By TIM BALLARD FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
Tim Ballard is a former DHS special agent, founder of Operation Underground Railroad, and now Senior Advisor at The SPEAR Fund. His story inspired the movie Sound of Freedom.
I didn’t choose to spend my life in hell chasing child sex traffickers, but hell is where you find them.
In 2014, I stood outside an unassuming concrete compound in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
There was no way to be prepared for the human misery that I witnessed inside.
I was on a mission to find a kidnapped two-year-old Haitian American boy named Gardy Mardy.
He had been snatched in broad daylight from the parking lot of a church and sold to sex traffickers.
A few back alley turns in the bustling city center had led me to the front door of a dilapidated building with 13-foot cement walls.
Inside, the conditions were heinous. Newborn babies lay in urine and feces. The fetid air reeked of excrement. Kids sustained on meager bowls of mush displayed bloated bellies.
There was an outhouse in the yard and a menacing guard, who carried a whip on his shoulder.
The children called him ‘teacher.’
A woman lined up the kids like animals at a livestock auction.
‘Take your pick,’ she said. ‘They’re $15,000-a-piece.’
You may ask how a Mormon guy from La Canada, California with nine kids ended up chasing some of the world’s most sadistic criminals.
I’ve often ask myself the same thing.
I always wanted to serve my country. After receiving an advanced degree in the study of Terrorism and International Politics, I joined the CIA, but quickly became bored with an analyst’s desk job.
In the shadow of 9/11, I jumped to the newly minted Department of Homeland Security where I trained as a special agent to work the U.S. Mexico border.
For six months, I crawled through tunnels pursing narco-traffickers, arms-smugglers, money-launders, and terrorists, until a higher up at the Department asked me to help establish a new unit to fight child trafficking.
I didn’t even really know what that was.
It seemed too creepy, too dark.
I asked my supervisor why I was selected.
‘You’re a person of faith,’ he said, ‘and that’s almost a requirement to deal with what you’re going to see and experience.’
He was right. My first case was a baptism by fire.
An overstuffed folder landed on my desk. It contained graphic images and videos of prepubescent children being brutally raped and tortured.
The victims were about the same age as my own kids.
I freaked out and threw up in my trashcan at work.
It was a turning point.
Would I turn my back on this world of evil and depravity? No. I couldn’t.