Rising Lonestars interviewed McLenon County Sheriff Parnel McNamara to discuss her nomination to the RLS Top 10 in August 2022. Sheriff Parnell McNamara discussed human trafficking in Texas and his department’s work with law enforcement organizations around the world.
Transcript
Simon Nichols
Please just provide some background on the human trafficking situation in McLennan County and what your department has been doing to counter it.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Well, when we got involved in it the first time in 2014, we didn’t know what we were getting into. We never had done it before. And I’d only been with the sheriff’s office a little over a year. We found out that it was absolutely rampant in McLennan County massage parlors all over the place. Trafficking people from other countries, mainly Asians, also victims from Mexico.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
So we concentrated on our local area here first, and then we branched out into other parts of the state. And then we’ve been requested to assist police departments all over the United States. Washington, D.C., Boston, L.A., Las Vegas, New York. And recently, our officers with human trafficking have gone into Mongolia, training Mongolian police to not arrest the females, don’t victimize the women twice.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Go after the the low down traffickers, the scumbags that are pimping these poor women out and so target them. So we spent several weeks in Mongolia. Our guy did then we were requested to go to Poland to assist in identifying traffickers that were grabbing the Ukrainian women and kids as they were coming across the Polish border, you know, fleeing Ukraine.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
When the Russians attacked, we also went into Moldova back in, I believe, June, and were there for a couple of weeks working with Interpol, doing the same thing, helping the police identify traffickers and helping them arrest the traffickers and so forth. So we’ve been involved with fighting human trafficking really all over the world. And in another two or three weeks, our guys will be going to the Kurdistan in Iraq.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
We’ve been requested to go there. So we don’t go anywhere that we’re not requested to to help. So word got out that we know what we’re doing, that our guys are simply the best of the best at what they’re doing. And so we don’t care where it is. If people reach out for help, no matter what kind of help they will.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
We try to always go to wherever they are and help them.
Simon Nichols
That’s incredible to me. So you said that it was in 2014. Later, Berman first became aware of this occurring in Clinton County. What was it that brought it to your attention? And that’s apparently not coming to the attention of so many other parts of the country.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Well, one of my detectives, Joe Scaramucci, just came to me and said, what do you think about going on the Internet, posing as underage kids, underage girls, 15 or 16 years old, looking for action and putting it out there and you see what kind of response we get? And I said absolutely, let’s try. So the first 12 hours that we were up on the Internet, we had over a hundred applicants, people wanting to get with these kids for sex.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
So we arrested 20 of the worst ones that we saw. So I was kind of overwhelmed by that, that we got 20. And so it went kind of nationwide. The media started calling and I made a comment to the San Antonio News. I said it was like every kind of weird sicko came out of the woodwork. So with nationwide headlines all over the place, New York and Chicago, Texas sheriff arrest 20 weird sickos.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
So if you Google, just Google weird sickos, all these people we’ve arrested pop up three weeks. Three months later, we did another sting. We got 29. And the next thing, 44, then 50. And we even got up to where we were getting 70 or 75 people each saying the better we got at it. So we’ve arrested hundreds and hundreds of these sex buyers and sex offenders of all kinds over the period of the last eight years.
Simon Nichols
That’s incredible. And so the reason we highlighted you on our rising line stories, publications back, I think in April and May was both for your work, like you mentioned, in Poland, as well as your more local work with the organization Unbound in Waco. To me, that speaks to the fact that countering human trafficking, it’s not just the law enforcement.
Simon Nichols
It’s not just a role, law enforcement role. There’s a whole community role involved to working with so many different organizations. You’re working with groups outside of McLennan County, outside the United States. Can you tell me a little bit about what that’s like?
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Well, and shortly after we got involved in it, I was approached by Susan Peters with Unbound, and she wanted to know if we would team up with them. And I said absolutely anything we can do to strengthen this effort. And Unbound is a big part of this effort because law enforcement can rescue these women, but we can’t save them.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Unbound saves them. We get the women out of this horrible situation that they’re in. We bring them to the sheriff’s office and then unbound takes them from there to try to get them out of this horrible lifestyle that they most of them have been forced into. So Unbound was with our guy Scaramucci in Mongolia and some of these other places.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
So Unbound is a very, very important part of this effort because it’s twofold. We need to rescue these people, but they need to be taken and saved where they don’t get back in this. And they need to be protected from these pimps and traffickers that are have been doing this to them. And unbound is so good that when we rescue the Asian women, we don’t speak Mandarin.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
They provide Mandarin interpreters, usually from Baylor University, to come in and interview these these ladies that we have just rescued. So Unbound is a critical component of this effort, and I can’t say enough. Nice things about them. Susan Peters and her team are just just over the top. They are simply the best.
