President Donald Trump’s controversial border enforcer has tapped into another conservative cause célèbre—staging dramatic raids to take down supposed pedophile rings. And helping him is a former lieutenant to the allegedly perverted ex-federal agent whose story inspired the movie Sound of Freedom.
Mission Safe Harbour went live on Twitter on Sept. 21, and on Telegram two weeks later, with identical messages and a video of beefy men in tactical gear counting ammo and firing weapons at close-range targets. Spliced into the footage are hazy clips of similarly clad figures bursting into seedy motel rooms and tackling faceless perpetrators inside.
“Introducing Mission Safe Harbour,” the social media posts read. “We are a non-profit organization and our mission is PROTECTING CHILDREN. We train skilled military veterans to integrate alongside law enforcement agencies, running operations to combat child exploitation by locating and arresting pedophiles.”
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Virginia business records reveal that Mission Safe Harbour is a fictitious name for an entity incorporated last December called Free Them All Inc. And the IRS-issued employer identification number on Mission Safe Harbour’s donation page matches the one on the letter the federal tax collector sent Free Them All Inc. in May, approving its application for charity status.
The recipient of that missive, the registrant of the Mission Safe Harbour trade name, and the incorporator of Free Them All is the former attorney general of Virginia, and Trump’s head of U.S. Customs and Immigration Services: Ken Cuccinelli. For all three filings, Cuccinelli used the address in Spotsylvania, an hour-and-a-half south of D.C., that local property records show the one-time Old Dominion gubernatorial aspirant co-owns with his wife. Cuccinelli did not respond to emails, calls, or text messages seeking answers and comment.
The entrance into the hyper-lucrative globe-hopping world of sex-trafficking saviorism marked a departure for Cuccinelli, who made his name in Richmond as a vitriolic foe of gay rights, climate policy, and birthright citizenship before Trump made him boss of the country’s immigration and naturalization services in 2019. A federal judge later ruled the appointment illegal, since it bypassed the Senate, crowning the multiple controversies that attended Cuccinelli’s tenure at USCIS.
But the post opened new national vistas for Cuccinelli, even as his prospects in blue-trending Virginia dimmed, according to political scientist Mark Rozell, who observed the Republican’s career from his own position at George Mason University. Still, the public policy school dean argued Mission Safe Harbour is likely more than a simple grift.
“His stint in the Trump Administration gave him a more national platform and created the opportunity for him to be a part of a venture such as this one, which looks just so different from anything in his past activism,” Rozell told The Daily Beast via email. “From watching his political career over the years, I see him as authentically committed to the social conservative issues he has championed rather than a Trump-like opportunist using such causes to advance himself in politics.”
The most obvious model for Mission Safe Harbour, which claims on its website to have a team of ex-military operators that “conducts operations and provides critical support to non-profit organizations, law enforcement, and government agencies,” is the Trump- and QAnon-friendly outfit Operation Underground Railroad. And few have enjoyed greater insight into just how much cash such an organization can reap than Cuccinelli’s co-director at Mission Safe Harbour, Dave Lopez. Lopez, too, failed to respond to repeated requests for comment.
A former Navy SEAL and operator for mercenary firm Blackwater, Lopez has for years reported participating in O.U.R. 2013 rescue of child sex slaves in Colombia depicted in Sound of Freedom. He would work under the film’s now-disgraced hero, former Department of Homeland Security operative Tim Ballard, at Glenn Beck’s Nazarene Fund—dedicated to saving Christians from the Islamic State—as well as at the Ballard-founded O.U.R.. Lopez would spearhead O.U.R.’s operations in Haiti, captured in the group’s 2018 film Operation Toussaint.
The mission in Haiti involved trying—and failing—to track a missing boy based on tips from a Utah-based psychic, which earned O.U.R. notoriety and mockery in recent years as the details became public. But in a promotional interview for Operation Toussaint, Lopez ladled praise on Ballard, who resigned from O.U.R. this summer amid allegations of predatory behavior toward women.
“Tim is a guy that I have so much respect for,” Lopez said in the 2018 clip. “For me, to be partnered with such a, you know, a man of integrity, a guy that is not swayed by the normal things in life than men are swayed by: the fame, the... whatever it is.”
In the same video, Lopez described his evolution from a self-described “neo-Confederate” to a hawker of T-shirts with Abe Lincoln’s face and the word “abolitionist” printed on them, and from a Southern Baptist to a regular incanter of Hebrew prayers. The T-shirts and the documentary weren’t the only products O.U.R. had on offer in 2018: the interview took place at a Crossfit gym the organization runs in Draper, Utah.
