A multidisciplinary operation against child exploitation, carried out by 112 police agencies and led by the Los Angeles Regional Cyber Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force resulted in hundreds of arrests.
The result of the Operation Firewall sees 341 arrests of suspected digital predators and identification or rescue of 40 childrenages ranging from 1 to 17 years. The operation took place from April 19 to May 3 in five counties: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara and Ventura.
The suspects arrested during the undercover operation are involved in crimes such as production, possession and distribution of child sexual abuse cloth, lewd acts with a minor, contact or attempted encounter with a minor for lewd purposes, human traffickings, failure to register as a convicted sex offender, and probation or parole violations.
First Assistant United States Attorney Invoice Essayli highlighted a sentence of forty-five years in prison for Daniel Navarro, from Victorvillein San Bernardino County, who manipulated two girls on Instagram and trafficked one of them to Mexico in collusion with Garden Grove resident Julie Lee.
Navarro posed as “Danny,” a teenage football player on Instagram to sexually exploit two teenagers he met online, and for taking a victim from San Luis Obispo County to Mexico to engage in illicit sexual activity. Mexican authorities finally managed to rescue the victim at a residence in Tijuana.
The sexual predator had been in federal custody since July 2022. His trial, which lasted just four days, took place in July 2025.
“Crimes against children are a top priority for the Department of Justiceand we will not rest until we secure long-term sentences for the perpetrators of these cases,” Essaily stated at a press conference on Thursday.
They warn about the violent group ‘764’
The federal official issued a warning regarding the ‘764’, a violent and nihilistic online extremist group that attacks vulnerable young people through chat rooms and social networks to coerce them to seriously self-harm and produce explicit clothing.
“This is a very serious problem that we are detecting among the younger population,” Essaily said. “These are groups that form online and whose objective is to attract children and target them to produce images of child sexual abuse and images of self-harm.”
Members of the ‘764’ group are known to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and engage in criminal conduct, both within the United States and abroad, in order to promote political, social and religious objectives that derive, mainly, from a hatred towards society as a whole and the desire to cause its collapse by sowing discord, chaos, destruction and social instability.
Currently, the national ICAC network includes 61 coordinated working groups and more than 5,400 participating agencies nationwide. The Los Angeles ICAC regional task force, led by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), is one of the largest of its kind in the country.
“During this Operation Firewall, investigators conducted proactive undercover work on multiple social media platforms and executed numerous house search warrants and arrest warrants throughout the five-county region,” said LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell..
“The magnitude of the crimes and the exponential rise in reports of online child exploitation are appalling, but the results of this operation demonstrate something equally powerful.”
Arrests in other counties
In San Bernardino County, the Sheriff’s Department made more than 100 arrests. In Orange County, deputies made 19 arrests, 10 of which were in undercover operations conducted in conjunction with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents. The undercover agents posed as 13-year-old girls.
In Lengthy Seaside, an investigation into a resident Suspected of manufacturing and possessing child pornography revealed that he possessed more than 150,000 illicit images.
Authorities stated that predator groups that target children frequently use social media platforms to share material of child sexual abuse, spreading it online through their various networks.
They also stated that they often blackmail victims to force them to comply with their demands, which ranges from self-mutilation to performing sexual acts -both online and in person-, mistreating animalssexual exploitation of siblings, acts of violence and threats of violence, suicide or murder.
Another case resolved in February by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was the arrest of Matthew Edward Fisher, an 18-year-old from Pennsylvania.
Fisher is believed to have acted in line with the ‘764’ ideology. He was arrested based on a federal complaint, given that he traveled with the intention of engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a minor.
According to court records, the defendant manipulated a 13-year-old girl into sending him sexually explicit clothing of herself, as well as images of herself harming herselfa pattern of abuse that is consistent with nihilistic violent extremism.
“Ultimately, he persuaded her to flee her home and meet him at a Santa Clarita motel,” U.S. Attorney Essaily revealed. “Fortunately, that same day we managed to locate them and rescue the minor from said establishment.”
Nathan Hochman, Los Angeles County District Attorney, said: “If they are out there creating content and preying on these children, if they are distributing child pornography, if they are even consuming child sexual abuse pornography, we will find them. We will arrest them. We will prosecute them and punish them”.
And, in a message to parents, he warned them: “If you were a parent, you would never physically take your child into a room and leave him alone with a predator or pedophile. Yet, every day, parents give their children electronic devices that give them digital access to a predator or pedophile.”
Hochman described the formal complaint against Michael Leslie, 35, who is accused of creating and selling videos in which he appears to perform sexual acts — sometimes with other adults — while viewing recordings of children being abused.
“He is charged with the alleged crime of profiting from this cloth, which is linked to the illegal exploitation of minors, some of them as young as one year old,” Hochman said.
After his arrest, the existence of more than 600 different images of children between the ages of one and 10 was revealed, which were stored on his computers.
