A nonprofit led by a candidate for Oregon attorney general is accused of helping African police officers kidnap children from their families

Will Lathrop is seeking to become Oregon's first Republican attorney general in more than 30 years and boasts that for the past five years he has led an international charity's efforts to end slavery and human trafficking in Ghana.

His first campaign ad states: “In Africa, I led multinational teams to rescue children from human trafficking and protect women from violence.”

The state-issued voter brochure states: “Will led large multinational teams in East and West Africa to protect women from violence, rescue child slaves and victims of human trafficking, and build criminal justice systems.”

And on his campaign website, in bold and underlined, it says: “As a result of his team’s work in Ghana, the number of children used as slaves in the fishing industry in Ghana has been reduced by an estimated 36%, an unprecedented achievement in just a five-year period.”

But a 2023 BBC documentary tells a darker story: Lathrop's team's single-minded focus on setting and achieving goals resulted in them, in collaboration with the police, kidnapping some children and separating them from their families under false pretenses.

Lathrop denies this, telling the Capital Chronicle in an interview that the team he oversaw at the Washington, D.C.-based International Justice Mission felt pressured to rescue at-risk children — not to meet arbitrary targets.

“You felt that pressure every day because there were tens of thousands of cases. You got to 100 a year and you still had thousands and thousands left,” he said. “There was no amount of money, no targets or goals, whatever you wanted to call them, that motivated me and the people I worked with more than the pressure that was based on human lives.”

The International Justice Mission, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC, operates in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South and Central America, working to end slavery and violence, particularly against women. In Ghana, where Lathrop was stationed, the BBC World Service's investigative unit spent months following up on leads that the organization had failed to ensure that the children it identified as victims of human trafficking were in fact victims.

For the 50-minute documentary “The Night They Took Our Children,” reporter Kyenkyehene Boateng used interviews with over a dozen people, analysis of internal WhatsApp messages, and audio recordings from an undercover journalist from the International Justice Mission’s accounting department.

“I spent a year investigating a major charity that cares for the vulnerable,” Boateng concludes in the film. “Driven by the need to achieve goals, they seem to have lost their way. I think I saw innocent but poor families being torn apart by this. I wonder how many others are out there.”

Two cases

Lathrop served as country director of the International Justice Mission in Ghana from 2018 to 2023 before returning to Oregon to run for attorney general. The documentary highlighted two cases during his tenure.

In September 2022, acting on a tip-off from the International Justice Mission, armed Ghanaian police officers arrived in the remote northern village of Mogyigna in the middle of the night to take away four children. In the documentary, a woman who described herself as the children's grandmother said police put a gun to her throat. Other villagers described the night as traumatic – children who remained in the village tried to hide when they heard cars, and the grandfather of the children taken by police later died and was never able to see his grandchildren again.

The three girls and boy abducted that night were between the ages of five and 11. They were taken to a hotel where they were bathed, fed and photographed. They were then taken to a home where they ended up staying for four months, the documentary says.

Officials from the International Justice Mission had determined before the raid that the three girls had not been trafficked, but that the boy may have been, according to text in the documentation and a later statement from the organization. Nevertheless, two of the children's uncles were arrested and charged with child trafficking and violating child labor laws. The charges were eventually dropped.

Lathrop said he did not know much about the case, which occurred toward the end of his term, and doubted the story portrayed in the documentary was true. Many areas of Ghana are still controlled by the country's slave-owning class, he said, and there is an incentive to look the other way when it comes to child trafficking and slave labor.

In addition, he said, it is not uncommon for police to follow up on a tip-off from International Justice Mission about human trafficking and remove more children for abuse, neglect or violations of child labor laws.

In the other case featured here, a boy and his sibling were taken away from their mother in 2019. The ailing woman was accused of selling her son into slavery on a fishing boat and sentenced to five years in prison – but her sentence was overturned after two years by the Sudreau Global Justice Institute, a partner of the International Justice Mission, which publicized her case in a fundraising campaign, claiming she had been wrongly convicted of a serious crime.

Set goals

Globally, the organization set a goal in 2019 to free millions of children from slavery by 2030. In Ghana, Lathrop said he signed the local goals, but employees of the nonprofit told the BBC undercover journalist that Lathrop set them himself.

“Targets like that are all set from the top, and if a target should be set in the organization, it should come from Will,” says an employee in a secretly recorded video included in the documentary. “On that basis, all departments then try to save that number of victims. That number of suspects should be arrested.”

And with a lot of money at stake – the nonprofit raised more than $118 million in 2023 and spent almost all of it – staff interviewed by the BBC's undercover reporter said there was pressure to perform.

“We provide resources, so we can't allocate a lot of money so you can only save 10 children a year,” said one staff member. “So the goals are set. You just have to put in the effort and achieve them.”

If these goals are not met, one employee said in the documentary, he may miss out on a pay raise or even lose his job.

Lathrop said the goals were set by each team at the beginning of the year — the nonprofit had staff on teams dealing with investigations, advocacy and social work, among other things — and then reviewed by their supervisor and office manager before signing them off.

Goals could be things like how many cases a team wants to investigate in collaboration with police or how many victims it wants to find in collaboration with social workers, he said. Lathrop said he couldn't remember ever raising a goal, and there have been times when he's lowered goals based on available resources or other anticipated work disruptions.

He expressed shock at the report that employees feared losing their jobs if they did not meet targets.

“I can't speak for the whole organisation, I can only speak for my time in Uganda and Ghana, but no one was ever fired for not meeting their goals or penalised,” he said. “The people who ultimately left the organisation, as with most organisations, usually left because of their behaviour, like not coming to work or arguing with colleagues or things like that. It never had anything to do with goals.”

One of the people who ultimately left the organization was Lathrop, who, in his own words, put himself out of a job. He said his main job in Ghana was to put together a functioning team, build relationships with the local government and develop local leaders who could take his place. A Ghanaian woman now leads the team he left.

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