Simon Nichols
Reminding me of a conversation I had with the Georgetown chief of police not too long ago where we were talking about homelessness in Georgetown. And he was saying, you know, police aren’t the answer to every part of an issue. They play a really important role. But at the end of the day, they can’t fix everything that’s happening with any particular area.
Simon Nichols
And it’s just like what you’re saying here is the sheriff’s department has a critical role in countering this, but they aren’t the entire solution. You have to work with groups like Unbound to go beyond rescuing and actually save these people.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
That is so true.
Simon Nichols
Pivoting slightly from discussing human trafficking, the sheriffs are interesting in Texas to me because they’re not just a law enforcement entity. They also have a political role because they’re elected and they have to run on party lines. What does it mean to you to not just be a law keeper, but to also be a politician and to be elected by the country county?
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Well, I put in 32 and a half years with the United States Marshal Service, and the government hired me as a U.S. marshal. US Department of Justice. But the people hire the sheriff, and the sheriff is the people’s voice in law enforcement. The people basically hire the sheriff. They hired me. And so I strive every day to do the best job that I possibly can for the people that put their trust in me.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
And so by being a political figure and being elected, you have a tremendous amount of responsibility to serve the people that put you in this position or put me in this position. And I think about that every single day. And so our whole department is out there every day serving the public. And that’s what I drill until the public hired us.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
And we appreciate that so much.
Simon Nichols
Now, we have three quick questions we like to ask after we get through all of our specific questions. So we ask everybody the same three questions and you can just answer anything you choose to. It doesn’t have to be an eloquent response. It can interpret it however way you want. So the first question is what do you see as being the biggest challenge that the state of Texas faces right now?
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Well, obviously, the biggest challenge that Texas faces is the open borders. It’s horrible. The battle rages on down there. It doesn’t have to be that way. We just two weeks ago, I sent two of my pilots with a helicopter to the border to this airport, to county sheriffs down there and when they got there. So part of county didn’t even have jet fuel or helicopters.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
So they had to fly out of Laredo and refuel and all the way back almost didn’t make it. And so then I had to send another deputy to the border with a load of jet fuel to help the border sheriffs and they have their back to the wall. It is almost a losing battle. Border Patrol, DPS, the sheriffs down there doing the very best they can to fight the human trafficking and the illegal immigration that we have going on.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Our guys with a helicopter were patrolling the border. They got in pursuit. They got involved in some anti-drug activity. They located a body in the river that was really sad. This guy had apparently been tortured very badly. He had a cinder block tied around him. He had been stabbed. It looked like he had been tortured with a blowtorch.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
And so they were able to recover the body. But our guys located it from the air, from the helicopter. And so it’s it’s a battle zone down there. And to me, that is the biggest threat facing this state right now. There are these open borders because people are coming in from all over the world. They’re coming in from Asia, they’re coming in from the Middle East, they’re coming in from South America.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
And a lot of them are gang members, criminals of all kinds. And they’re committing war crimes once they get over here. And there’s some good people coming across, but there’s a lot of bad ones. And thanks to current administration, the borders open.
Simon Nichols
So with that in mind, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing the entire country versus just Texas?
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Well, I think that is that’s an nationwide crisis, right? They’re not just Texas. These people are coming through. They’re going up north. They had gang members brutally murdered, two little high school girls like they were in the ninth grade with stabbing them and used machetes on them. And they were illegal gang members from Mexico that had come across.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
This is a problem for the whole nation, not just Texas. And so and the sooner that it’s recognized as a national problem and hopefully people will, the better off that we’re going to be, the harder that we need to fight this. The police, the sheriffs, DPS and Border Patrol are overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of these migrants coming across the border every week.
Simon Nichols
So in the last question is a bit of a departure from that. But if you had any advice for the Texas legislature, you know, things that you think should be immediately addressed and it can be the border. What would you tell them?
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
First of all, do everything you can to secure the border, even if we have to put funds to finish the wall that was working. And then once that was stopped, here came the the hundreds of thousands. I think over 2 million have come over in the last year and a half or two years. And so that is paramount right there.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
Texas still has a lot of crime, even though police are fighting it as hard as they can. We’re very lucky here in the state of Texas, because for the most part, our good citizens back up law enforcement. It’s not like up north or California. Some of these places that are so far to the left that the police don’t have backing from the citizens and the politicians.
Sheriff Parnell McNamara
They’re out there on the lam by themselves. I don’t know how some of these places are doing it, some of the law enforcement there, because it is it would be a scary situation to work under those conditions.
