Tim Ballard, the embattled former CEO of Operation Underground Railroad, said Saturday that the Biden administration’s U.S. border agents have become a “child-sex-trafficking delivery service” in one of his first public appearances since multiple lawsuits accused him of sexually assaulting a string of women.
Ballard appeared onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington during a Q&A session alongside Eduardo Verástegui, producer of “Sound of Freedom,” the movie loosely inspired by Ballard’s efforts against sex trafficking.
Ballard said the film was repeatedly rejected by studios since it would “force a conversation” people didn’t want to have — “especially about the southern border, where tens of thousands of kids have disappeared into the belly of the United States — which is the number one consumer of child rape videos in the world.”
He alleged children are given “no regard” and that their sponsors are not vetted when they are brought into the country.
“I would go so far as to say that, unwittingly, our own agencies on the border — again, not because they want to, because they’re being told by the administration — they have become a child-sex-trafficking delivery service,” Ballard said. “These kids just show up, and they’re unaccompanied, and they have a phone number of the sponsor. They have to call the number and they send the kid away. That’s how easy it is.”
Ballard told the audience, which earlier Saturday heard former President Donald Trump speak, that when his team tried to make the movie, film companies wouldn’t take it — but when it finally hit theaters, “we’re being told lies about the film, that it’s QAnon adjacent, whatever that means.”
QAnon is a conspiracy theory that asserts the world is run by a satanic group of elites that run a global sex ring.
“The film was made and done before the term QAnon was ever even published or out there,” Ballard said. So “they’ll just keep coming up to stop the information from getting out there. There’s a war on children right now, from our southern border, to our classrooms, education — so many things that children are being attacked. It’s a spiritual battle as well.”
Ballard was named Friday in a new lawsuit, filed by a Colombian woman depicted in the film. The suit’s plaintiff, Kely Johana Suarez Moya, is shown as a former beauty queen who kidnapped children under the guise of modeling auditions, piled them in shipping containers and sold them into sex slavery.
In the court document, the plaintiff says she was never involved in human trafficking and that she spent 18 months in prison before being released but has never been convicted of any crime.
Ballard’s legal team recently released the first in a series of videos in which Ballard and his wife, Katherine, respond to the allegations made against him.
The first installment includes a solicitation for donations to Ballard’s legal defense fund. The video suggests the lawsuits were timed to coincide with the success of “Sound of Freedom” — it has reportedly taken in more than $240 million — and Ballard’s then-exploration of a possible U.S. Senate bid.
— Tribune reporter Robert Gehrke contributed to this story.
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