Tarrant County police arrested 115 individuals in a sex trafficking sting early last month, according to CBS Dallas/Fort Worth. 

The sting – called Operation Buyer Beware – was timed to utilize a recently implemented Texas state law that makes buying sex a full felony instead of a misdemeanor.

"One of the main reasons that the cartels are involved in smuggling people across the border of Texas, into Texas and other parts of the United States, is to fuel the sex trafficking industry," said Hank Sibley, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, in a recent statement.

During the operation, CBS Dallas/Fort Worth reports investigators posed as children using online sources to identify key suspects. Perpetrators were ages 20 to 70 and appeared to have largely different lifestyles. The main goal of police departments in Tarrant County was to remove demand that bolsters the trafficking industry between Mexico and the United States.

According to a 2016 report from the University of Texas at Austin, there are 78,996 minor and youth victims of human-trafficking and 234,457 victims of labor-trafficking in Texas at any given time, totaling 313,453 victims in all.

Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn recently told Fox 4 KDFW that the root cause of sex trafficking "is an evil that is with us, and we're trying to send the signal today that this will not be tolerated in Tarrant County. These people who were arrested were from every walk of life. From every socioeconomic group. From every ethnicity or race."