Homeland Security Helps Nab 80-Year-Old Man for Paying a Sex Worker

Here’s your periodic reminder that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—the agency tasked with safeguarding America from terrorism and other grave threats—is also in the business of policing private sexual acts between adults.

An 80-year-old man was recently arrested in Plattsburgh, New York, as part of an ongoing Homeland Security investigation into potential prostitution at a massage business. He was charged with the misdemeanor crime of patronizing prostitution in the third degree.

The arrest was made by deputies with the Clinton County Sheriff’s Office as they helped Homeland Security Investigations execute a federal search warrant at “an alleged prostitution enterprise operating as a massage parlor,” per a Sheriff’s Office press release. Further information is supposed to be released later by the Buffalo field office of Homeland Security Investigations.

The elderly man may have been a bonus bust in this operation, not the express point of it. But he’s far from the first person facing criminal charges because Homeland Security has decided to take an interest in stopping sex between consenting adults. (Or, one suspects, to police immigration under the auspices of policing sex.)

Homeland Security routinely teams up with local cops to police independent massage businesses, searching for signs of sex. Almost always, the targeted businesses are operated and staffed by Asian women.

The feds say they’re looking for human trafficking. But again and again, we see the flimsiest of evidence employed to justify this suspicion; again and again, we see stings that turn up nothing more than licensing violations or, at worst, prostitution arrests.

The women working at these businesses—the ones Homeland Security claims to be protecting—are often subjected to repeated intimate encounters with local and federal law enforcement officers or their informants (a situation made all the more perverse if authorities really believe these are victims of trafficking). Then they wind up arrested, out of work, and facing fines for prostitution, practicing massage without a license, and so on. They may also find their savings subject to asset forfeiture.

In “Operation Asian Touch,” for instance, Homeland Security agents had at least 17 sexual encounters with women working at Mohave County, Arizona, massage businesses. Afterward, women who agreed to paid sex acts were arrested and had their assets seized.

In the Florida massage parlor stings in which Homeland Security helped nab New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for solicitation, charges against Kraft and many other men arrested for solicitation were eventually dropped. But women providing massages and sex acts were still prosecuted, with some having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for “soliciting” these men to commit prostitution.

Workers arrested in these stings are often taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

Even when immigrant massage workers are in the U.S. legally—and in most of the cases I’ve have looked into, they are—they can face deportation over suspected sex work. Legal permanent residents of the U.S., a.k.a. green card holders, can face removal if they’re found to have engaged in  “moral turpitude” (as can people with less permanent immigration status, of course). Massage staff could also face deportation simply for giving massages if they’re here on a type of visa that doesn’t permit paid employment.

What seems to be really going on here is a targeted attack on immigrant-owned businesses and Asian immigrant women, dressed up as a national security initiative. Occasionally it ensnares the odd old man who dares to see these women as consensual service providers rather than threats to the homeland.

In the News 

Japan has the most porn-friendly populace: A new survey from the Pew Research Center asked people in different countries whether porn is morally acceptable. Around the world, women were more likely than men to say porn was wrong. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. women and 47 percent of U.S. men said it was wrong. Among women, moral disapproval of porn was highest in Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, and Brazil and lowest in Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany. Among men, the highest levels of disapproval were found in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil and the lowest in Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany.

On Substack

The fight against false or allegedly biased information is leading to the “jawboning” of artificial intelligence companies, notes Jacob Mchangama at Persuasion:

Recent efforts go well beyond combating clearly illegal content such as child sexual abuse material. From Brussels to New Delhi, Warsaw to Washington, officials are wielding regulations, threats, and public shaming to shape what information, ideas, and perspectives billions of people can access through AI.

In October, the Dutch Data Protection Authority warned that AI chatbots made by OpenAI, xAI, and Mistral are “unreliable and clearly biased,” since they produced voter recommendations that tilted toward far-left and far-right parties ahead of national elections.

The regulator argued such behavior could violate the EU’s new AI Act, which requires powerful models to mitigate ill-defined “systemic risks,” including “negative effects on…society as a whole.” It referred the matter to the European Commission, which can impose fines of up to 7 percent of global annual turnover for non-compliance.

In July 2025, Poland’s government reported xAI to the European Commission after X’s chatbot Grok generated antisemitic content and offensive comments about Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. A spokesperson for the Commission told journalists, “We are taking these potential issues very seriously…we are in touch with the national authorities and with X itself.”

Read This Thread

Jennfer Huddleston of the Cato Institute has a very in-depth thread covering last week’s markup of four online “safety” bills in the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

Alright mark up starting eminently this is my live tweet thread https://t.co/ZhkPVavxh7

— Jennifer Huddleston (@jrhuddles) March 5, 2026

More Sex & Tech News

• Mother Jones examines how Homeland Security agents are using Mobile Fortify, “an app that allows officers to photograph a person’s face and immediately query [Homeland Security] databases for matches against passport records, visa files, and border entry photos.”

• Age verification by app stores? The App Store Accountability Act amounts “to little more than a change to the default settings for minors downloading apps, providing parents with false comfort while imposing real risks on all Americans,” write Reason Foundation’s Max Gulker and Caden Rosenbaum.

• History repeats:

1936: A New York bill would ban Radio from answering questions related to licensed professions like law. (via our substack https://t.co/sMuleH0Y2p) https://t.co/bpvjD1yE25 pic.twitter.com/cPJwRnMjtP

— Pessimists Archive (@PessimistsArc) March 6, 2026

• AI is less popular than Donald Trump, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom, or ICE, according to a new NBC poll.