Were 2,100 sex trafficked children rescued by US Marines? Fact Check

Various online messages claim that the United States Marines conducted an operation within the United States that rescued 2,100 caged children that had been sex trafficked.

FALSE

Some variants of the rumours claim that the operation led to 18,000 arrests. Other variants claim it was actually 35,000 children that had been rescued. Most versions of these messages claim the children were located in tunnels underneath various states in the United States, including New York and California.

Examples of this claim on social media are below.

The United States Marines, under orders from President Trump from a new Executive Order, rescued 2,100 caged, trafficked kids ranging in ages of 3-17 years old. And Marines made over 18,000 pedophile arrests. (Think I’m wrong? Google it.)
Question: Did you even know about it? Of course not. You were too busy being distracted about wearing a mask.
(So, do you still think this is just all about a virus???). Things are going on that you don’t even know about. Might want to get a clue. But the media isn’t telling you. (Thank you, Marines, Semper Fi!)

And

Over 35,000 Malnourished, Caged Children Rescued Out of US Tunnels by Military

The claims are part of an entirely baseless and evidence lacking conspiracy theory that appears to be started (for the most part) in October 2019 (and again in March 2020) by a conspiracy theorist called Timothy Charles Holmseth.

Holmseth uploaded a video to YouTube in March 2020 titled “2100 CAGED KIDS IN TUNNELS RESCUED BY US MARINES IN CALIFORNIA – MOST BELIEVED TO BE ABDUCTED BY CPS” claiming to have uncovered the details of a US Marine-led operation conducted within the United States that resulted in 2,100 children being rescued from tunnels underneath California (Holmseth originally made these claims back in October 2019.) He asserts that most of the children had initially been abducted by CPS.

However, throughout the video, Holmseth provides no evidence of his claims. Instead, Holmseth claims to have an anonymous contact at the Pentagon who has given him this information, and that “the truthfulness of the report will be received and accepted by the viewer through the Holy Spirit“.

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Holmseth makes a number of other outlandish and entirely baseless claims throughout the video, including the claim that he is the only journalist authorised to report exclusive content from the “Pentagon Pedophile Task Force” (a spokesperson for the Pentagon told us through email that no such department exists.) and that he had previously been kidnapped and imprisoned by the “Deep State”. He also claims to have uncovered a worldwide trafficking operation being conducted through the Ukraine Embassy in Washington DC.

While the claims come thick and fast throughout the video, the logic and reasoning does not. While Holmseth asserts that the rescue operation comes courtesy of President Trump’s work to rescue victims of sex trafficking (at one point saying that Trump and Melania “want the world to know” about the CPS abductions) he offers no explanation as to why the Trump administration or any federal entity has not announced details about such an operation.

Not only has there not been any announcement as to the operation, but entities that would naturally be involved in such a rescue operation have told us through email that no such operation has ever taken place. A spokesperson for California Child Services told us that they were “not aware” of any such operation, and a spokesperson for the Department of Defense told us via email that they were not even aware “of any such allegations relating to children being held underground“.

Similarly, while Holmseth and many messages peddling this conspiracy are quick to chastise the mainstream media for their “silence” about the operation (an oft used technique to assert or imply that the media is part of the alleged “Deep State”) they fail to address the reality that no such public announcement by the White House or any other entity regarding the operation exists.

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And perhaps inevitably, no explanation as to why there have been no first-hand accounts from any of the presumably thousands of first responders (Marines, city authorities, medial staff, police) that would have to be directly involved in such an operation.

Holmseth and his anonymous Pentagon contact appear to be the only source for this outlandish claim, and his “reporting” had made its way to a number of different conspiracy driven websites and social media memes (though many have changed the 2,100 children reported by Holmseth to 35,000.)

It is, ultimately, another baseless conspiracy that ties into the larger “QAnon” niche of conspiracies that claim there exists large, underground child sex slave rings orchestrated and managed primarily by well-known businessmen, celebrities and (usually Democratic) politicians, and that President Trump is working to take down and reveal these operations. Such conspiracies gained traction after the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, that claimed Democratic politicians were using the term “pizza” in emails to covertly refer to child pornography or child sex trafficking.

We rank these claims as false.