Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and a group of law enforcement officials on Thursday announced the arrest of six men as part of “Operation Summer Hurricane,” a multi-agency operation targeting online child predators in North Florida.
Two other individuals are being actively sought.
Uthmeier made the announcement in Apalachicola, in Franklin County. It’s a historic small town in the Panhandle located between Tallahassee and Panama City, perhaps known best for its oysters. Law enforcement officials said that such rural areas are known to child predators as “safer” places to hunt kids, but no longer.
“There is a perception in the pedophile community that if you want to see kids online that there are safe places to do so and there are places that are not so safe,” said Albert Willis, assistant agent in charge at the FDLE Tallahassee Regional Operations Center. Previous law enforcement stings have been held in more metropolitan areas of the state such as Tampa or Tallahassee, he said.
“We are setting a standard that the places you typically thought were okay to hunt kids, or solicit kids online, that is no longer the case,” Willis added.
“If you thought you were safe trying to solicit a child online in a place like Eastpoint or Apalachicola because your mind says that there’s not a big law enforcement presence there, it may not be a large, sophisticated agency, so it’s safer — we’re breaking that mold with this op[eration], and this will be the first of many more planned across the state … because the internet doesn’t care where you are and it provides these offenders a pathway to offend anywhere so we’ve had to adjust, and we’ve made that adjustment.”
The sting operation took place between July 10 and 12 and included a dozen state, local, and federal agencies, according to a press release issued by the attorney general’s office. That release said that a Homeland Security Investigations officer interviewed one of the men and learned that he is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico and placed a deportation detainer on him.
That arrest should dispel what he called “the narrative” that most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are actually peaceful individuals just trying to provide for their families, Uthmeier said.
“So, you hear the left, you hear the media try to spin the narrative, that people are just here wanting to pursue a good living. An honest living. And then, every time we do one of these stings, we end up pulling illegal aliens off the streets that are trying to molest and prey upon our kids,” he said. “So, no. It is not just people that are here wanting to work hard and raise a family. There are people here that have illicit motives that want to hurt our children.”
The Phoenix reported last month while the Trump administration’s push for mass deportations has led to a 31% increase in Florida of arrests of people with criminal convictions between May and June, the biggest jump, 86%, was of people without previous convictions or charges.
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