Getty Tim and Katherine Ballard.
Tim Ballard is a former special agent for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security whose work to rescue survivors of child sex trafficking are featured in the new movie “Sound of Freedom.”
Jim Caviezel plays Ballard in the movie, which shows the character traveling to Colombia to try to rescue a trafficked girl. At the end of the movie, a photo of Caviezel morphs into a photo of the real Tim Ballard. Over the years, Ballard’s organization has drawn the attention of celebrities, former President Trump and news outlets.
However, Ballard’s organization has been accused of exaggerating its role in some rescues. According to Deseret News, a Utah prosecutor in March 2023 closed a criminal investigation into Ballard’s nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad without issuing charges.
“We feel the conclusion of this investigation — as well as an extensive independent third-party audit — helped to reinforce” the group’s integrity, Ballard said to Deseret News.
Watchdog group Charity Watch.org assigned a question mark instead of a customary letter grade to Ballard’s organization, indicating “concerns about this organization.” In 2021, Ballard received compensation of $335,500, according to his organization’s tax filings, which were published by ProPublica. The group reported revenue of more than $47 million that year, the filings show, up from less than $1 million in 2013.
In 2019, Trump appointed Ballard to “the Public-Private Partnership Advisory Council to End Human Trafficking,” according to a White House press release.
Here’s what you need to know:
1. Tim Ballard, Who Started His Career With the CIA, Worked on a Child Sex Tourism ‘Jump Team’ for the Department of Homeland Security
I’m a strong “yes” on this one. Absolutely *Incredible* film; handles one of the most difficult issues with grace & thoughtfulness. Chatting with these two gents, @IamJimCaviezel & @TimBallard, was likewise mind-blowing.
📺 @AmThoughtLeader coming on Thurs. June 29th, 7:30pm ET.
According to the Calexico (California) Chronicle, Ballard worked as an “undercover operative” for Homeland Security for a dozen years.
His organization’s website says Ballard “spent more than a decade working as a Special Agent for the Department of Homeland Security, where he was assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force and deployed as an undercover operative for the U.S. Child Sex Tourism Jump Team.”
The website says Ballard “has worked in that role and has seen every type of case in the fight to dismantle child trafficking rings. He’s worked in the United States and in multiple foreign countries to infiltrate child trafficking organizations. He has successfully dismantled dozens of these organizations and rescued children from slavery and exploitation.”
According to his bio on All American Speakers, Ballard started his career with the CIA working on cases that focused on terrorism and Latin America.
According to a 2015 article in The Daily Herald in Provo, Utah, “after running operations for more than a decade, and seeing how many individuals he couldn’t get to, he wanted a change.”
2. Parts of the Movie Show Fictional Acts, But the Island Raid Really Happened
GettyPresident Trump listens to Operation Underground Railroad CEO Tim Ballard (left) during a 2019 meeting on fighting human trafficking on the southern border.
In 2013, Ballard started Operation Underground Railroad, described by the Calexico Chronicle as “an anti-sex trafficking nonprofit that assists law enforcement agencies, including the Imperial County [California] Sheriff’s Office, with software training for mining data and to trace criminals.”
The “about us” page for that organization explains,
While working for the government, Ballard saw how much more is needed in the fight against child trafficking and exploitation across the world. In 2013, he and a team of former government operatives left the security of their careers to accomplish the work of rescuing children as a private foundation – Operation Underground Railroad. At O.U.R., Tim has created a team that can work in any jurisdiction and in conjunction with law enforcement to rescue children directly. That team exists today and operates all over the world.
Operation Underground Railroad has a website devoted to explaining which parts of “Sound of Freedom” are true and which are fiction. For example, there really was an island raid, and the character of Giselle was based on a beauty pageant queen named Kelly Johana Suarez, according to the website. However, it says, the real Ballard did not go into the jungle by himself to rescue a trafficked girl. The character of the boy given the nickname Teddy has basis in truth, and the necklace Caviezel’s character receives is based on a necklace Ballard received from the boy, according to the website.
The website notes that the real Ballard has never killed anyone, unlike his fictional counterpart.
The site adds:
At the first of the film, it shows security camera footage of several different kidnappings. This is real footage, and while this type of human trafficking exists, it isn’t the majority. When we hear the phrase ‘sex trafficking,’ our minds often picture dusty, dark alleyways in foreign countries where orphaned children from the streets are kidnapped, exploited, and sold. And that is a horrific reality, but it is also important to understand that sex trafficking is not just a foreign issue, but an acute domestic concern within the United States that is ever increasing.
According to Charity Watch, in a post about Operation Undercover Railroad, “Multiple Officers and Directors have a family relationship. Todd Reynolds (Director) is Tim Ballard’s (Founder) brother in law. Julianne Blake (Director) is Tim Ballard’s sister. Tevya Ware (CFO) is Tim Ballard’s sister in law. Mark [sic] Reynolds (Secretary) is Todd Reynolds’ brother.”
Jerry Gowen, who was an executive for Operation Underground Railroad, told Daily Herald, “We pose as traffickers. In a lot of cases, it’s rich, wealthy businessmen who are the primary offenders here.”
Gowen added: “These don’t look like bad guys, they look like you and me.” Elizabeth Smart, the former missing child, has served on the group’s board, the Daily Herald reported.
“They’re using words that we use to sell a car or a computer. They talk about them as objects of lust or an object to be sold, and I have to pretend to enjoy that,” Ballard said to Daily Herald. “I have to be a monster.” After they buy the children, local authorities swoop in and make arrests, according to that article.
