Exploited, Persecuted, & Displaced

This is Sam from the Masking Journey Podcast, and our goal with the podcast has helped you to try to find your way in this difficult world. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and choosing the Truth Podcast Network. Wow, do we have a treat for you today on Land and Rescue. We have Mark back with us, and Mark's got a whole bunch of updates.

Really, in the three areas that Landon helps with, the exploited, the persecuted, and the displaced. So, Mark, carry on. Robbie, it's great to connect with you and to be on the show. It is our three lanes of effort when we talk about rescue in case somebody's new to our show.

Sorry for those that are old, we'll just cover it real quick. We exist to rescue those who are exploited, those who are persecuted, and those who are displaced. The exploited are those who are being trafficked around the world, and that is definitely our primary focus because we've been doing that the longest. We've got incredible people working to rescue the persecuted, and even a lot of my time spent in my life has been to do that to help those that are believers who are being persecuted because of their faith in different countries. And then we've got, obviously, in the current war that's happening, we have a response to that to help those who are in need, who are fleeing war, and so we help those who are displaced. You know, displaced maybe is not a great word. It's kind of the technical word, Robbie, you know, IDPs, but I don't know, these folks, their homes have been leveled. Can you imagine waking up, going to work, and a missile hits your house or your city, and you sleep your life.

Displaced is the only word we tend to use, but it's a horrific happening in your life. So all of these people God cares about, and we've been blessed to rescue a lot of people in each area. And as I sit here today, I just returned from out of the country for over a month, and I do some flying around the states, I'm preparing for another operation in the continent of Africa, and some of our team members are going there. So I'm looking over all that everybody's doing, and I'm just praising the Lord, because I don't want to get down about it. You start watching the videos that I see every day from people who are being burned and beheaded to realize that we can't give up. We got to keep working and then look for the highlight of success. Even today, I was talking to one of our director of operations, I'm sorry I'm getting off course here, but he said, hey, Mark, we've seen a lot. He's like, but our team just captures the video. It's just really hard.

And he's like, I don't know if we should share it internally or not, because it's so difficult to watch. And it's people who are literally their heads are set on fire, Robbie. And these are innocent people. These aren't criminals. These aren't gang members. These are people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it doesn't matter about age.

It doesn't matter about gender. Evil people in the world just torture people, torture innocent people. And it's demonic.

We continue the conversation. I said, isn't it incredible that you can see the same ruler of these people in Haiti, for instance, or the same ruler of the people in Niger or Nigeria, or the same people that are ruling in Ukraine, in Russia, invasion. All of that, you see the same signs of intelligence, and it's how they treat people. It's what they do to people, right? And it makes you realize that the devil is the prince of the air, right, for this time, where scripture refers to that. And he's clearly having his way, and he's not just having his way in one little spot in the world.

He's having his way all around the world. Yeah, it's actually horrifying. But, you know, I find it fascinating with the technology that we have today. I guess we can see the similarities in these different areas of what's going on, but it seems like the same patterns, right? Yeah, it is.

It is. We're going to get to what we're going to talk about here in a second. But even I was reading in 2 Kings 18 and 19, and what a situation of war for Hezekiah, who's literally been circled up by his enemy, you know, Sennacherib and the Assyrian kings. You know, they've taken everything. They've taken northern kingdom of Israel, and now they're coming for him. And just the way that they operate against God's people is so similar to what we see in wars today. An enemy comes into an innocent land doesn't mean it's perfect, but as they come in, they begin to deport children, they begin to put children in other parts of the world. You know, they they take down any fortifications in certain areas, they begin to lie to them with propaganda, they begin to instill fear.

And then they they begin to discredit who they are as a group of people. That's like, you know, Satan has not changed his tactics from the Old Testament to 2023. If we even look at the current wars in our in our world, he is he is doing the same tactics and in the world. There is clearly good and evil. And we as a people have to choose which side we're going to be on. And honestly, I feel like when you don't choose to be on the good when you don't choose to fight for good. And take us a position of well, I'm not going to be involved.

I'm not doing anything. You're really on the position of evil. Because evil is banging the door down right now.

And I mean, I'm sure everybody in their their generation felt the same. But right now I am just looking at content intelligence videos in the front, you know, personal experience through my own eyes of the severity, the severity of evil. And it's, it's past politics, people like I know there's evil in politics.

