PHOENIX, AZ — A story Cindy McCain told earlier this week about saving a young child from human trafficking is unraveling. McCain, a co-chair of the Arizona Human Trafficking Council, told an Arizona radio station this week that she recently witnessed human trafficking involving a toddler at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, but the city’s police department later disputed that report.
McCain, who also serves on the McCain Institute’s Human Trafficking Advisory Council, said she was heeding the advice of the Department of Homeland Security, which encourage in its motto: “If You See Something, Say Something.”
In an interview Monday with KTAR News, McCain said she was arriving home from a trip and saw a situation that “looked odd.”
“It was a woman of a different ethnicity than the child, this little toddler she had, and something didn’t click with me. I tell people, trust your gut,” McCain said. “I went over to the police and told them what I thought, and they went over and questioned her. And by God, she was trafficking that kid.”
When the radio show hosts expressed surprise about the age of the child believed to be involved, McCain continued: “A toddler. It was a toddler. She was waiting for the guy who bought the child to get off the airplane.”
But the Phoenix Police Department said on Wednesday it didn’t happen that way. Officers conducted a welfare check after getting the report on Jan. 30, but found no evidence of criminal conduct or child endangerment, according to a statement to Phoenix media.
McCain walked back her comments on Twitter.
“I commend the police officers for their diligence,” she tweeted. “I apologize if anything else I have said on this matter distracts from “if you see something, say something.”
What’s troublesome to some is that McCain apparently made her judgment because the toddler’s ethnicity differed from the parent’s — an irony given that McCain and her late husband, Sen. John McCain, adopted their daughter, Bridget, from Bangladesh in 1991.
“Which airports do you prefer?” one Twitter user responded. “You know, just so my multi-ethnic family knows which ones to avoid.”
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One Twitter user said McCain should have apologized to the woman she “called the cops on,” and another said she offered “a crappy non-apology” and needs “to apologize for blatantly lying about this family to the media.”
That type of profiling isn’t unusual, according to a Twitter user who travels with her father, whose skin color is different. It happens “at least once a week,” she wrote.
“We had to show my birth certificate so often that Papi would carry it to the library on our weekly father-daughter trip,” she tweeted. “Do you have any idea how that (profanity) me up?”
She said her father was “constantly treated like a criminal for just being a great dad” who took his daughter to libraries and museums. She said she wouldn’t have blamed him if he had stopped taking her places without her mother, but is “thankful he didn’t.”
A similar incident happened in December 2017 at the Phoenix airport. Brian Smith told television station KNXV that he was accused of trafficking his daughter, Georgianna, who was 16 at the time. Smith and his wife, Renee, have three biological children, but adopted Georgianna from China.
When the family got off a Southwest Airlines flight from Fort Myers, Florida, they were approached by a Phoenix police officer who said “the flight attendant had some concerns about the person you’re with,” the teen’s father told KNXV.
The Smiths said at the time that they were curious about what behavior raised the flight attendant’s suspicion. She was seated next to her father, but slept most of the time, and their only interaction with the flight attendant was when placing drink and snack orders.
“I don’t like to accuse anyone of anything,” Renee Smith told the television station. “But … if Georgianna was a Caucasian child, I don’t believe this would have happened.”
Southwest Airlines apologized to the family and also said its flight attendants would undergo training to help them spot behaviors that are common in human trafficking.
Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., estimates that in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are trafficked. The organization says its data suggest the number is on the rise.
Photo of Cindy McCain by Christian Petersen/Getty Images