I had a previous post on a Jim Caviezel interview that was creepy and you can tell his handler was present. This was all involving his Sound of Freedom movie due out linked to a political push for Trump with a severe overhyping of the movie (controlled opposition is purposed to capture people resisting the globalist elites so they have control and limit their impact). And I keep seeing Tim Ballard being hyped in conservative media circles, so I thought I’d look up his Wikipedia page suspecting he might be a spook. Somehow he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page even though he has a lot of history having testified before congress as well as being part of a White House Public-Private Partnership Advisory Council to End Human Trafficking. Consequently, his O.U.R. does have a Wikipedia page which is very interesting.
Ballard claimed that prior to founding O.U.R. he served 12 years as a U.S. Special Agent for the Department of Homeland Security, on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC) and the U.S. Child Sex Tourism Jump Team. According to The Atlantic, “spokespeople for the CIA and DHS said they could not confirm Ballard’s employment record without his written permission, which he did not provide.”[5]
I’ve included the meat of the page below, but it really does look like a spook operation, and you can’t overlook the corporate connections through history of the organization having given a talk at Google and a supposed link to American Airlines…(O.U.R. doesn’t disclose financials). And with controlled opposition they always fall short of telling the real truth of what is going on, as well as introducing errant conspiracies which can be used to discredit people that accept them. Evaluate it for yourself, but I wouldn’t get too caught up in the movie or its use to garner political support for Donald Trump (Trump’s daughter is a WEF Young Global Leader and remember for all his talk of the D.C.Swamp he filled his administration with Swamp creatures as well as bringing us the DeathVax through Operation Warp Speed, which he refuses to condemn still insisting it saved millions of lives).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Underground_Railroad
Operation Underground Railroad
Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) is a United States-based, anti-sex trafficking nonprofit organization founded by Tim Ballard.[1] The organization has conducted multiple sting operations, some outside the United States, and donated technological and monetary resources to law-enforcement agencies that combat sex trafficking.[1][2] The organization has been criticised for its conduct during sting operations and for exaggerated claims regarding its work.[1][3]
History
Operation Underground Railroad was founded in 2013 by Tim Ballard.[4]
Ballard claimed that prior to founding O.U.R. he served 12 years as a U.S. Special Agent for the Department of Homeland Security, on the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC) and the U.S. Child Sex Tourism Jump Team. According to The Atlantic, “spokespeople for the CIA and DHS said they could not confirm Ballard’s employment record without his written permission, which he did not provide.”[5]
According to Ballard, he was frustrated with the lack of strategies employed to rescue kidnapped and trafficked children in underdeveloped nations, and the inability to prosecute offenders in non-U.S. related cases.[6][7] Subsequently, he left government service in October 2013 to found Operation Underground Railroad.[6][7][8]
On 16 March 2015, O.U.R. announced a merger with the Elizabeth Smart Foundation.[9]
CharityWatch gives O.U.R. a question mark rating because the organization does not disclose financial information.[10] In February 2016, the Justice Department advised members of ICAC against “being involved in, assisting or supporting operations with” O.U.R. The commander of ICAC’s Washington branch stated in an email to state and local police that O.U.R. was not affiliated with ICAC and that “no task-force group should partner with O.U.R. or provide O.U.R. with ‘any resources, equipment, personnel, training.'”[11]
As the CEO of the organization, Ballard has briefed multiple politicians on the issue of child sex trafficking, including President Donald Trump in January 2019.[12][13] He also trained Imperial County Sheriff’s Office personnel in the use of data mining software, which eventually led to the arrest of a man suspected of distributing child pornography.[14] On March 6, 2019, Ballard was called to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee concerning US-Mexico border security and its relation to child sex trafficking.[15]
Also in 2019, O.U.R.’s founder was appointed to the White House Public-Private Partnership Advisory Council to End Human Trafficking.[16] The Council was terminated on September 30, 2020.[17]
Operations
According to the organization, O.U.R. supplies a data mining platform “which they deploy against networks that child traffickers and pedophiles use to communicate with each other.”[6][18][8][19]
International operations
In 2014, O.U.R. participated in a sting operation in Cartagena, Colombia.[20][7] In April 2022, O.U.R. participated in an anti-trafficking summit in Cartagena, Colombia.[21]
In 2022, O.U.R. also provided investigative and undercover support in the arrests of pro-pedophilia activists Nelson Maatman, who fled to Mexico, and Marthijn Uittenbogaard and his partner, who both fled to Ecuador.[22][23]