I get it. I get I see what's happening in our own country. But there's another level that's happening.

And it is it is through terrorism, it is through vigilantes, it is through cartels, it is through traffickers, it is through armies, it is sheer disregard for human life and for God. And it's time for God's people to get on the good side and really be on the good side. Right. And that's really one of the reasons I love this show is it gives people an opportunity of what it's like to stand up and what it's like to be counted. And, you know, both stand up in prayer and stand up when possible, to volunteer or to help financially and all those things. And so yeah, I mean, we do that.

You just said it. And it is we have to pray, I guess, if somebody's listening, like, you know, they're, they're pumped up listening to us and saying, Okay, what do I do? What do I do? You know, Mark, what do I do? I'm gonna, you know, email lantern and I want to help. I tell you what, don't email us until you pray. And I mean, until you like, pray against evil, and you not just pray about what God wants you to do.

Yeah, you know, he wants you to wake up every day and make your body a living sacrifice. So pray about combating evil, I think of like, go back to second Kings 19. All hezekiah had to do was he, you know, he touched base with Isaiah and Isaiah say, Hey, God's already said this, and hezekiah is like, Okay, we're praying, right? And it's through prayer. God sends one angel. Not, you know, he could have, you know, when he was being tempted by the devil, he could have been, he could have called on legions of angels, he could have called on legions of angels, which 12 regions, which are 6000 per legion in Roman terms. So we're talking 72,000 angels Jesus could have called on, but instead, he only needed one to kill 185,000 of the Assyrian army who was coming against Judah, right.

And that happened through prayer. And we have we need we need God, we we don't need politics. I'm telling you, we need, we need the angel of the Lord, we need his army to push the angel of the Lord. We need his army to push back in the spiritual realm, we need to push back evil right now, because it's, it's a big Assyrian army right now. And we need an angel that takes out 185,000 of our enemies.

Yeah, and I and I love the way that lanterns diversified, in that all these things are huge, right? There's a huge amount of exploitation, there's a huge amount of persecution, and there's an unbelievable amount of people to be in displaced by war. But in each case, you know, God gives us a little shovel to work with in all these areas.

You're right, I'm sorry, I've got off. Hey, so the human trafficking, we'll just take each side of each part of what we do in our terminology, we call them our lanes of effort, our rescue lanes of effort. So before the break, if we want to talk about the human trafficking side, there, there's incredible, positive stories I want to share.

Okay. One last week, we arrested a guy in Haiti, who was, you know, posing as a pastor, he raped a girl got her pregnant, he was wanted, and through the incredible work of one of our analysts who digitally exploited him, including our team on the ground, who we've worked with for seven years now, and our director of operations, over that country through their incredible effort and work and patience. That guy was arrested.

And he is, you know, it's hard to get arrested in Haiti, I'm not gonna lie, like, that's a really hard thing to do, especially in the climate right now. But we were able to do it. And so we're grateful. Another positive story I'd like to tell you, which is a little bit about the aftercare. So we'll jump from like the arrest and rescue moment to the aftercare situation. We had a teenager of Venezuelan nationality, and through, you know, seduction, deception, she was put into exploitation and social network. For adult adults, it was known as the coca.

And for those who are Spanish, you know, I'm sorry, I pronounce that probably wrong. But later, what happened is she started getting threats if she didn't offer sexual services inside of certain areas. And so once we found that out, we began to work with the unit that we have in place, plus the unit in that area who's responsible for jurisdiction authority and brought her into a place of rescue. The difficulty then was recuperation and the continuation of the rescue.

And some orders do a great job talking about that, you know, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. Listen, rescue happens at the moment that the girl is removed out of crimes way to rescues happening later that day when, you know, you're breaking down the barriers of hey, we're going to take care of you're going to be okay to the rescue still happening a year later, where this girl is needing therapy and a job and home and education. Right. So it just starts the rescue process at that moment.

