Fixed it for you.

Everyone in America should stop what they are doing and read the explosive new New York Times expose “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” by NYT reporter Emily Baumgaertner. Share it far and wide.

But read at your peril: The stories are so heartrending, so visceral, you might have trouble sleeping tonight. It might also make you a bit angry.

Or more than a bit.

Thousands of girls as young as 11 from the foster care system are being trafficked on the streets of L.A.

They aren’t disappearing into the ether. They haven’t been “taken.” 

The Los Angeles Police Department knows exactly where they are. And what is happening to them. But thanks to well-meaning but obviously misguided progressive laws and policies, the LAPD is practically powerless to do anything about it.

In the words of one brazen and utterly unrepentant sex trafficker quoted in the article, they “run Figureroa now.”

No wonder he’s so arrogant: For “buying” and “selling” hundreds of girls — children —  as young as 11, he and his fellow sex-traffickers can expect to get upwards of six months in jail.

If that.

In the opening paragraph of the NYT story, we meet Ana, who at 19 has been on the streets of the Figueroa sex trafficking district for six years. The years have’t been easy years for Ana: She wears an ostomy bag under her skimpy outfit (in January) and is missing her front teeth.

NYT reporter Emily Baumgaertner described what she witnessed while embedded with local police investigators thusly:

“She surveyed the intersection in South Central Los Angeles, where preteens were hobbling in stilettos and G-strings,” Baumgaertner writes of Ana. “It was a Tuesday night this January, and Ana knew that most of the girls longed for a coat or gloves — anything to keep them warm — but covering up was not an option. Their eyes were cast down, but their hands waved mechanically at every car, angling for another customer to help meet their traffickers’ quotas.”

“Ana was working, too, but the years had worn down any visceral anxiety into something more like resignation,” Baumgaertner explained.

“By now, Ana had grown accustomed to the protocols of the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States,” she added.

Wait. Let’s get this straight: The NYT is telling us that there is a 50-block radius in L.A. where underage girls are openly trafficked?

The entire article is full of terrible and dreadful revelations like the following:

Figureroa’s sex trafficking industry has flourished so much, a cottage industry of goods and services has grown to serve it.

“Amid boarded-up storefronts were a few that catered specifically to the trade: a smoke shop with the banner ‘free Magnum condom with any purchase’ and a lingerie store named — in cursive — Sluts.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

Figureroa (The Blade) has grown exponentially over the past six years.

“Over the years, the Blade had become much busier than when Ana started: more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch. Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

Long-term public school closures caused this crisis.

“For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode. Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked. Teachers who would ordinarily follow up on absences or report signs of neglect could not.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

The police are hamstrung by budget cuts (Defund the Police).

“The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

“As trafficking grew, the means to deal with it shrank. In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem. According to Navarro, the 77th Street Division was supposed to have six investigators at Armendariz’s rank in its vice unit. Instead, she was the only one.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

2021.

During the height of the progressive defund-the-police mania.

The police are hamstrung by progressive criminal justice policies.

“Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: “We run Figueroa now,” he said.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

“Soon every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama,” Baumgaertner revealed. “By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

Blood boiling yet?

Buckle in.

Children in California’s foster care system are being hunted by sex traffickers

“To Ana’s mild surprise, no one from the child-welfare department seemed to come looking for her, either. She wondered if they were relieved to be dealing with one fewer foster kid. It was true that California’s foster care system was buckling under the weight of demand. There were too many children, too few good homes and a caseworker turnover so high that it was nearly impossible to keep track of kids who went missing.

More than half of the underage girls pulled from the Blade turned out to be from foster care. Even for those who were not runaways, the stories were the same: Traffickers had parked their cars in front of local group homes, waiting for a chance to approach. There were the “Romeo” types, who would flatter a girl, take her on a few dates and then send her out to the Blade. And then there were the “gorilla” types, who acquired a girl by brute force.

By the time Ana was 19, she had been put on the street by at least 17 people, she says — mostly men, a few women, all of them with fancy cars and strict rules. Ana’s face, neck and hands had been tattooed with their monikers, as if she were cattle.” — Emily Baumgaertner, The New York Times. October 26, 2025.

So many takeaways, here. So many things to be furious over.

Sex traffickers are preying on children in California’s foster care system by waiting outside shelters and luring them or outright snatching them away.

More than half of the children rescued from The Blade are from the foster care system.

These predators are thumbing their nose at law enforcement by openly tattooing these children.

It’s staggering. It’s appalling. It’s mind boggling.

How does California Governor Gavin Newsom sleep at night? To say nothing of his ambitions to become President of the United States in 2028.

Is this the type of leadership the nation can expect under President Newsom?

The valiant Officer Armendariz , who is profiled in the article “could not believe what traffickers were getting away with on the Blade.”

Who can?

The sex-trafficker arrested during the course of Ms. Baumgaertner’s investigation “faced up to six years in prison (though he ended up with 180 days in county jail and probation, plus an anger-management program).”

And that was the GOOD news.

“What can we do?” is the refrain of the progressives responsible for inflicting these policies on the public in the name of social justice, or equity, or some other thing. “We remove the girls from the streets, but they just go back.”

Oh, I don’t know: You could enforce the law.

Aren’t there laws against sex-trafficking underage girls in America? 180 days probation and anger management?

Why is this notorious sex trafficking corridor growing instead of being shut down?

Is California’s legal system out of its mind?

No wonder progressive anti-crimefighting heroes like Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and soon-to-be NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani stress the importance of social workers, community interventionists, and outreach coaches in place of police officers.

When police officers aren’t allowed to enforce the law, communities like L.A. and N.Y.C. are going to need all the help they can get.

Apparently, even in the estimation of the New York Times, it’s now the community’s responsibility to rescue the scores of exploited, trafficked, and traumatized young women when their government allows sex traffickers to operate openly with impunity.

The NYT is right: That would be impossible.

Why can’t we expect the legal system to enforce the law instead? That seems more reasonable.

This report should make every single American furious. Impoverished, at-risk, young children are being preyed upon. Like Philadelphia’s open-air drug market, the authorities know exactly who is perpetrating these crimes.

This travesty has a number of major causes, from defund the police, to long term school closures, to the failure of so-called “progressive” prosecutors to enforce the law. Why should cops arrest suspects who are being released after committing violent crimes 30, 40 times? It’s outrageous.

Why should citizens cooperate in prosecutions if they know the person they accused will be out of the street in a matter of hours?

You mean, the best L.A. can offer its foster daughters is one overwhelmed officer trying to make a difference and one dauntless, blessed do-gooder handing out fuzzy socks and hugs?

It’s time for California voters to demand better of their leadership.

This is massive failure on every level of government: City and state.

Donald Trump did not do this. The Democratic Party did this. Failed, absurd policy positions that defy all common sense and reason has brought L.A.’s trafficked girls to this dreadful impasse.

There should be protests in the streets over this outrage.

Elected officials should resign en masse.

Bet they won’t.

Californians need better leadership, better policies, and more accountability from their elected officials.

For trafficked girls haunting a forsaken stretch of L.A. real estate that has grown to a size of 50 blocks over the past few years, a changing of the guard can’t come soon enough.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)