Big Country DPS Sergeant shares chilling insight into child trafficking
BIG COUNTRY, Texas (KTAB/KRBC) – Every day across the United States, dangerous commodities are being trafficked — fentanyl, cocaine, and more. But according to Sergeant Marc Couch with the Texas Department of Public Safety, one of the most urgent and overlooked threats is human trafficking.
More than 70 Texas law enforcement agencies recently took part in Operation Soteria Shield, a statewide crackdown on internet crimes against children. The operation led to 109 child rescues and the identification of 244 offenders.
While proud of the results, Couch says the work is far from over.
“These types of operations are good in the fact that they’re getting these victims. Number one is we’re rescuing people that are in basically slavery, in a situation that they’re in… So it’s a great thing to be a part of it,” Couch shared. “But the saddest part of the news I could give you is that we’re just scratching the surface of the problem. If you look at some of the films that were released about the victims of human trafficking, it is a huge commodity that is going on worldwide. Unfortunately, the United States is the leader of the consumer of that commodity.”
Couch said that while human trafficking has become more blatant in recent years, there are now stronger efforts underway to limit it.
“Some things are going on that way that are starting to, you know, choke down those points to help, hopefully, combat some of the just the wholesale openness of it. To take it back to what I would consider to be more of a smuggling, where they’re trying to evade, avoid law enforcement, whereas where it was just kind of open, open game, where just wholesale crossing was happening. It was being done, really, not monitored or even stopped at all,” Couch explained.
A major factor fueling trafficking? The internet.
Couch described how traffickers often use “dark sites” or word-of-mouth networks to post ads and lure victims, many of them children or teens, some even acting on their own in vulnerable situations.
“People understand and know what sites have an ad on, or are on in fishing or looking for these, these folks that are out there, whether they’re someone who’s doing it on behalf of a minor and trying to put them out there for sexual contact, and those kinds of things,” Couch said. “Or in some cases, it’s a young person who, by themselves, is doing that themselves. They may be working with someone else, or in a situation, a lot of times, it’s those people that the traffickers are looking for, they’re trying to score those people.”
He detailed how predators often start by complimenting their targets, building trust, and eventually arranging in-person meetings for exploitation. He added that those without homes are more at risk of being targeted.
“They are looking for those people who are down and out, have no place to provide for themselves, and they will start grooming them on the internet. It’s called grooming; they’ll start, making contact with them. It can be that they’re telling them how pretty they are and how wonderful they are, and all these different things that start happening in that situation, and it ultimately will culminate in a meeting,” Couch shared. “In some cases, it’s someone truly for underage sex. And you have people who are in hard situations who just want money and they’re going to sell their body because they’re 14-year-olds, 16-year-olds.”
To catch these criminals, investigators often create fake online personas, posing as minors to bait predators. But these operations require careful legal navigation.
“It’s common practice to get up a fake profile, all the things you need to make yourself into, like I can make myself into a 14-year-old girl and put myself on the internet, and then just put myself in one of those places. We don’t start out with that, because, again, these are complex criminal investigations that we’re doing, and so there’s an element to that,” Couch explained. “To get beyond what the prosecution would call entrapment, you have to provide an opportunity for someone, but in that, there are certain things and elements that our prosecutors want us to have to make sure that we meet the elements of the crime, that we didn’t make someone commit the crime.”
Couch also warned that online gaming platforms have become another common tool for traffickers and predators.
“So, you have cases like that where these contacts are made, because I know that I, for instance, interact with people all over the world. Hey, where are you at? Yeah, I’m in Detroit, or I’m up somewhere. But you know, there are a lot of cases where people have driven, like, 300-400 miles to go meet this minor because they said they were 16… That’s the anonymity of the internet. You can take on a persona that’s not you and try to suck someone into your world,” Couch shared.
His advice to parents: keep kids offline as long as possible.
“Whether it’s the trafficking and all that stuff we’re talking about, but I used to work in schools and sixth graders and seventh graders at a junior high, and it’s the worst age… I mean, [kids are] brutal to each other,” Couch added. “It’s hard enough for your child to have the voices they’re in contact with publicly in their head, or in their life. Why would we want to add to it the voices of 1,000s of other people on the internet that are going to be coming into their life? Children are not old enough to be making those types of decisions for themselves yet, and as a parent, we need to be raising them and training them to be able to utilize these devices to where it’s not a hindrance to them, but it’s a value that’s going to flourish their life and not going to hinder their life.”
Couch also touched on recent changes in drug trafficking trends, noting a drop in seizures early in the year, followed by a sharp spike in April.
“Why was there a bump in April? I don’t know… I will tell you this, that the drug trade is no more, is no less than anything like the oil markets or anything else. It’s consumer-driven,” Couch said. “Things go up and down based on commodity and how expensive it is to get it, and how expensive it is to move it, and to put it into place, and to get it, so we’re seeing up rises like right now. We’re seeing an uptick in cocaine, method, and methamphetamines, always a standard… in the last six months, there was a record seizure of fentanyl pills by CBP, I think in March was one of the highest seizures ever made.”