Mariana van Zeller

So that's what's so unfortunate about all this, too, is that in the Hmong culture, the way that people get engaged or one of the cultural traditions that they have there is that for a man to ask for a woman's hand to get married, he actually, there's some strange cultural tradition where they go and kidnap them from a public street, take them on the back of their bike or take them in the car, wherever.

And it's sort of a thing that they do.

And then they go and present them to the parents and they get engaged.

The problem is that this is also how traffickers are kidnapping women.

So they're actually using the cultural tradition as a disguise to actually kidnap women.

It's very unfortunate.

That's why you're so comfortable saying their name back and forth.

I was like, no one knows about the Hmong.

So you know this too.

And it was really hard, actually, because there's a ton of footage out there on YouTube of real kidnappings and of these traditions.

So even for us, like our archival producer lost their mind trying to figure out what's real and what's just a marriage proposal.

I'm so happy you mentioned that.

Even we're reporting, we make, we fact check, but it's good to have this corroborated.

This is actually the case and happens even outside of the country.

No, not me.

Meanwhile, I know that he was a human trafficker.

And we had people who agreed to talk to us.

The police showed up at their house and told them not to talk to us.

It was really hard.

And it wasn't really until we partnered with that Asian undercover group of journalists.