‘Sound of Freedom’ movie may be most important of the decade

By Michael Ashcraft –

“You are one of the men who rescues children, aren’t you?” little Miguel said to Special Agent Tim Ballard while munching a burger.

Ballard couldn’t answer. The fact was that he wasn’t a child-rescuer and Miguel’s rescue was only incidental. As an officer for Homeland Security on the Mexican border, all he did was bust purveyors and predators of child sex.

Busting bad guys was a worthwhile goal, and it was within a limited scope of the law for his mission at the time.

But the kids? American law didn’t adequately provide a way for rescuing them and reuniting them with their families.

As the new movie Sound of Freedom depicts, Ballard grew increasingly frustrated with being hamstrung in what he most wanted to do: rescue kids. Ultimately, he broke with Homeland Security and went rogue. He started his own non-profit specifically focused on setting kids free from sex slavery around the world.

Sound of Freedom is a riveting feature currently playing in theaters. The action-drama is not just entertaining. It’s important. It educates about the real and haunting horrors of a demonic fact that many Americans would rather know nothing about, the unsavory subject of modern human slavery. Catholic Review calls the movie a “weapon of mass instruction.”

Miguel and his sister, Rocio, got abducted by a Columbian former beauty queen under the guise of a talent search commission. Their father never saw them again after that first all-day “audition.”

What’s surprising is that much of the plot of Sound of Freedom is facts-based. The real-life hero Tim Ballard is depicted solidly by Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and portrayed Edmond Dantes in the The Count of Monte Cristo.

Miguel, Rocio and a band of other child victims are spirited away from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, by boat to Cartagena, where they are separated. Miguel – whom his owners re-christen El Oso Teddy – gets separated from his sister and is taken to Tijuana, where he is rented out to pedophiles.

When a rich American pervert “buys” him and attempts to bring him into the United States with a phony passport, he gets caught by the quick-thinking, quick-acting Tim Ballard.

Ballard could take satisfaction with a long and storied career of busting some of the worst monsters on the planet. But his frustration grew because the law restricted more interventions on behalf of such children.

Little Miguelito, wonder-eyed, looked up at the man who saved him while he enjoyed a hamburger and asked Ballard to save his older sister too.

It is his epiphany.

Ballard first asks for a week off to search for Rocio in Colombia. When his boss orders him home after a not-so-fruitful first week, Ballard quits and continues to his quixotic mission to save Miguel’s sister.

For all anybody knows, she’s already been moved to another country, perhaps Russia. But Ballard sticks with his gut instinct and continues to track her down. By working with a local cop and a cartel-boss-turned-good, he closes in on the beauty queen who first abducted the siblings in Honduras.

Sound of Freedom checks all the boxes on top notch thriller adventure. But is more. It offers a frightening glimpse into the haunting theme of child sex slavery.

The real Tim Ballard on Fox News says the current administration’s lax border policy helps the sex trafficking business. A trafficker will send an unaccompanied minor across with the border with a name and phone of a “sponsor,” who picks the kids up from Homeland Security, with no vetting as to the integrity of the sponsor.

“We are making millions of dollars for child traffickers because of these policies and hurting children in ways that will only later will be discovered,” Ballard said.

Ballard now runs a non-profit Operation Underground Railroad that has freed children in Colombia, Dominican Republic, and other nations where the malefactors find easy prey from unsuspecting parents who are desperate to break out of poverty.

Not surprisingly, his organization has been strongly criticized by liberal organizations like Vice News who show more concern for his vigilante justice than about the safety and well-being of children trapped in a sinister web of American demand and trafficking supply. Liberal media, like CNN and The Guardian, have resoundingly criticized Sound of Freedom. It’s hard to imagine why.

Sound of Freedom has been called the most important film of the decade. It’s important for Christians to see and become aware of what is going on in the darkest corners of the world and on the web. It can be hoped that predators and potential predators can see this film and have the blindness removed as to the true horrors of what they’re participating in.

This is no Disneyland fiction. Sound of Freedom offers bitter-biting reality.

The movie is not a tragedy. It is an epic of hope, a call to courage and prayer, the story of how one man, believing more in God than in his government, stood up to evil and overcame incredible odds to save children from the claws of evil.

The “sound of freedom” is the music Rocio makes that the children learn. Singing is what children should do. Their innocence should be conserved.

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About this writer: Michael Ashcraft is a financial professional in California.