A former Navy SEAL went from battling international terrorism to fighting a different war at home—the war against child sex trafficking.

Craig Sawyer, a former Navy SEAL and founder of Veterans for Child Rescue, told EpochTV’s “Bay Area Innovators” program how his background led him to rescue children from trafficking networks that are operating in plain sight.

Sawyer, who grew up in Houston, joined the Marines at the age of 19 and deployed to various locations.

“I was learning about what [terrorists] were doing, hijacking airplanes and everything, and I just thought that was horrible, and that was the worst evil that I could identify. And I felt compelled to go and stop that from coming here,” he said. “So I ended up ... at the very top of the counterterror realm of special operations.”

After leaving the military, Sawyer went into law enforcement and did 10 years of high-threat mobile security in war zones for government entities such as the State Department and the Intelligence Community. Eventually, he moved into film and television work and did a mini-series about saving rhinos, an endangered species.

“I learned that by filming something, you could show the rest of the world something that is wrong and rally support to help correct that wrong,” he said.

Around 2015, a friend from the Intelligence Community told Sawyer that Houston had become an epicenter for child sex trafficking.

“It seemed like the last place on earth that should be allowed or would be allowed, and that’s when I realized it was a covert operation ... run domestically at industrial scale, because we found out that ... child trafficking in the United States generates more revenue than all pro sports combined,” Sawyer said.

The former SEAL went on to create a documentary to expose the operation but was unable to get help from big tech companies or the film industry.

After three years of trying, Sawyer decided to make the documentary himself. He founded a nonprofit and campaigned to generate revenue. Eventually, his documentary, titled “Contraland,” was released in 2019, free for the public to watch.

The one-and-a-half-hour film shows clips from real cases, not reenactments. Cameras were strategically concealed to record the events taking place.

5,000 Predators Respond to Ad

For one of their first operations, they placed a fake ad for a 12-year-old girl on Craigslist in Guilford, Connecticut.

“Five thousand different predators responded to that ad, trying to get to that child,“ Sawyer said. ”And it just repulsed us, but it revealed the level of pervasiveness of these predators. They’re everywhere. They’re in the nice areas, and they’re in the bad areas. They’re everywhere in between.”

Through an app used for crimes, they arrested a Mormon church elder who targeted two children, in addition to an illegal immigrant, a high-level cartel member, and a trafficker. The app has been taken down.

“Some of these apps take covert still images and videos of your child without the app demonstrating that it has that capability. So the full-grown man who your child may think is another child they’re playing with is capturing video of your child,” Sawyer said.

He said that child predators also stalk children through video games, smartphones, laptops, and chat apps, and pretend to build trust.

Those images are then used to blackmail children by telling them the images would be sent to the children’s parents or school. According to Sawyer, a lot of these children end up taking their own lives because their brains are not developed yet and cannot process the betrayal.

He recommends that parents be more involved in their children’s lives and monitor what they see and who they talk to on their devices.

Sawyer said they have up to nine agencies involved in their joint operations.

“We’ve got 29 child predator arrests with a 100 percent conviction rate,“ he said. ”We’ve got 87 warrants for more now. So the ongoing operation is growing.”

Daughter Was a Victim

In 2018, Sawyer’s daughter, Aspen, was kidnapped and raped at 18. Her story is also included in “Contraland.”

“I woke up like I felt like I was in a war zone,” he recalled. “My wife told me that our daughter was driving home, and I could hear my daughter screaming through the phone. Very upsetting to hear someone that’s that precious to you screaming like that. So I jumped on my phone, started calling the sheriff’s department, and seeing if they could interdict her and make her safe.”

His daughter drove so fast that she got home before they could go out and find her, he said. They took her to the hospital, and she decided she wanted to fight back. Now a junior decoy agent for their operations, she acts as a chatter, talking to predators online who come for her.

“They get arrested, and ... it’s interesting to watch how she folds her—she’s petite—she folds her arms, and she stands in front of them when they’re being arrested and handcuffed,“ he said. ”And I asked her: ‘What is that about, Aspen? What’s that stare-down thing you do?’ And she said, ‘I’m taking my power back, because when I watch them turn from predator into prisoner, it’s healing for me.’”

Sawyer said that gang members who used to sell guns and narcotics are bringing children into the United States illegally without their parents and selling them like commodities from motel rooms, abandoned hotels, houses, and drug cartels.

He has been advocating for better law enforcement, new legislation, and the ousting of corrupt public officials. He said he believes that revamping the educational system to teach children to be resistant to predators is an important factor in fighting crime, but the topic is often censored.

“We’re creating more documentaries, and we do social media campaigns, and flyers, and NASCAR, billboards, and public speaking—all of it to get the word out past all the gatekeepers that don’t want the American people to know,” Sawyer said.

“We want them empowered with the knowledge of what’s happening to our children, so that we can all link arms and say no to this evil.”