Caribbean Update

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The following program contains sensitive content. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to Lantern Rescue, a ministry program dedicated to bringing light into the darkness of human trafficking. It's time to light the way to freedom. This is Lantern Rescue. We tell the stories, we talk about rescues, and we empower you to do something about it.

William Wilberforce once said, let it not be said I was silent when they needed me. This is Lantern Rescue. Well, what an episode we have for you today on Lantern Rescue. We have really a triple threat, so to speak, that just took a campaign down to the Caribbean. And so we've got Camp and Sean and Jack with us.

And so Camp, can you kind of tell us what happened and introduce the other guys to us? Yeah, so we just got back from an amazing three-week long trip down to two different countries in the Caribbean. We are joined with Sean, who is the director of operations for South Africa. And we also have with us Jack, who is one of our lead trainers. Yeah, that's so amazing to me that you were able to include Sean. And so Sean, had you ever been to the Caribbean before?

Yeah, good day. Yeah, I've been to the Caribbean previously. I've actually lived there for a little while.

I sort of understand the problems set throughout that region. It was good to be able to go and collaborate with my outsider Camp and see the challenges and the problems that I face in Africa, sort of replicated in the other parts of the world and just to be able to work together and, you know, to try and solve some of the problems and challenging a great opportunity to work together. And another really neat aspect of this, I guess, campaign or, you know, process that you went through was Jack.

You'd been trying to get on the same deployment with Jack for many, I mean, with Sean for many, many years, right? Yeah, it only took 11 years in the making, but we finally got to go train some dudes together and found a lot of the similarities in the way we train and the way the Aussie train. So it was easy going.

That is really neat. So Camp, can you kind of share what the idea was of what you guys were doing and how it went? Yeah, so the first part of the trip, I went down for about a week by myself first to do some training with our partners in the OAS where we trained 25 community police officers, and we had the opportunity to actually bring them into the OAS embassy to give them three different courses of instruction there. We went over criminal investigations with a focus on violence against women, an arrest technique, and report writing for law enforcement.

So that was my first week there. So just to jump in for a second, what is OAS? The OAS is our partners in the southern hemisphere.

It's the Organization of American States, the internet organization, yeah, that promotes peace and security in the region. Wonderful. So you went down there to OAS, in other words, you're training people there within that organization? Right. They have a, we're part of a larger campaign of theirs to bring some of the community policing officers, getting them more trained, more equipment, just to get them better prepared for the duties that they have, dealing with the gang violence down there.

Everybody's duties and responsibilities have kind of tripled. Right. So it's not apparently just sex trafficking or human trafficking that there's so much that you've got to deal with the gang violence, right? Right.

Yeah. You know, our main focus is obviously the human trafficking and rescuing the vulnerable. But the separate part of that is, too, you have to be able to train and equip the host country police to continue to do these efforts, whether we are there in country or not. So that's a big part of what we do, is providing training, equipment when we can. But yeah, it was an amazing opportunity to get to know 25 of the community policing officers and give them some much needed training. So every time we go and do these operations to rescue the kids, we need somebody that we can trust.

Some guys that we actually know have the training that we provided, that way it's not just some random guy off the street that is in our stack, that way we actually have vetted guys. Oh, I could imagine that, you know, that's gigantic and what an opportunity. You know, I really think it's amazing that you guys get the organizations and the connections in order to be able to get that cooperation. So, Camp, it's really amazing to me that God has given you the favor with these organizations in other countries. Do you have a sense of of how that door was opened? Oh, you know, I think you said it's God's favor, right? He opens doors and that's going to let the organization prosper.

And we've had doors closed as well. So we just try to stay in his path and in his direction. So yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think you said it there, it's God's favorite and God's plan for, you know, for some of us to partner together, not only with, you know, international organizations such as OAS, but the other nonprofits, other NGOs as well. You know, it's the more that we can come together and focus on the problem, the more success we're going to have. Yeah, absolutely. So what was the next phase where you said that was one week and then the second week you were joined by the other two, by Sean and Jack?

