A Frontier Airlines passenger on July 19th’s flight 4401 from Las Vegas to San Francisco was accused of trafficking their own 9 year old daughter. A flight attendant raised the concern, told the captain, who had law enforcement waiting for the flight on arrival.
It seems that officers took awhile to respond, though, so the airline claimed that the jet bridge was broken so that nobody could get off. Once law enforcement reached the gate, about an hour after landing, passengers were directed to sit in their assigned seats.
Officers arrived at seats 32 A and B where the parent and child were seated. The parent was told to go to the rear of the aircraft for a conversation – but officers didn’t follow. Instead they began questioning the child out of earshot.
A few minutes later the parent was told they needed to “explain a few things.”
The officer said that a “child trafficking” tip came in. He said that they looked at the manifest and saw that my last name does not match my child’s, so they took the tip as credible. He berated me and forced me to prove that I am my daughter’s biological mother.
What didn’t add up for the officer, and required explanation, was that the passenger is transgender. Eventually the parent and child were reunited, though “[s]he was visibly terrified and is still traumatized by this incident.” The officer then made inappropriate comments about the nine year old’s attractiveness, “apologized for the situation and exited the plane behind us.”
My daughter was physically ill for days following the event and afraid to leave my side. Both my daughter and I are now seeking therapeutic care as a direct result of the emotional turmoil your airline has caused.
Frontier, for its part, eventually apologized for he “inconvenience” in response to a complaint and offered 10,000 miles as compensation.
Airline and hotel employees are taught to use their prejudices to spot and report human trafficking, and this often works out badly. Flight attendants are told they need to be on the lookout, and you have to sympathize with the position that puts them in. Imagine if they didn’t say something when they could have stopped a bad situation? That would haunt them. So better to raise the accusation or flag innocent people for law enforcement to sort out. And that gives you situations like,
- An African American social service worker was traveling with a white baby and accused of kidnapping by an American Airlines flight attendant as a result. Delta accused grandparents of trafficking their mixed-race grandson.
- Armed Port Authority police boarded an American Airlines plane at New York JFK because a flight attendant saw an Asian American woman follow her hispanic husband to the lavatory (he was feeling unwell) and saw that they shared an orange juice. The flight attendant called for a sex trafficking investigation. It found their drivers licenses displayed the same home address because they were married, just different races. American American accused a black musician of trafficking his mixed-race kids, too.
- Cindy McCain once fabricated a story about catching a toddler being trafficked at the Phoenix airport.
- Southwest Airlines demanded to see Facebook posts when a white mother checked in with her mixed-race son, claiming this was ‘federal law’.
This family is on a holiday weekend adventure to support @Kenzie4bs at @usabasketball U18 trials. 💙💛🐻 pic.twitter.com/cbAcRdKyhJ
— Lindsay Gottlieb (@CalCoachG) May 26, 2018
Hotel staff, too, are trained by the Department of Homeland Security to report guests with too many used condoms in the trash, as well as:
- frequent use of the “Do Not Disturb” sign (you’re tired and don’t want to be bothered)
- guests who avert their eyes or don’t make eye contact (you’re tired and don’t want to be bothered)
- people with “lower quality clothing than companions” (no one ever accused me of fashion)
- people who have “suspicious tattoos” (which just means you’re from Austin or Portland)
- having multiple computers, cell phones, and other technology (you’re a blogger)
- “presence of photography equipment” (you’re a blogger)
- refusal of cleaning services for multiple days (you ‘made a green choice’ or ‘fear Covid’)
- rooms paid for with cash or a rechargeable credit card (you have to unload your gift card purchases somehow)
- guests with few personal possessions (you refuse to check a bag because you’re a frequent traveler)
See something, say something, when you’re encouraging amateurs to do it, leads to so many false positives that real cases of sex trafficking seem likely to get less attention. Employees think they are ‘trained’ when they’re really using their prejudices – often, though not always, against mixed race families. In this case the issue was transgender.
I’m not a big fan of lawsuits, but on those occasions when the company (or government) at fault won’t stop, it’s generally the only way to get them to back down.
I am a big fan of lawsuits. Frontier, prepare to pay out the aft.
