One of the nation’s biggest airlines has been called into the spotlight after a Black father was accused of trafficking his own children on a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles earlier in September.
David Ryan Harris, a musician who has collaborated with the likes of John Mayer, Carlos Santana and the Dave Matthews Band, recently took to social media to tell his story, and ask for people to “do better” after the incident rattled his family.
Harris says that he was aboard an American Airlines flight two weeks ago, heading to LAX with his two biracial sons, Truman and Hendrix. As they were de-boarding the plane, they found four police officers waiting for them at the gate.
“Apparently, a flight attendant had called ahead with some sort of concern that perhaps my mixed children weren’t my children,” Harris said in a video posted on his social media accounts. “We are met, embarrassingly so, by this AA employee and police officers. They questioned my kids.”
How common is human trafficking on commercial domestic flights in the first place? Seems like it would be one of the worst travel options for traffickers, for a lot of reasons.
Not uncommon.
You can go all the way across the country in a few hours.
But in the process you’ve alerted authorities in advance of where you’ll be traveling and with whom—and you’re disarmed, so you can be easily apprehended and your victims can escape without fear of violence. Plus you and your victims are confined for hours in close quarters with dozens of other people who have plenty of time to notice any erratic behavior.
Disarmed lol. It is comically easy to sneak a gun past the TSA. I don’t remember the specific numbers, but there was a test done, and something like 85% of the trials made it through with the weapon.
Feel free to look it up if you’re interested.
What matters in this case isn’t so much the fact of being unarmed, as it is the behavior of the victims and law enforcement who might feel empowered to act based on the belief that the trafficker is unarmed.
Traffickers presumably don’t actually want to end up in a shootout—they just want the perceived possibility to serve as a deterrent.
Tons of people are shit-scared of flying and are visibly anxious. Tons of people drug themselves with benzos before flying.
But regardless of those two points, when the victim is at the point where they would be in an airplane with their pimp, controller, whatever you want to call them, they’re likely going to be well under their thumb, or happy thinking about that wonderful American business opportunity as a secretary or whatever they think is on the other side of the flight.
Sometimes it doesn’t play out like that, but often it does.
Many times they don’t use commercial air flights like you suggest, they drive. That’s why there are apps that allow you to take a 360° view of your hotel/motel/hostel so they can match them up with known sexual abuse videos.