A Viral Story Claims an ICE Worker Was Caught in a Child Sex Trafficking Sting. The Truth Is Much Stranger.

The way people are misconstruing this prostitution sting mirrors the way ICE tries to mislead us about deportation stings.

A man who reportedly does background checks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was arrested in a Bloomington, Minnesota, sex sting. But the story is being twisted—by people employing the same sort of despicable smear tactics we see from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

"Police in Bloomington, MN just announced that one of the guys they arrested in an underage sex trafficking sting was a background checker for ICE agents," the Minnesota House of Representatives Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Caucus posted on Bluesky yesterday. "He had a high security clearance in the Trump administration… and he was caught trying to abuse children. Sickening."

The post includes a clip from a Bloomington Police Department press conference. "This is the most disturbing arrest that we've had here," says Police Chief Booker Hodges in the video, holding up a picture of someone identified as Brashad Johnson. "He's a backgrounder for ICE, Homeland Security, and federal agencies.…We locked him up."

"Thank you to Minnesota's local law enforcement for keeping our communities safe and getting the worst of the worst off our streets," Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz posted on X about the sting.

News media and countless folks on social media have been running with the child sex trafficking narrative, using this story as an opportunity to dunk on the caliber of people employed by federal immigration agencies. "ICE is a child trafficking operation for the pedophiles of the regime," says one post on Bluesky. "An administration of pedophiles, for pedophiles," says another.

As much as I share folks' abhorrence at ICE generally, the ire and smirking here is misplaced. Minnesota politicians may be calling this a "sex trafficking sting," but—as is so often the case—it's just a vice operation aimed at adults looking to find other adults for sexual activity.

"Operation Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places" involved Bloomington police posing as sex workers and arresting those who allegedly took the bait.

The operation yielded 30 arrests. Of those, 28 people face misdemeanor charges. Two more people face felony charges because they have prior criminal records. No one was arrested on sex trafficking charges, though "one person who spoke with the undercover officers is now under investigation for potential sex trafficking," according to local news station KSTP.

(Hodges said at his press conference that finding even a potential sex trafficker is a "first" for the department's sex stings, which sort of gives the lie to the idea that these stings suppress anything but adult sex workers and their customers.)

Johnson is not an ICE employee but a Department of Defense contractor, according to KSTP.

Bloomington Police's press conference and post about "Operation Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places" are truly bizarre. The YouTube video of the conference opens with an elaborate skit, acted out by Bloomington cops, in which a scruffy dude on a couch books a date with a "sex worker" who is really a police officer. "Be careful who you're messaging this Valentine's Day," one man in a Bloomington police uniform says. "It could be us."

Chief Hodges—who spends part of the press conference singing "Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places" and most of it making quips about those arrested as he shows their mugshots—complains that ICE "interfered with our operation" because people were suspicious of meeting the undercover cops, thinking they might be ICE.

Hodges makes a big deal about stressing that his officers are not ICE. But the way police and politicians talk about people caught in prostitution stings sure mirrors the way the Trump administration talks about people caught in deportation stings.

DHS and ICE officials, and others in the Trump administration—including the president himself—routinely portray their immigrant roundup efforts as being aimed at "the worst of the worst," including "kidnappers, pedophiles," and "violent assailants." Again and again, it comes out that people being taken in and slated for deportation have no criminal records. Trump and his administration's descriptions of their deportation efforts don't match the reality.

And it's no wonder: Many people—including people who nominally support immigration enforcement crackdowns—are against aggressive tactics like we've been seeing from ICE. They don't like the idea of a massive mobilization of federal money and resources aimed at nabbing peaceful people guilty, at most, of minor immigration infractions.

We see the same thing happening with so-called sex trafficking stings.

Even people opposed to prostitution often balk at the idea that Homeland Security and the FBI should be used to stop it, or that tons of money and time should go toward arresting people who may be looking to privately and consensually hook up. So authorities have rebranded vice stings and prostitution busts as "sex trafficking stings" and "human trafficking operations." They say that by arresting sex workers and their clients, they're "finding victims" or "ending demand" for human trafficking. They use words like prostitution and trafficking interchangeably, and do nothing to correct impressions that their operations nab people for truly heinous crimes.