Right. So also during that first week when I was down there, I got a call from Mark asking if we were able to get a team together to extract a family of three who had been targeted by the by the gangs in one of the Caribbean countries. After going over some of the details of Mark and getting some background information, we were able to quickly get a team together to go to the area where the family was temporarily being housed and get a route together, get a plan together with some local partners and some of the police in that area as well.

And we were able to safely get that family out and to the airport to leave the country to start a new life here in the U.S. But that was that was an amazing opportunity to be a part of. So that happened the first week as well, besides the training? Yeah, that happened as well.

That was a surprise call from Mark. And yeah, that's just amazing. You know, and of course, you're right there in the middle of with all those people you just trained, did you actually use some of them to get that extraction done? We did. So one of our local personnel there on the ground had done some training a few weeks prior with the police that we actually used in this operation. And it was it was so great to see them utilize that training and the way they deployed out and the way they, you know, use the skills that they had been taught to to provide protection to get these families, this family loaded into the car and out of an unsafe area and back down to the airport. So it just it just goes to show that, you know, it it does all come full circle that the training that we provide, it does does have value in what we do. If we haven't had not had given that training a few weeks prior, I don't know that I would have either trusted or even taken these guys with us to do this operation. But it was it was definitely a blessing to have them with us.

Wow, that's amazing. So then that's done. And now Shawn and Jack come, right? Yeah, Shawn and Jack come down. And what we were going to do, we were going to train a tactical unit in one of the Caribbean countries. And these, this planning had been done for months, months of planning had gone into this with the with the host country. And, you know, Jackson arrived, they get there, they're ready to go. And typical, you know, in these types of arenas that we work in, everything just kind of fell apart.

The communication with the with the fleet in that country just fell apart the the range that we're going to use the ammunition that was going to be provided, all of that was no longer available was no longer there. So these guys came down ready to train and we were instantly faced with some some heavy obstacles to overcome. Wow. So your perspective on that, Jack? I will say that many different places that have gone to train, we've been promised the world, everybody said it's good to go, we show up, and they have not.

So with Shawn and I being adaptive and pretty much able to train full gambit of any tactics or techniques you could think of, we basically just made do with what we had for the first couple days until they figured out the ammunition, and then we just continued to train as per. Oh my goodness. And Shawn, my question to you would be, so in Africa, gang violence is a big part of what goes on down there as well, I would suppose? Yeah, I mean, it is. I mean, when you're looking at human trafficking across the globe, it really does tie into a lot of other common steps as well. You know, the human traffickers thrive in environments where, you know, there's lawlessness, there's terrorism, there's gang violence, that's where they thrive.

So very sort of rarely do you see that it's just, you know, trafficking by itself. You know, it goes hand in hand with poverty, gang violence, you know, these other problems that fuel the greater problem of human trafficking as a byproduct. So when we come back, not only do we have an amazing opportunity that God has opened up that you can take part of in an opportunity for Landon Rescue, as well as the continued update on this training operation, as well as extraction that all that went on just recently in the Caribbean.

We'll be right back. Landon Rescue is a USA-based organization that conducts international rescue operations for people suffering from human trafficking. Landon specializes in sending former U.S. special operation law enforcement and intelligence personnel to partner with host nations and assist them in creating specialized units to combat ongoing security problems, such as genocide, terrorism, and human trafficking.

As a nonprofit charity, they offer services free of charge to their host nations. Human trafficking has grown into the second largest criminal activity in the world, reaching an estimated $150 billion in annual activity. Landon Rescue has developed rapidly to combat trafficking. Landon operates through a trained international network in order to rescue women and children from sex and labor slavery, and facilitates holistic aftercare services.

They're gearing up for operations right now, and you can go to lanternrescue.org to see how you can support them financially. Welcome back to Landon Rescue today. It's like, how cool that we get, like, up to date. Like, this just happened, what, camp just last week or week before? Yeah, yeah, we all, we all just got home last, last weekend. Yeah, this weekend, actually.

Yeah, this weekend. So, you know, here we are, and it's up to date. These operations just happened.

God's doing this stuff, like, right now. And it was, we were talking about when we went to break, there were all sorts of obstacles and stuff, right, camp, that you guys were up against. Yeah, you know, and as Bob Jack said, it's nothing new.

We're kind of used to it by now. But, you know, and that doesn't take anything away from the officers that received the training. Those guys are so grateful for any bit of instructions and training that they can get. Because, you know, they have a dangerous job. It's a dangerous country that they're in.

But yeah, I'll let Jack go into a little bit of, we overcame some of those obstacles and and stayed together as a team and just kind of pushed through. All right, so we showed up, and they're supposed to have a couple thousand rounds of 9 mil and rifle. They couldn't, supposedly, they were already trained by the French a week prior, and that's why they didn't have ammo.

Then we found out that the French never trained them. It was just sort of coming up with all these excuses, and honestly we didn't have time for excuses. And Sean and I's biggest thing was we wanted to increase survivability and increase lethality. So we didn't have any ammo, so we couldn't really work on the lethality thing. Then we basically just fell back to our training.

The biggest thing that we did was CQB and urban movement, because we've seen videos of these guys literally standing out in the streets trying to fight. And then one that goes hand in hand with that was some vehicle bailout drills. Basically if they're driving along, their vehicle gets shot up and they can't drive out of an ambush. Basically how to bail out of the vehicle safely, use parts of the vehicle as cover, and then bound back to other parts of cover.

Wow. And so essentially these guys are going hand to hand in the streets with these gangs, and I don't want to know any secrets or anything, but what do you tell somebody that's going to face something like that? Basically just get behind cover. Camp showed us this one video of one of the officers running around an armored truck through a mud puddle, and instead of fighting from the armored truck, he just kept running in the middle of the street. And that's, I mean it sounds basic to be like, hey get behind cover, but once you get bullets getting shot at you, you always revert back to your lowest form of training, which these guys have never had any kind of training like that. Wow.

Wow. And in your perspective on that, Sean? The guy on the ground, you know, he's just trying to do the best he can with the training in difficult circumstances, you know, and it's a difficult spot for those guys. They're trying to take the fight from these gangs, and we've got to think about these gangs, they're the cover for everything else illegal that happens under that, right? The systemic human trafficking that goes on can only occur because the gangs have freedom of movement and free reign of the nightclubs and the bottles and the bars.

So they sort of give only that protection if the gangs have control and the gangs make money out of this. So it's a multi-faceted problem set that we have to try and combat. So being able to give these guys what we would call the basic skills to take the fight to the games, that's where you start to get a bit of momentum and then we can actually get in there, you know, and kind of rescue some of these these girls and these children that are being taken advantage of. So Camp, I'm interested in, you know, what were some of the things that you felt like the officers were really lacking in that you wanted to make sure they got while you guys were there? So a lot of the things that I think our listeners are probably not aware of is just how under-prepared I guess some of these officers are in these countries. They're, just for example, the community police officers that I trained, you're talking about guys who don't even have handcuffs, who don't have a flashlight, no sort of non-lethal option to use in the field, which is, you know, by us here in the U.S., our standards is, you know, you have to have all those things and they are much needed and they all have a place and a function.

So just for, you know, just the community policing officers on their belt, they basically, I think one guy had a pair of handcuffs that I think he bought himself. And everyone else just had a pistol that looked like it had seen better. These guys, these guys don't have any type of cleaning kit or cleaning to keep their service weapons reasonable. They are just, you know, under-equipped.

It's just not, it doesn't even get justice to describe it. When it comes to training, you know, a lot of these guys, even the guys who've been in law enforcement for 10 or 15 years, may have only shot their weapons in a training setting three or four times in their entire career. So you're looking at maybe a couple hundred rounds that they've shot their entire career.

So the proficiency is not there. I mean, these guys are just in dire need of equipment. These guys are just in dire need of equipment. Just basic training. And there's some guys, like the group that Jack and Sean trained, you know, they need that basic and that experience for the duties and the roles that they play. But, you know, you have to go into further about what you think the, what they need.

So Jack, as you were working amongst them and on those needs, you know, what would your viewpoint be on all that? To piggyback on what Camp was saying, when we did finally get the ammo and then went out to the range, I mean, we had guys that couldn't even hit paper at five meters. And then we found out that they weren't even looking through their sights. So if it's on the flat range, nobody's shooting back at them. Once those bullets start flying, I mean, they're not, they're not going to have the muscle memory of, oh, I need to get a good sight picture.