Simon Nichols
So Houston is incredibly diverse. There’s but even being diverse, there’s very distinguishable pockets across the different districts. I believe you can tell me a little bit about what it’s like working with, you know, city council when the different interests are so varied.
Amy Peck
Yeah, the different interests are varied, not even just all over Houston, but even in district alone, there’s different areas of my district are very diverse and different from one another. And so yeah, it’s very interesting to see the needs across each council district and in district specifically. You know, we have so many different needs, diverse when it comes to population.
Amy Peck
Our district is primarily Hispanic. We also have a very big Korean population in District A and a lot of Korean businesses and restaurants. So that’s really fun to go to the Korean restaurants and we have the Korean Community Center and District Day. And so just the needs of the people in district are just so different. And that’s one of the things that I love about our district.
Simon Nichols
I imagine it presents really unique challenges that you might not have expected. We first went in because I imagine you discover a lot about your community when you’re the person that everyone needs to come to.
Amy Peck
Yeah, absolutely. So my experience is a little bit unique from other people because I was the chief of staff for the previous council member before I took this job. And so I have been working in District Day and for District Day for many years now, but it is really different to go from behind the scenes to in front of the scenes.
Amy Peck
And so there were definitely a lot of things that I learned, you know, just being in front of of the themes. And of course, with COVID and the pandemic, things are just so different now from before. And so there’s definitely a lot to take in for sure.
Simon Nichols
So we like to ask three questions to everybody that we interview three of the same questions each time. These are just the first thing that comes to your mind to prepare, you know, any prepared responses or, you know, particularly eloquent thoughts here, but just what you think are your most genuine reactions. So the first question is, what do you think is the biggest challenge facing the state of Texas at this moment?
Amy Peck
The biggest challenge for the state of Texas, I think, is to I mean, there are there are a lot. But the first one that came to mind is, you know, we have so many people moving to Texas every single day and businesses that are relocating here. And I think that that’s a great thing and I encourage that. But at some point, you know, there’s you know, we have to keep getting more people here and keep getting businesses.
Amy Peck
And so I wonder if that starts tapering off, you know, what that’s going to do to the economy. And so it’s just a matter of how do we continue to want people to come here and I guess that’s a challenge for the city of Houston as well, to make sure that more people are coming here and wanting to stay here.
Amy Peck
Once they’re here.
Simon Nichols
That’s a great response because it’s it brings out how multifaceted that issue is. You know, not only do we need to plan for the future and see how do we keep this momentum moving? But there’s also an element of planning for the present. You know, we have more and more people coming. And Dallas Austin’s Antonio is struggling with affordable housing and finding rental options for people that are already living in Texas.
Simon Nichols
So it just points out there’s a lot of different ways or a lot of different elements of this issue that need to be faced. So then our next question is a zooming out a little bit broader. What do you think is the biggest challenge for our country, for the United States right now?
Amy Peck
Oh, my gosh. There’s so many. I guess the first thing that came to mind is just finding a way in Congress to move issues forward in a way that’s not so partisan all the time, which, I mean, sometimes it has to be. And I get that. And there are issues that people feel very differently about, but there’s so many things that both sides agree on and everybody just needs to come together to just move the country forward on those items that everyone agrees on.
Amy Peck
And even those items lately have become so contentious. And I think that we just need to find ways to work together and move some of those things forward.
Simon Nichols
That’s part of why we started doing Rising Stars was mean. The previous administration, and we felt like there was a lot of like the news was constantly filled with very partisan issues and the polarization was getting to be a new height. And so we wanted to start raising lone stars because we thought highlighting local elected officials where partisanship doesn’t play into the politics so much, it’s not too much of an element would be a valuable way to remind people that this isn’t the way our politics has to be.
Amy Peck
Absolutely. I mean, in Houston, for the most part, on most issues, we find ways to work together. You know, there’s amendments sometimes. Sometimes we don’t always agree. But for the most part, we’re working together and finding ways to move forward, even when we don’t necessarily agree on the items. And I really think that that’s the best way to just move our city forward and move our country forward for sure.
Simon Nichols
And our very last question is, if you could talk to the Texas legislature and tell them one thing, either a piece of advice or something to focus on in this state, what would you tell them?
Amy Peck
Oh, that’s a very good question. We’re just trying to stay Houston focused on, you know, what’s happening at the legislature. I always try to follow anything that that pertains to the city of Houston, because, of course, that’s where I’m elected and that’s where my focus is. And so I would say to the legislature to really listen to local officials when it comes to something that’s making any kind of significant change at a local level, to just hear us out and listen to how that’s going to affect people locally.