Authorities manufacture support for prostitution stings the same way the Trump administration manufactures support for its deportation raids. And neither are keeping anyone safe.

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Follow-Up: Arizona Drag Bill Passes Two Committees

Last Wednesday, this newsletter covered an Arizona bill that would make it a felony to bring your kid to a drag performance or let them be in a building where one was taking place. The House Judiciary and Rules committees have now advanced that measure, with votes of 6–3 and 5–2, respectively. Meanwhile:

Having muscled age-verification through last session, AZ Republicans are pushing forward even greater restrictions on sex, including banning porn entirely (HB 2900), threatening adult producers with warrantless AG inspections (HB 2133) and HB 2720, which would make purchasing sex a felony.

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-02-11T01:19:52.495Z

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In the News

Texas' latest "bounty hunter" abortion law will get its first test in court. Passed in December, it says anyone can bring a lawsuit against someone who "manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides" abortion pills to a Texas resident. "Last week, Jonathan Mitchell—one of the architects of the state's total abortion ban—filed a revised lawsuit against Dr. Remy Coeytaux on behalf of Jerry Rodriguez, who first sued the doctor in July for allegedly sending abortion pills to his partner, which she used to end her pregnancy," reports Jezebel. "In his updated claim, Rodriguez accuses Coeytaux of violating the new law, even though the alleged abortion took place before HB 7 passed." Rodriguez's suit also invokes the Comstock Act.

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On Substack

You can use artificial intelligence to write romance novels—but should you? Kathleen Schmidt at Publishing Confidential, dissects The New York Times' article "The New Fabio is Claude" and the ethics of AI book writing:

Flooding the market with AI slop hurts the industry. More importantly, it hurts the self-publishing ecosystem. It even hurts the hybrid publishing ecosystem. When you have endless self-published titles and, say, half of them are "written" by AI, discoverability becomes impossible. Using fake names and claiming to have written 200 books in a year when you really only came up with familiar concepts in romance is deceiving readers. You're collecting money, but you're not doing the work. It is downright insulting to actual writers who sometimes spend years writing and querying before they are published.

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Read This Thread 

When a sitting representative refers to the Super Bowl halftime show as "pornography," people should use that to reflect on how they and other representatives are simultaneously working to ban, censor, and restrict "pornography" and what that actually means

— Kat Tenbarge (@kattenbarge.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T18:52:11.532Z

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More Sex & Tech 

• Is it constitutional for the government to limit the number of sex offenders that can live in a house?
• "I found that xAI is indeed raising Section 230 as a defense to liability for Grok's bikini pics," posts Stanford's Riana Pfefferkorn on Bluesky. See the filing here. (Whether Section 230 applies to generative AI outputs is still an unanswered question and a matter of much debate.)
• AI systems will "inevitably form senses of self," said Amanda Askell of Anthropic. She's here to guide at least one of them, Claude, in the right direction.
• Is AI just creating more work for us? Kate Lindsay at Embedded makes that case.

Comments

[Don't look at me! ( Is the war over yet?)]

As much as I share a decidedly minority of folks' abhorrence at ICE generally..

FTFY

[But SkyNet is a Private Company]

I thought this was gonna be like King Kong vs Godzilla - which does she hate more? ICE vs Sex Stings

[Don't look at me! ( Is the war over yet?)]

When a sitting representative refers to the Super Bowl halftime show as “pornography,”…

Poor choice of words , but men humping one another is not material meant for broadcast television.

[mad.casual]

Why you gotta be an anti-MSM phobia-addled homophobe, bigot? Is it because you're secretly gay? There was plenty of MF and FF humping action going on too.

[Use the Schwartz]

"The YouTube video of the conference opens with an elaborate skit, acted out by Bloomington cops"

Gay.

