Posted on 08/07/2023 10:59:49 AM PDT by 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."
Wait, isn't Cindy McCain the mother of a daughter who is a different ethnicity than her? Why didn't this beer Karen arrest herself?
Isn't she the largest distributor of Bud Light in the country? What did Cindy know Mulvaney and when did she know it?
It was a plane, so didn’t the mother have to have some paperwork getting on?
I smell a hoax.
2
Right. You have to show ID when checking in, before you even get to the TSA screenings.
It’s the SoundOfFreedom effect.
Hoax indeed. A real mother would be thankful they cared enough to try to protect people’s children.
Does that apply to kids? I never had ID as a kid, and I was on planes all the times, except that was long before 9/11. I don’t think I had a passport until I was a teen, or so.
-PJ
This story doesn’t wash...
Airline employees see every race, religion, etc all day long. I don’t believe what the mother is saying at all.
***people who seem “nervous.”***
Ummm, that’s me when I fly, because it feels like I’m in a cattle car. I’m on someone else’s schedule, and they seem to have lots of rules about what you can and can’t bring on a flight.
Oh, and the bomb-sniffing German Shepherd makes me feel very comfortable, too. /s
Biracial families are ubiquitous now. No one bats an eye anymore.
Either someone at SW is loony or there’s more to this story.
The incident was not an occasion of false claims by someone.
I saw the mom on TV this moring and saw the video of her and her daughter being confronted by the false charges as the deboarded the plane; the daughter was crying the whole time. The mom is white and her daughter is biracial. They did not have seats ticketed together. With the flight attendants knowledge the mom asked ofher passengers if they could make some accomodation so she and her daughter could sit together.
Someone on the flight staff reported that they suspected the mom of being part of human trafficking. They did not even check the flight manifest showing mom and daughter have the last name.
It was not a “racial” incident, just a stupid incident.
The incident was not an occasion of false claims by someone.
I saw the mom on TV this moring and saw the video of her and her daughter being confronted by the false charges as the deboarded the plane; the daughter was crying the whole time. The mom is white and her daughter is biracial. They did not have seats ticketed together. With the flight attendants knowledge the mom asked ofher passengers if they could make some accomodation so she and her daughter could sit together.
Someone on the flight staff reported that they suspected the mom of being part of human trafficking. They did not even check the flight manifest showing mom and daughter have the last name.
It was not a “racial” incident, just a stupid incident.
Post 9/11, I had multiple passengers report to me that they thought a certain passengers was acting suspiciously. I reported it to the pilots and a very thorough investigation was done - without the passenger even knowing of it or that they were being accused. Once all was good, I reassured the passengers that all was good and we were on our way.
Going up to the cockpit, closing the door and reporting what multiple people had. said, I almost collapsed and was shaking. Turns out, the guy was just a nervous flyer.
Those FAs who reported that mother could have easily seen a relationship between the mother and daughter and that the child wasn’t being trafficked. However, I do not think it was lawsuit worthy unless the mother was put in a serious situation and threatened by LE.
My guess is such mistakes happen a lot these days, but bad outcomes (or publicity) are rare.
My other (less charitable) guess is this story has its roots in a desire for publicity.
I worked in an airport for a decade and I recall people blending together. It was behaviors that caught my attention. I can see a passenger bringing attention to something like this, but not an employee.
This article is about the airline employee, not a passenger.
Frivolous lawsuit. So the cops stop you for one minute to make sure that everything is ok. Gee, the horror of it! And if the daughter started crying at the cops asking a couple of questions, maybe she has other issues that should be addressed.
Something similar happened to my nephew and his wife. They vacationed in Mexico. Nephew is pale white, his wife is dark black, and they have a bi-racial son who is more on the white side. The black wife was crossing the border into the USA and Mexican authorities detained her, accusing her of child trafficking the son because he looked nothing like her. Took her awhile to produce paperwork that proved he was her son.
...which is why it stinks.
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