How The ACLU Indirectly Helped Keep Hundreds Of Young Girls On ‘Kiddie Stroll’

Originally named “Street of the Grasshoppers,” Los Angeles’ Figueroa Street has earned a new nickname: “Kiddie Stroll.” 

Figueroa, now “one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States,” is nightly lined with “preteens … hobbling in stilettos and G-strings,” according to The New York Times Magazine. 

The Los Angeles city attorney dubbed Figueroa “Kiddie Stroll” in 2023, reports author Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, “because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.” Locals call the 50-block stretch of Figueroa notorious for prostitution “the Blade.” (RELATED: INGERSOLL: That’s It, Trump Needs To Invade LA)

The prostitution on Figueroa is so pervasive you can go on google streetview and see them standing on the corners in the middle of the day.

Like many awful things in this city, nobody cares. https://t.co/qXczg7aU9e

— Keegan – Smartest Boy Urbanist™️ (@keegan_tweets) October 27, 2025

Nunn spoke to Ana, a 19-year-old prostitute who had begun selling her wares on Figueroa at 13. The Blade was never busier, Ana said, never younger. And never more violent.

“Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles. She had met girls brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait. The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.” 

The 77th Street Division had long been plagued by Figueroa’s prostitution problem, according to Nunn. 

“But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode.”

Nunn credits part of this explosion to the lockdowns, “when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked.”

Nunn refrains from speculating on the consequences of former President Joe Biden’s border free-for-all, which began in earnest in 2021. 

International sex trafficking was “America’s fastest-growing criminal enterprise,” Madeleine Rowley reported for The Free Press in October 2024. 

Rowley asked “Lisa,” a woman who runs a nonprofit anti-sex trafficking organization, “if the sex trafficking of migrant girls had increased since the Biden administration threw open the border.” 

“Yes,” Lisa told Rowley. “Nearly all of my sex-trafficking rings now are migrant girls. The [prostitution] ads exploded within the first three months of the border being open. We started noticing new sites and ads in Spanish. That was very few before. Then sites dedicated to Latino girls popped up everywhere.” 

“If I wanted to, I could order a girl within 15 minutes,” Lisa added. “It’s that easy.”

Rowley, citing government statistics obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, claims “forced labor and prostitution among underage migrants more than tripled under [former] President Biden.” 

This story is about a 3-mile stretch of LA known as “kiddie stroll” due to its open trafficking of child prostitutes.

Budget cuts have left LAPD short-handed to combat it.

This is something that the National Guard could be called in for, @GavinNewsom.https://t.co/ynPfov5cgT

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 27, 2025

Those trafficked girls might’ve been more easily caught, were it not for California’s government and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 

“In 2021, the [Los Angeles] Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem,” Nunn reports. 

The Los Angeles City Council voted to reallocate about $89 million “originally slated to pay for police services … to antigang initiatives, universal income programs, homeless services, education and jobs initiatives and more,” following George Floyd’s death, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2021. 

Then Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the ironically-named “Safer Streets for All Act,” also known as SB 357, on July 1, 2022. The act repealed the section of California’s Penal Code which criminalized loitering in a public place with the intent to commit prostitution. 

SB 357 was authored by Democratic California State Sen. Scott Wiener.

Weiner, a gay politician, previously authored a bill that relaxed sex offender registry requirements for sodomy with minors, if the offender is within 10 years of the victim’s age. Weiner introduced a different law in 2019 which allowed male prisoners to be incarcerated in women’s prisons. (RELATED: REPORT: America’s Most Sexually Degenerate Lawmaker Scott Wiener Is Challenging Nancy Pelosi In A Primary)

The ACLU co-sponsored SB 357, claiming the former law “gives law enforcement a tool to harass and discriminate against Black and trans communities.” 

FOX NEWS ALERT — Federal agents conducted a raid in Los Angeles along Figueroa Street, a known hub for s*x work, arresting 10 s*x traffickers and rescuing four victims, including a minor.

Matt Finn: “On scene in a predawn takedown of the Hoover Street Gang that the federal… pic.twitter.com/6Jh5w4WewE

— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) August 14, 2025

“The Safer Streets for All Act will take away this outdated and subjective [law] which has for too long allowed law enforcement to criminalize and harass someone based on the color of their skin, their gender, or how they choose to make a living.” 

Note that the ACLU quietly lumps in a mutable characteristic with two immutable ones. Yes, we should punish those who “choose to make a living” by hawking fentanyl or defrauding the elderly. Or pimping out underaged girls. 

When the law was “implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell,” Nunn reports.

“One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told Nunn she’d seen the trafficking herself, calling it a “a failure of government, period.”

“It is our responsibility, and therefore, it is our fault.”

Bass — and every California leader who paved the way for a massive child sex-trafficking operation — will have to do a little more to wash the blood off their hands.

Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC