GOD'S CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR SALE - End Human Trafficking

GOD'S CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR SALE - End Human Trafficking
Compiled By: The BLUE Magazine Editorial Staff with Tom Homan

After a 5-year delay, Angel Studios was able to get it in 2,600 theaters and beat out Disney’s “Indiana Jones,” released in around 4,600 theaters, on July 4th: “Indiana Jones” budget $294.7 million, “Sound of Freedom” budget $15 million yet, “Indiana Jones” July 4 collection was $11.5 million while “Sound of Freedom” July 4 gross collection was $14 million and continues growing from there!

Hollywood and their allies are largely aghast that this largely grassroots crowd-funded film is such a raving success. In their attempts to politicize the movie and discredit its accuracy, The Guardian featured the headline “'Sound of Freedom': the QAnon-adjacent thriller seducing America."

The Washington Post claimed that starring actor Jim Caviezel "has openly embraced" QAnon ideas, but conceded that the film "doesn’t depict anything close to QAnon conspiracy fantasies."

At Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman said that Sound of Freedom is “a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.”

By and large, audiences nationwide have embraced the movie exposing the horrors of modern-day slavery and child and human trafficking realizing that, in actuality, this is not a political matter but one of human rights and decency.

"At least they broke their silence. It means they can't ignore this issue; they cannot ignore it," Caviezel said, as reported by Breitbart. “They’re scared. Quaking in their boots. And it’s because the public is listening to their hearts, which is what this film tells you to do."

Sound of Freedom is an action-thriller written and directed by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gómez Monteverde. Based on the true story of Tim Ballard; a former undercover agent for the Department of Homeland Security. His investigative work revolved around saving children from pedophiles and prostitution rings. Incidentally, Ballard previously advised former President Donald Trump on trafficking issues.

The Sound of Freedom truth-based story, as presented online by Angel Studios as a prequel to the movie, reveals that Tim Ballard, who had initially worked for the CIA for a year prior to joining the then-newly formed Department of Homeland Security, spent several years investigating consumers of child exploitation material without ever being able to rescue the kids being exploited.

“I had spent 12 years as a Special Agent, undercover operator, for the Department of Homeland Security,” Ballard told (source), “working child crimes, child trafficking, and it was kind of an evolution, the first few years it was mostly just end-user, collector, cases of people who are possessing, distributing child exploitation material. And [I was] always wondering, ‘Where are the kids?’ I see these videos, it breaks my heart, I gotta describe them [in the reports]. There’s a scene in the movie that breaks my heart where Jim [Caviezel] is crying as he’s having to describe these horrific sex scenes of children, and when I say children, I mean average age, seven, six, five.”

Tim continued that by 2006 the laws changed for the better. “For the first time, U.S. agents could actually go overseas and prosecute Americans for engaging in sex with children overseas, and prosecute them as if they’d committed the crime on U.S. soil. So that opened up my horizons and I started finding the kids.”

Ballard tells how everything came to a head for him in 2012 when he was working on two different cases, one in Haiti and one in Colombia. “I was told, ‘Come home,’ on both of them. They were both major cases, a significant hit against human traffickers would have taken place. There I am, thinking, they’re asking me to come home once again, and I’m not gonna do it. I’m gonna stay, and that means I have to quit my job.” Bal-lard revealed in an interview with The Daily Signal.

“I called my wife, hop-ing, hoping she’ll say, ‘Get your butt home, are you kidding me? We got six (now nine) kids to feed.’ And I want her to say [that], because I was being a coward. Instead, my wife said in a stern tone of voice, I will not let you jeopardize my salvation by not doing this,” Ballard continued in the Daily Signal interview.

Observed at a showing of the film were audience members displaying both sadness and anger at the travesty they witnessed unfolding on the big screen. In the end, after leaving the packed theater, and a standing ovation, it was time to come home to further reflect on the human exploitation and suffering surrounding us both near and far.

Human trafficking is a worldwide problem. The U.S. Department of State has reported estimates that, at any given time in 2021, approximately 27.6 million people were in forced labor. Of these, “17.3 million are exploited in the private sector, 6.3 million in forced commercial sexual exploitation, and 3.9 million in forced labor imposed by state.”

Human and child trafficking is currently being exacerbated at the United States southern border with mass unlawful migration being largely controlled by human traffickers and their coyotes.

According to Tom Homan, former acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, the trafficking of children is a growing issue. It has exploded under the Biden administration for several reasons. One is the open border. With Border Patrol o overwhelmed with migrants, up to 70% of agents were pulled off the line to process and care for aliens, which caused large gaps that traffickers took advantage of to move children undetected across the border. Secondly, the children and family groups coming across the border go through less vetting than under Trump. The Biden administration is concentrating on processing quickly and releasing quickly. They care more about the optics. If there is no overcrowding, then they can claim no crisis. We don’t know how many of the family units are actual families. But worse is the fact that over 350,000 children have crossed the U.S. border since Biden has been in office and because of the lack of appropriate vetting, the government cannot find nearly 100,000. Many of these children are victims of trafficking and will never be found.

If you haven't seen the movie, what are you waiting for? Rated PG-13 for all - with youngster parental supervision. It will open your eyes to the compelling horror of child sex trafficking and slavery. For where there is knowledge by learning from the experts and the storytellers, there is hope.