In August 2022, O.U.R. supported an operation in the Dominican Republic involving raids, the arrest of 14 suspects, and over 200 law enforcement agents.[24]
Law enforcement support
Between 2015 and 2018, O.U.R. donated more than $170,000 to Washington State Patrol’s “Net Nanny” sting program. The money was used for “additional detectives, hotels, food and overtime.”[11] Sergeant Carlos Rodriguez, the initiator of the sting program arranged positive media coverage for O.U.R.,[11] solicited donations for them,[25] and, upon his retirement in 2019, was employed by O.U.R. as their domestic coordinator.[11]
O.U.R. bought over 50 dogs trained to detect electronic storage devices from Jordan Detection K9 and donated them to police departments in several U.S. states and Thailand.[26][27]
Aftercare
O.U.R. says it runs a non-profit aftercare program,[28] providing medical and psychological services, education, and vocational opportunities to survivors.[29] In January 2022, O.U.R. stated that in 2021 it provided aftercare in 30 countries.[30] In February 2020, O.U.R. paid for an adopted Wisconsin woman to visit her biological parents after she discovered that she had been stolen from them as a baby and trafficked through orphanage fraud. Her birth parents were poor Romanian farmers that had since moved to Italy.[31]
According to Foreign Policy, in 2014, “after OUR’s first operation in the Dominican Republic, a local organization called the National Council for Children and Adolescents (CONANI when abbreviated in Spanish) quickly discovered it didn’t have the capacity to handle the 26 girls rescued. They were released in less than a week.”[8]
In media
In 2016, The Abolitionists, a documentary produced by Gerald Molen, featured the first operations undertaken by Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad.[32] Another documentary from director Nick Nanton, Operation Toussaint,[33] was produced in 2018 which featured an operation in Haiti that had the support of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and former US congresswoman Mia Love of Utah.[34] Deseret News movie critic Josh Terry described Operation Toussaint as “an engrossing and expert production” but also said it “feels more like a promotional film than a strictly traditional documentary.”[35]
A feature film about Ballard’s life, Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel, Mira Sorvino, and Eduardo Verástegui was announced in 2018.[36][37] The 2018 documentary, Operation Toussaint, and the 2020 documentary, Triple Take, were also based on Ballard’s work against sex trafficking.[38][39]
Mel Gibson is not a producer on the Operation Underground Railroad upcoming four-part documentary series about child sex trafficking.[40]
Publicity and celebrity endorsements
Corbin Kaufusi, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, and Tony Robbins have helped raise funds for O.U.R.[41][42] In July 2021, O.U.R. partnered with a Ft. Myers, Florida, Harley-Davidson dealership in organizing a “freedom ride to raise awareness about child sex trafficking.”[43] In 2018, Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin went to Haiti “for a first-hand experience” with O.U.R., which was filmed for ESPN.[44]
Criticism and investigations
The group says it disavows conspiracy theories, though founder Tim Ballard was criticized for refusing to condemn the QAnon conspiracy theory.[45][46][47]
A September 2020 Vice News article called O.U.R. a “QAnon-adjacent charity,” and said the “organization has embraced followers of that particular baseless conspiracy theory, rather than condemning it the way that other anti-trafficking charities have”—even though the organization claims no association with the group, and its website “vaguely disavows conspiracy theories.” The Vice article quoted Ballard telling The New York Times a month prior, “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes. So now it’s our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.” A spokesperson for O.U.R told Vice that they’re “not affiliated with the group QAnon in any way, shape or form, and to date we have had no interaction with them.”[45][46][47]
In a December 2020 article, Vice News said that Tim Ballard embellished O.U.R.’s role in the rescue of a trafficked woman, stating that they did not find “outright falsehoods but a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading”.[1]
A 2021 follow-up article further criticized O.U.R.’s practices, including using inexperienced donors and celebrities as part of its jump team, a lack of meaningful surveillance or identification of targets, failing to validate whether the people they intended to rescue were in fact actual trafficking victims, and conflating consensual sex work with sex trafficking.[48]
A 2021 article in Slate criticized an armed 2014 raid conducted by O.U.R. in the Dominican Republic, which was filmed live by a camera crew to use in a proposed reality TV show, saying that it was likely to have traumatized the trafficked children.[3] Anne Gallagher, “the leading global expert on the international law on human trafficking”,[49] wrote in 2015 that O.U.R. had an “alarming lack of understanding about how sophisticated criminal trafficking networks must be approached and dismantled” and called the work of O.U.R “arrogant, unethical and illegal”.[3][50]
In 2022, the O.U.R. falsely claimed that it had entered a partnership with American Airlines.[51]
Tim Ballard
Tim Ballard and Katherine, his wife, have nine children, ages 23 to 6.[52] Two children, sold to Ballard, in a sting operation, in Haiti, were adopted by Tim Ballard.[52]