“One of the ways that O.U.R.’s been able to capitalize on all those donations coming in is, early on, Tim really wanted to think outside the box and he wanted to find self-generating revenue streams to help pay for administrative costs,” Lopez explained.
But it would be Ballard’s entrepreneurial ingenuity that reportedly prompted a split between the O.U.R. founder and Lopez. In 2019, Ballard invited the ex-Navy SEAL to a now-infamous meeting in which Ballard appeared to lay out a plan to funnel the millions in funds and publicity flowing into his nonprofits toward for-profit enterprises.
According to documents a Salt Lake City Fox affiliate obtained this year, in late 2020, Lopez began cooperating with local authorities probing O.U.R.
“They saw they were just being used by Ballard as ways for him to have more money and more fame, and have more things come back to him,” said Lynn Packer, a veteran investigative journalist and consultant in Utah who has reported extensively on O.U.R.. “All you have to do is come up with a concept where you either rescue kids or dogs, and the money is going to flow in.”
Besides Ballard’s obsession with taking advantage of what he called the “sizzle” from O.U.R.’s high-profile activities, Lopez told investigators what galled him was the group’s continued fundraising off the case of the missing Haitian boy—despite giving up the search—and what he claimed were misrepresentations to donors. The organization, Lopez asserted, had moved away from staging its own rescue missions and had started taking credit for operations by law enforcement agencies they partnered with.
The probe into O.U.R. closed this past May without any charges. But by then, Cuccinelli and Lopez had launched their rival outfit. And despite Lopez’s critiques of Ballard, the duo have hardly abstained from gainful endeavors.
As The Daily Beast reported last month, Lopez co-owns multiple supplement companies catering to anti-vaxxers, one of which entered a promotion with Mission Safe Harbour to send a slice of the sales of its kids’ vitamins to the nonprofit. Further, as The Daily Beast reported in the same piece, Lopez and his business partner Foster Coulson co-own a Florida company called Cold Harbour Inc. with Cuccinelli, formed not three months before the former immigration chief incorporated Free Them All, Inc., the entity behind Mission Safe Harbour.
Meanwhile, Virginia business records show that only four days before Cuccinelli submitting filings to create the Free Them All/Mission Safe Harbour nonprofit, he established another for-profit called Care for Others Inc. Because neither Cuccinelli nor Mission Safe Harbour responded to The Daily Beast’s queries, and the organization has not yet filed a tax report with the IRS, it is impossible to see what relationship—if any—these companies have with the nonprofit.
Finally, Mission Safe Harbour also keeps the exact nature of its activities vague. The front page of its website features a pair of tickers, listing “Operations to date: 8” and “Child Predators Arrested: 36,” but provides no details on the raids or the arresting authorities. The figures have remained unchanged since the day the group announced its existence on Twitter.
The webpage also asserts that Mission Safe Harbour’s members “collaborate with law enforcement agencies and private organizations to combat human trafficking and child exploitation.”
“Mission Safe Harbour comprises a team of exceptionally proficient individuals hailing from intelligence, military, special operations, and law enforcement units,” the site reads. “Possessing extensive expertise in global operations and diverse backgrounds, O.U.R. experts collaborate closely with law enforcement partners to tackle intricate challenges with remarkable efficacy. Leveraging their vast experience in counter-terrorism operations, O.U.R. team skillfully repurposes their specialized abilities to combat the escalating instances of crimes related to child exploitation.”
Thus, just as with O.U.R., it is unclear whether the group itself is running raids or simply providing some resources to law enforcement.
Then, of course, there is the question of whether Mission Safe Harbour’s activities actually help child trafficking victims. O.U.R. and similar groups have long received criticism from human trafficking experts for failing to provide adequate support to victims post-rescue, which can result in trafficked persons simply returning to an exploitative situation.
Dr. Janie Chuang, a professor of law at American University who has written extensively on modern slavery, also argued that such dramatic, show-stealing operations soak up funds better directed toward addressing underlying social problems that cause children to fall into bondage.
“These sort of raid and rescue operations, they portray trafficking as a single moment in time,” Chuang argued. “If you imagine the amount of money poured into these raids, if it were poured into building schools or into infrastructure for these kids, it's kind of breathtaking.”
Chuang also noted that the groups’ desire to boast to donors of numbers of children saved and abusers apprehended can lead to misguided raids on sites where no trafficking has occurred—as happened recently with another anti-trafficking group, International Justice Mission, in Ghana. When working abroad, these groups can undercut developing countries’ efforts to build law enforcement capacity, either by interfering with police activities or by empowering corrupt officials.
“There’s so much money in this field and not a lot of vetting of the organizations that get the money,” Chuang said. “I feel like it’s more about the savior than it is about the victim.”
