In mid-August 2026, Florida ran what officials call the largest child-recovery operation in state history. Over five days of coordinated fieldwork, investigators located 163 missing children ranging from two months old to 17. Attorney General James Uthmeier and Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glᴀss announced the results in Tampa on Aug. 25, four days after teams left the field. The effort was named Operation Statewide Shield. It was the first statewide sweep of its kind in Florida, built on tactics adapted from two U.S. Marshals campaigns, Dragon Eye and Home for the Holidays.

FDLE’s Tampa office ran the command post. Partners included Uthmeier’s Office of Statewide Prosecution, other state agencies, hospital system BayCare, the victim-services group More to Life, and the state’s Human Trafficking Victims Fund. Special Counsel for Human Trafficking Rita Peters advised on legal strategy and later told reporters that locating a child is the first day of a case, not the last. Sub-operations ran from seven hubs: Tampa, Miami, Fort Myers, Orlando, Jacksonville, Tallahᴀssee, and Pensacola.

The regional count adds to 163: Tampa Bay 46, Miami 41, Jacksonville 32, Orlando 21, Fort Myers 12, Pensacola 8, Tallahᴀssee 3. Miami-Dade, where about seven in ten residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, accounted for roughly a quarter of the recoveries. Officials said the 163 cases were not one trafficking ring. Some children had been trafficked. Others were runaways, caught in custody fights, or living in unsafe homes. Many had already been through abuse, neglect, or exploitation. Every recovery was entered into Florida’s Missing and Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse so the missing-child report could be closed. Some children went to relatives. Others entered foster care. Follow-up care was routed through seven recovery hubs from Pensacola to Miami, including a Palm Beach County site backed by St. Mary’s Medical Center.

Leads did not stop at the state line. Investigators said the same operation connected to recoveries in California, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama, and New York, plus Puerto Rico and twelve countries on five continents: Taiwan, Ghana, Finland, Italy, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Canada, Jamaica, Dominica, Guatemala, and Mexico. Officials have not said how many of the 163 came from those out-of-state or overseas leads. The published total is the seven Florida hubs. A full out-of-state and international accounting has not been released.

Three men have been named so far. On Aug. 20, Lee County deputies arrested Robert Ferral Allison on a lewd-and-lascivious-battery charge involving a victim between 12 and 16. On Aug. 21, Jacksonville deputies arrested Michael Corey Prescott on three lewd-and-lascivious counts involving a minor, plus felony battery and aggravated ᴀssault; he also had a warrant in a child-custody interference case. Jayden Allen Harwood was booked on child-custody interference and resisting without violence, a case described as a family dispute rather than trafficking. Uthmeier’s office said more charges are expected and that prosecutors will seek the maximum sentences available, including the death penalty where Florida law allows it for qualifying child-Sєx offenses. Miami-Dade prosecutors are handling three of the felony cases generated by the sweep. Cases in Tallahᴀssee and Miami-Dade remain active.

Uthmeier said the children were “no longer in the hands of evil.” Glᴀss credited “the power of collaboration.” State Rep. Danny Alvarez and DCF ᴀssistant Secretary Jonathan Stephens used the Tampa briefing to argue the model should be repeated with government, nonprofits, and faith groups. After the announcement, some social posts circulated old, unrelated video as if it showed the sweep; fact-checkers later flagged those clips as recycled footage from other events.

As of mid-September 2026, the public record still looks like this: 163 children located in Florida’s seven hubs, three arrests disclosed, additional investigations open, and no complete list of how many recoveries sat outside Florida. Recovery closed the missing reports. The criminal cases, and the longer work of housing and treatment, are still underway.

Source: Fox 13