Church Leaders Arrested On Charges Of Human Trafficking By FBI

Three administrators of a Filipino-based Megachurch were arrested Wednesday on charges of running a human trafficking ring.

Guia Cabactulan, 59, Marissa Duenas, 41, and Amanda Estopare, 48, were members of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the Name Above Every Name (or KOJC). Their arrests from California and Virginia coincided with the raids of KOJC’s offices in Van Nuys, Glendale, and Los Angeles, the FBI said.

The administrators brought church members from the Philippines to the United States using a children’s foundation as a front. According to investigators, the visas were obtained under the pretense that they were coming to the country to perform musical events.

However, once the members arrived, their passports were taken away from them by the three administrators and they were forced to work as volunteers, collecting funds for the children’s foundation.

These volunteers were then sent to different locations across the U.S. to ask for money that they claimed went to Children’s Joy Foundation, a nonprofit run by the church that claims to help impoverished children in the Philippines. However, in reality, the money went to the church's coffers and aided its operations.

Between 2014 and 2019, the KOJC managed to raise close to $20 million from these donations, the FBI said. The money was also spent on luxury goods for the church’s leaders including a Bentley, a bulletproof Cadillac Escalade, an Armani suit and real estate, the New York Times reported.

On the contrary, the volunteers received little to no pay. They were often forced to sleep in their car overnight, parked at truck stops, or occasionally stayed in a small hotel room during their operations. The administrators also used several illicit tactics to keep workers in the country including sham marriages and phony enrollments in schools, ABC News reported.

82 such marriages were carried out in the last 20 years, investigators said.

Several of these workers approached the FBI, giving them a detailed account of the criminal activity carried out by the church administrators first hand. They also gave the investigators emails from administrators, which detailed their instructions in the scam.

The three leaders appeared before a judge on immigration fraud charges on Wednesday afternoon.

The KOJC was created by Apollo Quiboloy in 1985 in Davao, Philippines. The church claims to have 6 million members around the world. Quiboloy had claimed to be the “Appointed Son of God” when he created the KOJC.