Well, we got to go to a break real quick. But when we come back, of course, we got lots more. Later and rescue is a USA based organization that conducts international rescue operations for people suffering from human trafficking. lantern specializes in sending former US 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. lantern rescue has developed rapidly to combat trafficking. lantern 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 lantern rescue and today's update on. Wow, there's so much we may not get through the the exploitation part of this. But you know, as I was listening to Mark in that last segment, I couldn't help but note the relationship to the what's called the cups of redemption that happened in Exodus, chapter six, when God told Moses, you know, I'm going to take the cup of redemption. Moses, you know, I'm going to take you out of Egypt. And then he says, you know, essentially, I'm going to take the slavery out of you, which took him, you know, 40 more years, right. So the first step of redemption is you got to get you out of slavery, but then it takes a lot more work to get you get the slavery out of you. And then interestingly, it would be the third cup that Jesus offered us at the at the Last Supper, that that is actually the cup of redemption that happens after they come out of slavery.

And it happens after the slavery comes out of them. And that's that's a long, wonderful process that that God's at work in everybody's life, but really through this right, Mark. Yeah, I love the way you focused in on that. That's, that's so true. In fact, Robbie, we should probably, we should always keep it recording between our shows, because I love our conversation.

In the break. People would do this is kind of like, we say a lot, because we're trying to update people. And then we take a breath. And the two of us really, you know, we go, Oh, man, God's good. This is how God works, you know, is. So thanks for sharing that. And that's, that's so exactly right.

I have another operation, I guess I'll put this out. This is one to pray about our director of operations in one of our countries in Africa. He is, they've been working really hard to put together the necessary documentation, because we have the intelligence, put together the necessary training. And this is the whole operational security port, because we have known mine location.

So now people, I think maybe people have seen this on Instagram. You scroll on Instagram, and you've seen something about a mine in Africa, which is slam full of people, right? I mean, it's like, there's thousands upon thousands in a space that only should have a few hundred, much less have anybody because the working conditions are so bad, right? We have really strong intelligence that we need your prayer about because we need to remove a large a large number of miners, small children out of three locations. And, you know, to do that, we've got to have paperwork signed by these governments at a ministry level, like a high level.

And you know, what happens in those cases, you may have, it's difficult because there's people on these minds, right businessmen, and politics comes into play and all that. So we want to be able to make arrests and shut them down. We don't want to just go in and pull kids out. And then they just replace those children, right? If we don't have to, we really want to see it from start to finish, through the justice system.

So pray with us. Because we're talking about over 100 children. We're talking about children around the age of well under the age of 14. Who are working in blistering temperatures all day long, busting rock. These are also gold mines. These are dangerous holes there.

You know, and then what I've experienced in my past in some of the Middle East countries, these type of child labor situations is they work these 1214 hour days. And then if they're girls, they're they're sold in the night. I mean, you know, they're propped up through the night and sold to customers. They're taken up on the street.

And the lifespan is not long at all. So we need people to pray specifically for that. Wow. I had never even thought about that if you get all those, those kids out of there, they're just going to replace them. Yeah, yes, we don't if we don't bring in immigration law, you know, those who inspect these type of operations for immigration, a false fault that if we don't train those and say, Hey, first of all, you know, find out if they take the money on the table, or are they just lacking the training or the resource to actually examine and investigate, you know, then, which it's a it's all over the place with that answer, actually, but we're going to fix it. That's our job. That's what later does, you know, and we're not just going to come in and ask kids, even as Americans or foreigners, we're going to fix the problem. We're going to train immigration, we're going to find out who's doing what is responsible. We're going to arrest immigration people if we have to we aggressive, we arrest immigration people all the time, all the time around the world.

And God bless those governments who don't who go Yeah, that's a corrupt agent officer arrested. So we like to, you know, fix that problem, then we have to fix the labor laws or investigate and make sure they're in place. Then we have to arrest the people who own these minds who are managing the mind, we have to penalize them in some way. And then we then we're taking the children out as well. And you know, the whole the therapy and work through social services to take care of them. So it's a big, big, you know, job, but that's what we do, you know, and we want to all the more reason to be praying, right? Like, Oh, my gosh, yeah, we do. We need prayer because but not just the actual operation itself, which is dangerous enough and difficult enough.

It's just all the details, all the fine, crossing the T's dot in the eye detail, logistics and authority to do this, and to do it right and do it well. And then to go, Okay, we did this. Now, you know what, we're coming back in two months. And we're gonna we're gonna check and make sure there's no criminal out, there's no minors, there's no minor labor happening here.

Wow. So if I jump from there, to a Spanish country, we've got a team in country right now, Ren Allen, they're all in that spot, doing and utilizing SWAT members, plus our undercover teams there. And we are going to be really closing in, we've got about, we've got over 10 cases. 10 investigations opened, and we're dialing in on each one of them. We have one that we we can't wait to report on. It happened in June, I'm going to hold off, we had to hold off because we were still trying to find a certain number of girls. We didn't want to release that news so early because it would affect what the investigation was still happening.

But now that's closed. And so for sure, rather the next week or two weeks, Ren and them will be doing a show about that operation. It's been it's in the press releases now.

And yeah, hands off, man, we're just we're so proud of our team and everybody that worked so hard on those cases. And then include a lot of minor girls who have been placed into incredible aftercare options and Ren was actually following through on that aftercare. But as I mentioned, we have a fairly large training operation and operation happening in Spanish country. And that was Ren actually confirming some questions we had about the undercover work that's happening tonight. So you know, pray for tonight being it's already happened by the time the show comes out.

So pray for our team and the steps that they take tonight because this, this is not a local this is not a local game. This is this is a international cartel that's crossing over from Mexico into other Spanish countries. So we've been niching away at them for over a year now.

That's almost true. We're throwing in their flesh, we got to be. So one of the operations we did last year, we were unable to rest to the people in that particular one, and they're part of that larger organization. And so they have continued their criminality, but I think we feel like we're going to get them here soon. So I'm just so proud of the countries we're working in our task force, everybody law enforcement, nobody's given up ever, you know, nobody's giving up and that that's something really important to when we talk about human trafficking.

Every country we're in, even if it's a poor country, even if they're, yeah, they got corruption, even if they are dysfunctional. Hey, I'm gonna say the people we're working with in the world, they're not giving up. Robbie, they're, they're trying their best. They're doing is they're working as hard as they can. Inside of the parameters that they have sometimes that's really hard to do, but they're not giving up. And we're we're not organization that's giving up or even struggling with that. Everybody is just going at it as hard and as fast as they possibly can. But here in the States, and in our countries that we work in, and I'm proud of that.

I know we've probably got like two minutes left, right, right. Let's just we'll step away from human trafficking, although there's so much there. We'll step away from human trafficking and just step real quick into recovering the recovery extraction of the persecuted people. And right now, we have a lot of requests, but I'm just going to bring to front one family who has suffered greatly in Afghanistan. You know, there's hundreds and hundreds of families that we've rescued there. Many organizations have done incredible work.

They've spent powerless nights staying up doing all they can traveling, doing a lot. We're still doing it. We have not forgotten Afghanistan. We've not forgotten people there, the Christians in the Middle East, and we're still doing it.

So a lot of people quit and left. We've not. And we have a family with three children, beautiful kids all under the age of 10. A mom and dad, this gentleman served, very much served our country. I don't know how he was over. I don't know how he was missed, except so many were but this guy above many should have been should have been pulled to the States.

And you guys know I'm really particular about who I say that about. So this guy really should have been taken care of. And so we're helping him and in a way that we're so fortunate to be able to do with our foreign partners there and team in Pakistan, Afghanistan. We're able to work with governments to get the necessary documentation and visas where some can't we can, we're able to get them everything that's required in order to put them into hopefully a refugee program, if not in the state in Europe. And we're closing in on one that we're all would be excited to see him and his children in a safe place for the people still particularly, you know, there's a lady that we are safe housing right now she we rescued her out of Afghanistan, but her life is a continuing threat because she was a wrote poetry about women's rights. She became very well known Afghanistan and right now she's been hiding.

And she stopped writing poetry that she's still so vocal and still disseminating it in a way that literally she writes it and get to printed and just posted around tech, you know, cities. And if, you know, obviously, the Taliban or even Muslims would love to remove, remove her life. And we need to pray for her, you know, we'll call her Mary pray for Mary.

She is 30, right around age 30, not married, and doing all that she can to bring awareness to the situation of what women are facing right now in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. Wow, I hate we're out of time, Mark, but you can see we got a lot. I mean, you can go back and listen to this episode again and see all the places that we can be praying and standing up against evil.

Of course, if the Lord puts it on your heart, by all means, go to lanternrescue.org. Thank you so much for your prayers and for listening today. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, brother. This is the Truth Network.