A private foundation tentatively identifies 1,119 child victims in two-week sprints. Congress has seven analysts doing the same work full-time.
When Tim Tebow appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on March 3, 2026, he brought a map. 338,000 red dots, each a unique IP address tied to a computer used to download or distribute child sexual abuse material in the United States — a single six-month window from a DOJ database. Most victims depicted are under twelve. The Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Crimes Center has seven full-time analysts assigned to identify them. "You're telling me that it's 10 people's job to identify 89,000?" Tebow asked senators. "That is impossible."
He then described what his foundation had already done. Three two-week sprints — conducted with the FBI, Interpol, Europol, and HSI — tentatively identified more than 1,119 previously unknown child victims and facilitated the rescue of over 550 children. The Renewed Hope Act of 2026 would make those sprints permanent — funding 200 dedicated analysts, investigators, and forensic specialists within DHS. The bill cleared the House Judiciary Committee unanimously in January 2026.
The context demands a plain statement. Between October 2020 and September 2024, the Biden administration processed 468,736 unaccompanied migrant children through HHS. Senator Grassley's oversight documented that 11,488 were placed with unvetted, unfingerprinted sponsors in violation of federal law. A DHS Inspector General report confirmed the government could not account for the whereabouts of more than 233,000 children who were never properly enrolled in proceedings — and that HHS had withheld sponsor addresses from law enforcement to shield sponsors from immigration scrutiny. The Trump administration inherited a 65,605-case backlog of unresolved reports, including 7,346 trafficking referrals. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 21 million child exploitation reports in 2025 alone. The government had one job. The scoreboard is not ambiguous.
The Tim Tebow Foundation supports 52 safe homes for survivors and directs 100% of public donations to direct ministry work. Its unKNOWN campaign trained over 4,400 law enforcement officers across six countries in its first year and raised over $2.6 million toward victim identification. The foundation does not stage raids. It builds forensic infrastructure. It trains officers. It operates across 60 countries. And when given two weeks and the right partners, it identifies over a thousand anonymous children.
Compare that to what the Tim Ballard model produced. Operation Underground Railroad — popularized by the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, which grossed $251 million worldwide) — imploded the same year when Ballard resigned under misconduct allegations, leaving a cautionary case study in what happens when anti-trafficking work is organized around a single personality rather than replicable institutional infrastructure. Tebow has built the opposite: repeatable process, auditable results, scalable methodology. Safe homes are infrastructure. Forensic databases are infrastructure. None of them photographs well at a press conference. All of it works.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) captured the legislative logic during the hearing: "Just imagine what might be possible if we made it permanent?" That is the Renewed Hope Act in one sentence. The conservative case is not complicated. Private institutions, freed from bureaucratic incentive structures and federal procurement cycles, execute faster and spend more efficiently than agencies designed for process compliance over outcome optimization. A private foundation proved the model. Congress is being asked to fund the scale, not finance the experiment. No ideological gymnastics required — only the willingness to read the operational record and appropriate accordingly.
Burke's little platoons, Tocqueville's voluntary associations, the principle that civil society leads where government cannot — each finds its clearest empirical test in what Tebow's foundation has done against what the federal apparatus failed to do. One built the playbook. The other lost the children. The Renewed Hope Act asks Congress to fund the playbook.
The federal government has seven analysts against a database of 89,000 anonymous victims. A private foundation, operating on donor funding, has already outperformed that apparatus on a fraction of the resources. The Renewed Hope Act is not government expansion. It is Congress funding a model that a private foundation has proven works. Pass the bill. Read the scoreboard.
Jay Rogers is President of Alpha Strategies and a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about finance, constitutional law, national security, and public policy.