How many real cases of trafficking are prevented by these flight attendant tips? I have never heard of a single case.
No it wouldn’t — on the principle of MYOB (mind your own business).
I’m sorry, but is this another case where The Progressive Causes have just gone a little too far?
I realize that “trafficking” is a huge problem, but I can’t walk into a truck stop, an airport bathroom, a Post Office Lobby or a Panera john these days without seeing placards reminding me to “Say Something in I See Something” and that “Trafficking is Happening Right Under My Nose”.
According to the promotional posters? I’m surrounded by Traffickers and now I’m qualified to make judgments about it? Whoa.
This family, yet again, will be traumatized for years over some over-zealous flight crew and ham-handed cops. Who EVEN DECIDED that an ex-barista now-flight-attendant is even QUALIFIED to make these determinations? Much less detain a $150M asset and hundreds of people over a whimsical judgment they absolutely aren’t trained to make?
Little kids are hopefully caught by TSA. I’ve seen them vet kids and parents (but not always). Teenagers are more of an issue as they can go thru TSA separately from the trafficker, making it a more likely to be discovered on a flight. IMHO.
The TSA is incompetent in both choosing to do their “think of the children” nonsense and in doing their “think of the children” nonsense.
They go in applying sexist, racist and ageist prejudices and end up freaking out innocent families and innocent kids for literally no good reason and for all sorts of bad reasons. And about the ones whom they don’t freak out and whose cooperation they get in playing their nonsense game, the TSA have groomed them to be easier victims in various ways for criminals.
Thinking like a trafficking criminal, does it not make more sense to drive a child from LAS to SFO? The airport is full of LE and ID checks and of course vigilante flight attendants that just might question your choice of socks and report you. Why chance it? Yes there are horrible people out there but we have to be smarter to catch them.
The best they can do is falsely confine all of the passengers for an hour, missing their connections while they wait for the police that should already be in the airport.
People have to stop accepting this crap when some self appointed trafficking expert decides to take action.
Had a niece fly in as an unaccompanied minor. She was 10 years old. I booked her on a direct flight in 1B so she would be easily seen even from the galley. I got a gate pass and was waiting. She got off the plane with an escort from the airline. She naturally ran up and hugged me. The employee then questioned her if she knew me and had met me before (I kind of chuckled since she called me by name when she saw me). Then the employee asked me for two forms of ID. She had a bag of snacks the FAs had given her and said they checked on her every few minutes (she was in first). I liked the process and overall was impressed.
A lot of this could be solved by simply banning children on airline flights.
That’s pretty much the UAM service process, although the demand for two government-issued photos IDs from the pre-authorized recipient of the UAM would not be normal.
This is why the various states and SSA need to just have a public records database of who is the guardian or parent of who. Much of this information is from birth certificates and is already available. Guardianships and custody changes can easily be reported by the courthouse where they are filed. This would allow the companies to easily do a name reference check and confirm the passenger in question is actually the real minor of the adult traveling with them. This is also why I think photo ID cards should be free for minors. This way every family can have them for their kids and these situations can easily prove that there is no traffic involved. It would just be a random ID check, most of which would go on behind the scenes because again a government database that already has all the names and the DMV database that already has. All the pictures would be able to verify this..
What if the 9 year old daughter followed common internet lawyer’s advice and…
Refused to talk with the police
Answered and asked the police repeatedly if she is free to go.
I think human trafficking by air is uncommon. Far more common by car and older than 9.
I agree with your conclusion.
One way of moving beyond preconception bias based on ‘looks’ is to engage the persons in conversation and judge their responses & demeanor
Daniel’s idea has been done in some countries and it’s a privacy disaster which makes it a goldmine for all sorts of questionable characters.
For example, the Russians are estimated to have a list of something like 90+% of the Nordic countries’ national security community personnel because of the national population registers and such information is a ripe vector for exploitation in conjunction with their relatives or co-habitants info. And that’s even when the people are given the equivalent of a so-called protected identity status.
It’s really weird when someone tries to think they are a freedom-loving person but then tries to prop up a Big Brother super-surveillance state.
