Leer en Español
Domingo Emanuelli, Secretary of the Department of Justice, announced that his agency, together with the Office of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (HSI-ICE), is tracking child sex offenders.
His statements come after an increase in the number of minors who are victims of sex offenders in Puerto Rico. So far in 2021, the HSI-ICE rescued 60 victims, according to information from El Vocero.
“The type of abuse and illegal conduct against these children has advanced a lot in the networks, then ICE has such precise mechanisms to capture these offenders and what we do is that we work together and we have assembled a team to pursue these types of crimes and believe me, any sexual predator who tries through the networks to abuse or extort or somehow molest a child or a girl is going to be captured,” he said in statements to the local media.
For this reason, he assured that they will follow the trail of each one of the sexual aggressors of minors to put them under arrest.
“The team we have, although I cannot go into details, is very sophisticated and we will catch them, have no doubt,” Emanuelli said.
Meanwhile, Limary Cruz Rubio, press spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), told El Vocero that the agency has a proactive approach to identify perpetrators of sexual exploitation of minors, in addition to the production of child pornography.
“For fiscal year 2020, the FBI opened 3,351 cases of sexual exploitation of minors and arrested 1,613 people in the United States, including Puerto Rico. A total of 1,410 victims were identified. Meanwhile, for fiscal year 2019, 3,070 cases were opened and 2,300 people were arrested, and more than 2,450 victims were identified,” she said.
The official pointed out that the “Crime Against Children” initiative focuses on four main categories: kidnapping of minors, online sexual exploitation, child sex trafficking, sexual contact of minors, from which follows the production of child pornography, sextortion and sex tourism of minors, distribution and possession of child pornography.
