Suffocating Its Future One Policy At A Time