Here’s your periodic reminder that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—the agency tasked with safeguarding America from terrorism and other grave threats—is also in the business of policing private sexual acts between adults.
An 80-year-old man was recently arrested in Plattsburgh, New York, as part of an ongoing Homeland Security investigation into potential prostitution at a massage business. He was charged with the misdemeanor crime of patronizing prostitution in the third degree.
The arrest was made by deputies with the Clinton County Sheriff’s Office as they helped Homeland Security Investigations execute a federal search warrant at “an alleged prostitution enterprise operating as a massage parlor,” per a Sheriff’s Office press release. Further information is supposed to be released later by the Buffalo field office of Homeland Security Investigations.
The elderly man may have been a bonus bust in this operation, not the express point of it. But he’s far from the first person facing criminal charges because Homeland Security has decided to take an interest in stopping sex between consenting adults. (Or, one suspects, to police immigration under the auspices of policing sex.)
Homeland Security routinely teams up with local cops to police independent massage businesses, searching for signs of sex. Almost always, the targeted businesses are operated and staffed by Asian women.
The feds say they’re looking for human trafficking. But again and again, we see the flimsiest of evidence employed to justify this suspicion; again and again, we see stings that turn up nothing more than licensing violations or, at worst, prostitution arrests.
The women working at these businesses—the ones Homeland Security claims to be protecting—are often subjected to repeated intimate encounters with local and federal law enforcement officers or their informants (a situation made all the more perverse if authorities really believe these are victims of trafficking). Then they wind up arrested, out of work, and facing fines for prostitution, practicing massage without a license, and so on. They may also find their savings subject to asset forfeiture.
In “Operation Asian Touch,” for instance, Homeland Security agents had at least 17 sexual encounters with women working at Mohave County, Arizona, massage businesses. Afterward, women who agreed to paid sex acts were arrested and had their assets seized.
In the Florida massage parlor stings in which Homeland Security helped nab New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for solicitation, charges against Kraft and many other men arrested for solicitation were eventually dropped. But women providing massages and sex acts were still prosecuted, with some having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for “soliciting” these men to commit prostitution.
Workers arrested in these stings are often taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
Hellbound and Down 