U.S. Marshals say monthlong sweep recovered 79 missing and endangered children across Ohio

The U.S. Marshals Service said this week that a monthlong law enforcement sweep across Ohio located 79 children who had been reported missing or endangered, an effort officials are calling the largest operation of its kind in the state's history. The children, ages 6 to 17, were found in cases ranging from suspected sex trafficking and abuse to neglect and runaway reports, with searches extending into Georgia and Michigan before the operation concluded in late August.

The initiative, named Operation Meridian, paired U.S. Marshals fugitive task forces with more than two dozen federal, state and local agencies in a coordinated push across Columbus, Cleveland, Akron, Toledo and Cincinnati. Investigators said the recovered children are now being connected with medical care, trauma counseling and family reunification services through county children-services agencies.

A statewide sweep with local casework

U.S. Marshal Michael Black, who oversees the Southern District of Ohio, said the operation applied the same manhunt tactics the agency uses against violent fugitives to a different kind of search. "The United States Marshals Service, through its fugitive task forces, locates and arrests the most violent fugitives in our communities," Black said in comments carried by local television reporting on the operation. "Using the same resources and methods, we have the ability to seek and recover missing and endangered children."

Two of the more detailed cases released by investigators involved sisters, ages 13 and 16, who had been reported missing separately in Lockbourne, a small community south of Columbus. Marshals said the younger girl was found concealed inside a basement crawlspace beneath a bedroom closet floor, while her older sister was located the same day at a restaurant several miles away in Columbus. Their mother was arrested on an outstanding probation-violation warrant, according to the agency. In Toledo, a 16-year-old who had previously been identified as a trafficking victim was found with an adult man and taken for a medical evaluation; local police are continuing to investigate.

The scale of the problem

U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott, who leads the agency's Northern District of Ohio office based in Cleveland, said the August operation recovered at least three girls under 18 who had been with adult men in circumstances investigators believe involved trafficking. He put the broader caseload in context, noting that roughly 250 children remain listed as missing in the northern half of the state alone at any given time. "Once somebody is missing, whether they are a runaway or they were lured or preyed upon, they're all in a dangerous situation," Elliott said, according to a report from a Toledo television station. "We want to bring closure to every family."

"Every recovered child represents a life pulled back from danger."

That figure sits within a much larger statewide picture. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost's office reported in its 2025 Missing Children Clearinghouse annual report that families and law enforcement reported 15,367 children missing statewide over the year, down modestly from 2024. Nearly 98 percent were recovered safely by year's end, the report found, while 337 remained unaccounted for and six were found deceased. Of the cases where circumstances were specified, more than 7,600 were classified as runaways. The same office has separately reported that 61 percent of Ohio's missing children are Black, though Black minors make up only about 16 percent of the state's youth population — a disparity that has drawn attention from state lawmakers and victim advocates.

Who is affected

Special Agent in Charge Shawn Rice of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Inspector General, one of roughly 29 agencies that supported the operation, said his agency's involvement went beyond its usual mandate. The work, he said, "extends well beyond fighting waste, fraud and abuse. It is about protecting vulnerable children," according to reporting on the operation. Cincinnati police, the Colerain police department and the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office were among the local agencies that took part in searches in the southwestern part of the state, while Cleveland, Akron and Toledo police departments led recoveries in the north.

Amanda Berry, one of three women held captive for roughly a decade in a Cleveland home before escaping in 2013, partnered with the Marshals Service on the operation and addressed participating officers before searches began, according to Elliott. He said she urged the teams to "treat every missing child like they were our own." Her involvement was cited by several local outlets covering the operation as adding a survivor's perspective to the search planning.

Pressure for a permanent task force

The Toledo trafficking case has become a point of reference for advocates pushing state lawmakers to formalize task forces like the one assembled for Operation Meridian. Elesondra DeRomano, a trafficking survivor and founder of the Toledo-based survivor support group S.T.A.R.S. Toledo, has been lobbying for Senate Bill 178, which would create a standing state task force focused on missing Black, Indigenous and other women and girls of color. DeRomano has said survivors need sustained, trauma-informed support rather than one-time sweeps, and that prevention depends on people recognizing warning signs before a child disappears. The bill, introduced by state Sen. Paula Hicks-Hudson, remains before the Ohio Senate.

Ohio has run large-scale missing-child sweeps before. In October 2020, a similarly structured effort called Operation Autumn Hope, coordinated by the Marshals Service, the state attorney general's office and the Central Ohio Human Trafficking Task Force, located 45 missing children and 109 trafficking survivors and led to 177 arrests — at the time described by Yost's office as the largest anti-trafficking operation in state history. The Marshals Service has run comparable operations elsewhere, including one in Virginia that recovered 27 missing children. Officials in Ohio say the difference with Operation Meridian is scale and duration: a full month of dedicated task-force time devoted specifically to missing-child cases, rather than a shorter, more narrowly targeted sting. Nationally, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says it assisted law enforcement, families and child-welfare agencies with more than 32,000 reports of missing children last year, and has estimated that roughly one in seven of those children were likely victims of child sex trafficking.

For families whose children remain unaccounted for, the recoveries offer limited but real reassurance that cases are not simply closed and forgotten when a runaway report goes cold. Marshal Elliott said investigators treat every open file — whether it involves a suspected abduction, a teenager who left home after a family conflict, or a child believed to be in the custody of a trafficker — as a case that can still be solved with enough resources devoted to it. Marshals officials said Operation Meridian's task forces will keep working beyond the August sweep, continuing to pursue the smaller number of Ohio cases that were not resolved during the monthlong push, and that the Lockbourne and Toledo cases remain under active investigation by local prosecutors and police.

DeRomano, whose organization works directly with survivors after they are recovered, has said publicly that the period immediately following a rescue is often when victims are most vulnerable to being re-trafficked or falling back into unstable housing — part of why she and Hicks-Hudson are pushing for a task force with a permanent budget rather than periodic surges of activity. Agencies involved in Operation Meridian said children recovered during the operation are being tracked through county family-services caseworkers for ongoing medical, psychological and reunification support in the meantime.