Southwest Airlines Falsely Accuses Mom of Trafficking Biracial Daughter

Reason ^ | 8.7.2023 | ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

[nickcarraway]

A woman is suing Southwest Airlines after flight staff accused her of trafficking her child. Mary MacCarthy was flying with her 10-year-old daughter, "MM," in 2021 when Southwest Airlines staff called the Denver Police Department and reported her as a suspected child trafficker.

MacCarthy is white, and her daughter is biracial. In a lawsuit against Southwest, MacCarthy alleges that she was suspected of trafficking her own daughter "for no reason other than the different color of her daughter's skin from her own."

"There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter," states the complaint, filed August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, "and the only basis for the Southwest employee's call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy's daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child."

MacCarthy and her daughter wouldn't be the first multiracial family to find themselves facing human trafficking allegations at the airport. We keep hearing about flying families or couples falsely accused of being involved in trafficking because they don't appear to be the same race or ethnicity.

It's happened with interracial couples and with parents of mixed-race or adopted children. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, infamously fabricated catching a child trafficker when she reported to police a woman traveling with a child who was "a different ethnicity" from her.

This situation isn't occurring in a vacuum. It comes amid a decadeslong moral panic about sex trafficking generally and child sex trafficking in particular. The panic has taken many forms, including the Department of Homeland Security encouraging War on Terror–style citizen surveillance campaigns ("if you see something, say something") to stop trafficking; states requiring airports to post human trafficking hotline numbers and awareness signs; and government-sponsored programs to train airline and airport staff to spot alleged signs of trafficking.

Most of the "signs" these people are trained to spot are nonsense—impossibly vague or broad. For instance, Airline Ambassadors International trains airline and airport staff (using a training program approved by Homeland Security) to keep an eye on "children, those who accompany them, and young women traveling alone" and people who seem "nervous." Training materials also tend to tell people to go with their gut instincts. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lot of racial profiling, with ill-informed instincts about what a family "should" look like coming into play.

The wider campaign to "stop sex trafficking" via vigilance on airplanes and at airports is itself based on the faulty idea that human trafficking (a category that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking) is mostly done by brazen cabals of international traffickers ushering victims into the U.S. and Americans victims out, or shipping victims around the country. But in the U.S., labor trafficking tends to be concentrated in specific industries and to involve various forms of worker exploitation more than the covert importation of human beings. And in the sex trades, exploitation tends to take place at a much smaller scale, with individuals or small groups—often people the victim knows—perpetuating it. It also tends to take place in the communities people live in or with victims and traffickers traveling by car, not using commercial airlines.

Neither airlines nor the U.S. government have ever released any data to support the idea that these spot-a-trafficker trainings have led to criminals being apprehended or victims being rescued. Meanwhile, we hear stories like MacCarthy's again and again.

Denver cops stopped MacCarthy and MM as they exited the airplane and questioned them in a manner that "made it clear that they were given the racially charged information that Ms. MacCarthy's daughter was possibly being trafficked by her simply because Ms. MacCarthy is White and her daughter is Black," the complaint alleges. "After questioning, during which Ms. MacCarthy's daughter began to break down in tears, Ms. MacCarthy was eventually allowed to leave by the officers, but not before this display of blatant racism by Southwest Airlines caused Ms. MacCarthy and her daughter extreme emotional distress."

[Cowgirl of Justice]

I understand. The flight attendants have been told to say something if they see something but my point was that there was enough time on that flight for the flight attendant to see the relationship between a mother and daughter instead of saying that it was human trafficking based on skin color. Also, that the airline would know immediately that it was a relative with the docs that are required to be provided during the booking of the ticket.

https://www.afacwa.org/stop_human_trafficking

[higgmeister]

Hoax indeed. A real mother would be thankful they cared enough to try to protect people’s children.

Yeah, like you should be thankful that a police force made a oh-dark-thirty no-knock raid on your house because they read the address wrong on their confidential informant's information, because "they cared enough" to go after criminals.

Do you know how stupid that sounds?

[pops88]

That’s quite a different scenario. The situation might not have been handled well, but that doesn’t make the concept of verification invalid. I try not to look at everything through bitter eyes.

[HollyB]

Good point.