“We have a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), however about 90% of drugs are legal or have some type of legal use, yet we spend double digit billions of dollars a year fighting what is the illicit sale of legal commodities. We have the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), however, tobacco, alcohol and firearms are all legal. And yet, we spend billions a year fighting the illicit sale of tobacco, alcohol, and firearms. The 13th amendment (and a host of other laws) deems 100% of human trafficking illegal. Yet, where is our counter-human trafficking agency?”
Nic McKinley is the founder of nonprofit DeliverFund, an organization he started to combat human trafficking. He used his experience as a United States Air Force Pararesumen and an officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to inform their intelligence collection efforts to support their law enforcement partners.
DeliverFund provides actionable intelligence to their law enforcement partners, and many of their employees have spent their entire backgrounds dismantling illicit networks overseas against violent extremists in high threat environments. Moving into the private nonprofit sector, the organization implements these same strategies against human traffickers.
On this episode of ClearedCast, we talk about his journey through the military, working intelligence for three letter agencies, and how listeners can pivot careers by reinventing themselves every five years.
MicKinley was a USAF Pararescuemen, where Air Force Special Operations Command and Air Combat Command operators are tasked with recovery and medical treatment of personnel in combat environments. After transitioning, he did brief stint in Hollywood, and was eventually recruited by the CIA, focusing on CI and OPSEC as a project manager in high threat areas.
Feeling a call to service, he was drawn to the federal space, but eventually saw that the government’s goals did not match up with his personal passions. While deployed overseas, he was informed with intelligence on a human trafficker, but didn’t have anywhere to escalate this piece of intelligence – he saw a lack of resources in the human trafficking space and wanted to solve this huge problem.
His experience in the government, the private sector, software and data brought all this together for the mission of using intelligence to combat human trafficking – DeliverFund also provides leadership for the International Human Trafficking Analysis Center (iHTAC), a consortium of companies to serve as the central collection and dissemination platform for human trafficking intelligence.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline maintains one of the most extensive data sets on the issue of human trafficking in the US. Since its inception in 2007, they have identified 82,301 cases of human trafficking, and 164,839 victims were identified in these cases.
Learn more about DeliverFund’s efforts at DeliverFund.org.
