We are special operations and intelligence community veterans.We counter human trafficking in the United States and globally.

We find organized slavery, child trafficking, and sexual exploitation built on force, fraud, and coercion.

We build the cases that take those organizations apart — and hand them to the people with the authority to end them.

Independent 501(c)(3) · Operating since 2017

We build the cases that stop trafficking organizations.

1
Build the case.
Take a situation from indication to evidence: pattern development, corroboration, and documentation to the standard a prosecutor requires. This is the slow, expensive part of counter-trafficking work and the part that is chronically underfunded.
2
Refer it.
Completed cases are handed to law enforcement and prosecutors, who hold the authority to arrest and charge. ATLAS supports that process and does not substitute for it.
3
Support what follows.
Coordination with aftercare organizations and treatment providers, because prosecution alone does not restore anyone.

Doing only the first is triage. Doing only the second abandons the person in front of you. We do both.

The jurisdictional gap

Trafficking organizations operate across cities, states, borders, financial systems, and online platforms. The evidence needed to build a case is often scattered across those same boundaries.

Complex trafficking cases routinely cross jurisdictions, while no single agency has unlimited investigative capacity. Some cases therefore fall into the gap between what is known and what can actually be developed into evidence.

ATLAS works in that gap. We develop the case and refer it to the agency with the authority to investigate, arrest, and prosecute.

The same problem exists internationally, where jurisdiction and evidence may be fragmented across countries. ATLAS works across borders for that reason.

The cases we work

ATLAS works cases involving forced labor, commercial sexual exploitation, and other forms of exploitation through force, fraud, coercion, or control — including trafficking that develops from smuggling situations.

The work runs on two timelines. Some partner-referred cases involving missing or exploited children move in hours. Organizational cases can take months, and end when the operation loses its capacity to take anyone.

Counter-trafficking is a joint effort

No single organization ends trafficking. The work requires patrol officers, federal law enforcement, prosecutors, analysts, clinicians, and the aftercare organizations that carry the longest part of the burden.

ATLAS is a tactical specialist within that community. We contribute case development capacity, and methods we developed are now used beyond ATLAS. We hold no jurisdiction and seek none. Our work is measured by what our partners are able to do with it.

$3B in trafficking-linked revenue and market value disrupted since 2017.

Disruption is estimated from the combined operating revenue and market value of the organizations and entities implicated in cases we developed, measured at the time of referral. It reflects value denied to those operations, not funds recovered or seized.

Who does this work

Everyone who operates for ATLAS comes from United States special operations or the intelligence community. That background is the entry requirement, not the qualification.

We recruit almost entirely from within our own network — people our personnel deployed with, trained with, or served alongside. A résumé and two interviews cannot tell you how someone performs at hour thirty of a bad week, and we don’t find that out on a live case.

Selective recruiting from an already selected population. Selection applied twice.

We built this without asking for money. That has a ceiling.

For nearly ten years ATLAS kept a deliberately small public footprint and ran almost no fundraising. Missions came first, and the work was carried by volunteers and by a global security network our people already had. A case that would cost a commercial provider fifty thousand dollars gets done here for ten, because the people involved already know the people who can do it.

That model proved something. It also caps what we can take on.

We are stepping into the open now because the constraint is no longer capability. It is scale.

Everyone trafficked is somebody’s child.

Adults included. The people in these operations have families who are still looking for them, and the work of getting them out is worth funding whether or not it makes a good story.

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We are special operations and intelligence community veterans.We counter human trafficking in the United States and globally.

We build the cases that stop trafficking organizations.

Build the case.

Refer it.

Support what follows.