“One way of moving beyond preconception bias based on ‘looks’ is to engage the persons in conversation and judge their responses & demeanor”?
I would trust a toddler to be a better judge of responses and demeanor in this kind of airport encounter context than a “trained ‘behavior(al) detection’ officer/expert”.
Besides the privacy issue with IDs for children, there’s the problem that kids appearances change rapidly as they grow. My grandson traveled internationally when he was a few weeks old. Kids’ passports are good for five years (instead of ten for adults), but a four-year-old looks nothing like he did as an infant.
I question the legality of detaining an entire plane load of passengers who were not under any suspicion while waiting for the police to arrive.
It is cases like these that make me feel that the flight attendants should just stick to pouring drinks. I wonder what the percentage of false accusations to correct accusations is in cases like these where there are no signs of the child trying to get away.
This should have a name it happens so often. I dub thee “The Mall Cop Authority Effect”. If you give someone without any power the authority of a mall cop, they will use it and they will use it freely, and without reproach.
It actually does have a name though – it’s called the Prisoner Effect. Because let’s be real, we are all prisoners once we step foot on the plane if they can legally detain without notice for causes like this, and the flight attendants pouring drinks are the guards.
Why do airline staff in the United States all seem to think that they are some kind of law-enforcement? For those of us from the rest of the world, this is absolutely bizarre. Flight attendants are the worst, but even ground staff love to throw around the terms “federal law”, “federal regulations”, “FAA rules”, when they usually don’t know what they’re talking about, and no such rules, laws or regulations exist. Educate them or terminate them. Many people actually fear of having to deal with “customer service” personnel at US airlines.
America the police state. On the other hand, children are abducted. and adults can kidnap children, but obviously not in this situation. Almost happened to me at several instances in my life where I was followed by a stranger (in public, not on a airplane, decades ago). On the one hand, I suppose you can’t be too careful these days.
Just, but FAs don’t want to purchase drinks. They want to play a combination of Bond and Watson !
For a while, Canada was either the child kidnapping capital of the world or close to it. In large part it was because of how Canada calculated kidnappings and the rigor in counting, but the big part of that is that it was like most child kidnappings in high-income countries: done by parents or other close relatives of the child(ren). And yet we have these “think of the children” US DHS and encouraged airline and hotel worker type thinking “oh, it’s ok, because the kid is saying their name, says who the person is that is traveling with them, has an answer about where the other parent is, and knows where they are going.” And yet with these stupid interactions, these “think of the children” types are grooming children to let down their “stranger-danger” teachings and encouraging children to provide personal information to strangers.
Good intentions maybe, but the aggregate outcomes of these travel-related “service” types acting on the possibly good intentions is the opposite of good with all this “pre-crime” “crime”-fighting.
That said, I suggest people should investigate how the start of the “think of the children”-driven questioning from the TSA was related to something beside just a human trafficking concern.
@jns, just pouring drinks? Do you even travel by air? Doesn’t sound like it.
You know what, those skywaitresses and mall cops with a badge do have a first and a last name. If they want to keep on those power trips, at bare minimum, we should know their names. And yes, sue them into oblivion, make sure they spend their very last penny with lawyers.
I mean, skywaitresses should be peddling your own airline credit card, not playing airborne Sherlock Holmes. You mostly fail to reach your airline’s very own credit card selling target, you’re not getting at all a Nobel Detective Prize any time soon.
This happened to me and my husband years back on a Southwest Flight. It was very traumatizing. TIP: ALWAYS carry a copy of your kid’s birth certificate. Also if you travel solo out of the country without your spouse/partner with your kid you can run into trouble – so have a signed written letter with contact info from your partner saying it’s ok to travel with the kid. The Southwest incident was because our son didn’t want to get off the plane because he liked flying and so he had a melt down. We were questioned heavily by the police but thankfully we had family photos and scans of the birth cert on our computers.
@ Gary. So true . . . even out here in Western Travis County, “people who have “suspicious tattoos” (which just means you’re from Austin or Portland)”
Re: seeking therapeutic care, as in many cases that ship has sailed.
@ Flyer 1. You’re right . . . it’s not “pouring drinks”, it’s “slinging Cokes and Sprites.”