[Rick James]

You can use artificial intelligence to write romance novels—but should you? Kathleen Schmidt at Publishing Confidential, dissects The New York Times' article "The New Fabio is Claude" and the ethics of AI book writing:

Flooding the market with AI slop hurts the industry. More importantly, it hurts the self-publishing ecosystem. It even hurts the hybrid publishing ecosystem. When you have endless self-published titles and, say, half of them are "written" by AI, discoverability becomes impossible. Using fake names and claiming to have written 200 books in a year when you really only came up with familiar concepts in romance is deceiving readers. You're collecting money, but you're not doing the work. It is downright insulting to actual writers who sometimes spend years writing and querying before they are published.

My advice to upper middle class white people whose jobs are threatened by AI: Learn to ChatGPT.

[mad.casual]

Passed in December, it says anyone can bring a lawsuit against someone who "manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides" abortion pills to a Texas resident.

You do realize that I can't mail a handgun to a family member in TX, except *maybe* as a historical artifact, right? Forget mailing it to someone I don't know, forget whether I know they're actually going to use it to end a life, human or other. The act of mailing a handgun to a box in the state, regardless of who owns it, is illegal. And not even "civil liability" "illegal", straight up "The FBI and the State get to argue over which one of them is going to charge and imprison you." illegal. Even UPS and Fedex don't/won't deliver handguns.

The post hoc argument is fair. Everything else is a pretty unequal argument in defense of a woman's right to murder. Rather unarguably moreso because the vast majority of handgun owners don't use them to shoot people.

[KeninTX]

The idea that a doctor in another state can send a controlled drug across state lines to a patient they've never examined is kind of amazing.

That the drug in question has a history of MAJOR side-effects in a high-percentage of patients only makes the Texas argument that much stronger.

The way I read the "anyone can file the lawsuit" is a way to avoid issues of standing - having cases thrown out because the party bringing the case lacks standing to do so.

[Quicktown Brix]

Operation Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places

Seriously?

[KeninTX]

Yes, the name was coined by the chief sh he could sing the song in the press release video with the sketch his officers acted out for...

Chief is a frustrated drama club graduate...

[mad.casual]

AI systems will "inevitably form senses of self," said Amanda Askell of Anthropic. She's here to guide at least one of them, Claude, in the right direction.

A pale-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Scots... person... is there to guide at least one AI along its journey of discovery and self-identity? What could possibly go wrong?

[Eeyore]

The first clue that a novel is AI generated slop is that it is boring meaningless word drivel - explain to me how that is different from a human generated romance novel?

[MasterThief]

I read 50 Shades to see what women were going crazy about. The writing was terrible and often boring. The most clever and interesting parts were email exchanges.

[damikesc]

...or any Reason article...

[GOD OF PENGUIN ISLAND]

Leftists lie.

[Warren]

You're collecting money, but you're not doing the work. It is downright insulting to actual writers who sometimes spend years writing and querying before they are published.

Oh boo hoo hoo poor you

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

"Rodriguez's suit also invokes the Comstock Act."

Where's Hank?

[InsaneTrollLogic (smarter than The Average Dude)]

Back in 1890.

[Longtobefree]

Well, damn.
The cops lied.
The democrats lied.
The media lied.
The web continued to lie.
Additionally, the sky is blue, water is wet, the sun rises in the east.

[Dillinger]

>>As much as I share folks' abhorrence at ICE generally

which folks?

[InsaneTrollLogic (smarter than The Average Dude)]

The blue hair nose ring set.

[damikesc]

The same foks who buy into the same bullshit ENB does.

I still remember her pimping for Mastodon a few years ago. What a pathetic loser.

[KeninTX]

So I read this...

"Even people opposed to prostitution often balk at the idea that Homeland Security and the FBI should be used to stop it, or that tons of money and time should go toward arresting people who may be looking to privately and consensually hook up."

And I'm trying to remember if I EVER heard about ICE or the FBI running prostitution stings? I've never heard about any that weren't run by local police departments, not the FBI or ICE or any federal agency...

What I HAVE heard of is OCE or the FBI stumbling into a sex trafficking network when the go after gang/drug cartel/etc operations, but running fake prostitution ads and cos-playing Chris Hansen? Naw, doesn't happen...