According to that article, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes “traveled to Colombia with OUR to participate in a sting; he acted as a bodyguard and Spanish-speaking translator. 54 children were freed during the operation,” and the group was featured in a Sundance documentary called “The Abolitionists.”
3. Tim Ballard Is Active on Social Media, Where He Posts Family Photos & Writes About His Efforts to Save Children From Human Trafficking
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Ballard is active on Instagram. He is also active on Twitter.
He describes himself as, “Husband. Father. Subject of film Sound of Freedom. Author. Former DHS: Special Agent/ Undercover Operator.”
On Instagram, Ballard shared a photo with his family at the “Sound of Freedom” premiere. He wrote,
Wednesday night, my family and I were able to attend the premiere of Sound of Freedom. It was a surreal moment to be there with my family as the film was followed by a standing ovation. I’m so grateful for the cast and crew, Sean Wolfington, Eduardo Verastegui, Alejandro Monteverde and especially @angelstudios_inc for making this day finally happen. The support that this film and this movement have received has been nothing short of amazing.
Ballard has written about his love for his wife. “Happy Mother’s Day to my inspiring, amazing wife!! She couldn’t see a world where we didn’t fight to rescue God’s children and for that, I’m so grateful,” he wrote in one Instagram post.
4. Some of Tim Ballard’s Positions Have Caused Controversy & His Group Has Been Accused of ‘a Series of Exaggerations’
In 2020, Vice Magazine ran an exposé of Ballard’s group that said, “Backed by Donald Trump, Operation Underground Railroad has flourished in the age of QAnon. But not all of its stories hold up to scrutiny.” Vice reported that Ballard was “appointed by President Donald Trump to a council meant to guide federal anti-trafficking policymaking, which he co-chaired.”
Vice claimed:
The specific stories that OUR tells are intensely cinematic: bold, heroic, and extremely difficult to fact-check. They are also not the entire truth. An investigation by VICE World News focused on OUR’s operations identified a divide between the group’s actual practices and some of its claimed successes. What we found aren’t outright falsehoods but a pattern of image-burnishing and mythology-building, a series of exaggerations that are, in the aggregate, quite misleading.
According to Vice, Ballard “has repeatedly claimed that OUR played a central role in a large anti-trafficking case in New York State and implied that it helped rescue a victim in that case when, in fact, according to court transcripts and other records reviewed by Vice World News, she bravely escaped her trafficker on her own.”
In addition, the site says, Ballard’s organization “has also declined to describe what precisely it does with the millions of dollars it says it spends overseas, citing concerns about operational security.”
Vice claimed Utah’s criminal investigation tried to determine whether Ballard’s group misled donors by taking credit for work actually done by law enforcement. Deseret News reported that the prosecutor looked into “a communications fraud, witness tampering and retaliation against a witness, victim or informant” before deciding not to issue any charges.
According to Standard.Net, some law enforcement agencies have “severed ties with OUR.” For example, the Washington State Patrol stopped accepting donations from the group “that had helped fund its controversial Operation Net Nanny stings, which resulted in the arrests of nearly 300 accused child predators but which critics accused of entrapment,” the site reported.
Ballard gave an interview to The Daily Signal in which he made controversial statements about people who are transgender and what the article called the “woke left.”
The article says Ballard “warned” about “this whole trans [ideology] foisted on children.” Although he said that he would fight for the right of adults to “do what you want,” he drew a different line with children, telling the Daily Signal, “What they’re saying is, children can consent to having their bodies filled with a chemical that will destroy their reproductive system. They can consent to ripping apart their genitalia.”
“This is insanity — in and of itself it’s horrible,” Ballard said. “But what it’s going to lead to is what the pedophiles have been asking for. If you can consent to that, guess what? What’s more fluid than gender? Age.”
He also argued in the story that President Biden’s border policies are facilitating human trafficking, saying, “Our taxpayer dollars are literally, for the first time in American history, our taxpayer dollars are going to facilitate the last leg of a child-trafficking event.”
The New York Times interviewed Ballard for a story on QAnon conspiracy theorists hijacking the save-the-children movement. “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes,” Ballard told The Times. “So now it’s our job to flood the space with real information so the facts can be shared.”
An article in The Huffington Post asked, “We know that child trafficking is a huge problem in the United States. Why is OUR not operating here? For that matter, why are they not raiding the brothels of Amsterdam or London? The simple reason is that, lacking any legal capacity to undertake such operations, Bollard and his rag-tag team would be arrested on the spot.”
5. Tim Ballard, Who Lives With His Wife, Katherine, & Kids in California, Graduated From Brigham Young University
Ballard is author of the books “The Covenant: One Nation Under God” and “The Covenant, Lincoln and The War,” according to the speaker’s bureau website.
He graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and political science from Brigham Young University, the site says. He graduated summa cum laude with a master’s in international politics from the Mormon Institute of International Studies. He lives in California with his wife and children, according to that bio.
He also served a church mission to Chile, it says. According to Mormon Wiki, Ballard is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
According to Foreign Policy, “Ballard’s Mormon faith also heavily influences his work.”
“The other option was to face my maker one day and tell him why I didn’t do it,” he told Foreign Policy, adding that if a person is not “comfortable praying, they’re not going to be comfortable working with us.”
He told LDS Living Magazine that he felt instructed by God to “find the lost children,” according to Foreign Policy, which detailed one of OUR’s stings.
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