I actually need to squeeze the trigger instead of slapping it. And just things like gripping a pistol, like half those guys, it's like, they've never had a pistol before. And then it was weird because the, the second group that showed up, they'll show it with a Glock. The first ones they had, they were a Taurus, a lot similar to our, uh, we're out of 92s. But it's just, just because they have the equipment doesn't mean they're, they know how to use the equipment that they have.

They probably got it out of some kind of storage locker. And then, I mean, didn't, didn't know how to grip a rifle. These guys were lacking on fling. Like they just didn't have ill-equipped for everything that they're asked to do on a day-to-day basis.

And then in a week or two, they're actually going to have to go and do this on the street in real life. So basically we made do with what they had, but I mean, there's just so many shortcomings. And one of the things I'd like our listeners to know is, you know, we talk about special in this episode where law enforcement officers in these countries are just lacking heavily on, on equipment, your basic law enforcement equipment. Um, something we have started here with our local law enforcement agencies across our state is trying to go to them and, and see if they have any unwanted or used equipment that they would donate to us, you know, cause I promise you we can, we can find a home for it. We can find an officer that can utilize that, that equipment. So, you know, if there, if there's listeners out there who are in the law community, um, with access to, to use the equipment or, uh, you know, maybe their agency or their department has switched firearms and they have an excess, you know, of used holsters, you know, let us know we can, we can find a home for them. We can, we can find officers who, who need, who need this equipment. Um, you know, again, like I said, our, our, our main mission is to combat human trafficking. Uh, but we have to train these, these host nations to be able to do that on their own as well.

And with no equipment, no training, um, you know, it's just a, an uphill battle doesn't begin to describe it. Right. And I would think handcuffs and belts and all those things, right, then I think that's a great, uh, word for, you know, folks that are out there. And so if somebody has access to that kind of thing, how would they write, they'd go to land and rescue dot org, right. And just email you guys. Yeah, absolutely.

Then go there and follow the, uh, the info link. Uh, yeah. And just let us know. We will, we will figure out a way to, to, to get that equipment from you. Well, and while we're on that note, cause we were talking about talking about the opportunity for land and rescue and unfortunately we're running out of time, but we want to get in this big announcement, right? Camp that, um, that we've got and, and, you know, some opportunities that have just opened up actually today as we speak for land and rescue.

Yeah. We, we're excited to share that we have an, an amazing opportunity for our listeners. Uh, we've got a donor that has offered us a $100,000 match, uh, for donations. Uh, it's for a very short period of time.

I believe it's three months. Um, so this gives our, our listeners a, and a, and a chance to, you know, if they're, if they feel led to give, um, you know, this, this gives it a chance for that amount that they can give to double. Um, so we, you know, we're deeply grateful for the, for the trust that our listeners and our donors have placed in us to responsibly utilize the financial gifts that they sent to us. Um, and if you ever wonder if you make a difference, I can tell you every single dollar count. Uh, and I believe I spoke wrong. I don't believe it's true.

I believe it's 30 days. Um, every dollar that you donate, it will be doubled up to that $100,000 match. So you can go to lantern rescue.org, uh, slash freedom. And if you feel led, you know, donate. And if you can't, if you can't, we, of course we always accept your prayers.

Right. And obviously, you know, what an opportunity we all have to pray for God's provision, obviously for these officers that are, you know, put in these horrible situations that, you know, their safety is, is completely compromised because they don't have a set of handcuffs or they don't have the other equipment that they need. So that prayer for God's provision, that prayer for God's favor, that we can, um, be connected with the agencies and those kinds of things that can provide for these needs. And again, that prayer that God would provide the actual funds, um, to come alongside that $100,000 donor to, to maximize all that he wants to do, um, through all this wonderful work in, you know, human trafficking as well as, you know, family extractions and, and, and, you know, the other things that are going on in the Ukraine and all that. So, so camp, Sean, Jack, thank you guys so much for what you're doing and God bless you. And this is the truth network.