Continued from September 2026 blog
Shortly after its release on July 4, multiple former employees came forward to accuse Ballard himself of sexual assault and trafficking, including during sting operations. According to the women, Ballard would use a “couples ruse” during stings, coercing them into acting as his romantic partner so that traffickers wouldn’t suspect him. They said that he would assault them while demanding they “remain in character” and play their part as one half of a “kinky couple.”
Later revelations included that the Department of Homeland Security would not verify Ballard’s claim that he had worked there; that members of law enforcement saw his sting operations as stunts to lure donations; and that some operations resulted in more harm to victims. According to a report last year, those instances included “an orphanage in Haiti where OUR sent children it purportedly rescued, and at which those children were raped and subjected to forced abortions.”
The year he resigned, Form 990 documents show that Ballard was drawing a $566,993 salary from the nonprofit.
Today, the CEO is Derek Benner, who is drawing a salary of $413,387, saying in his most recent letter to donors that he “owes those we serve to remain lean.” Benner came to the organization with a background in conducting sting operations of a different kind.
Benner spent a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, including as executive associate director of Homeland Security Investigations, and before that, the deputy executive associate director. During his tenure, the agency set up a fake university in Michigan to lure foreign nationals who wanted to extend the length of time they could stay in the country by obtaining student visas. Officials named the school University of Farmington, after the office space it used in Farmington Hills. “Operation Paper Chase” resulted in the arrests of 250 students in early 2019, most of whom left the U.S. voluntarily.
ACCORDING TO THE MOST RECENT Our Rescue annual report, the group in 2024 worked with 228 law enforcement agencies and conducted operations in 27 countries and all 50 U.S. states. It ran 195 rescue missions and assisted in 1,969 global arrests.
Its grant to provide legal services follows the administration’s award of a no-bid $150 million contract to the small Texas law firm Burke Law Group to perform the same work. The law firm has just 24 attorneys, only two of whom have expertise in immigration and asylum cases. The practice’s co-founder, Marcella Burke, was a Trump appointee at the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.
It appears that President Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller are taking particular aim at children as part of their anti-immigration campaign, rushing them through the legal process and ignoring their rights in detention. In multiple immigration courtrooms this summer, reporters have witnessed children too young to understand the gravity of the proceedings, such as a toddler with pigtails, who had no guardian with her, and who played in her chair as her pro bono lawyer spoke to the judge, then held his hand when they walked out.
Judge Martínez-Olguín also noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children by executing new agreements for the legal services at the heart of the lawsuit, “for example describing two agreements recently reached for a seeming fraction of the legal services to be provided across the country.” She ordered the administration to file a report “detailing their current and ongoing compliance” with her order.