News
Miracle Worker
Denice Miracle has been a customer service representative at American Airlines for 27 years. As a worker in the airline industry, she’s always thinking of the safety of her passengers above all else. For this reason, it was fortunate that she was working one fateful day last year when two young teenagers approached her desk at the Sacramento International Airport.
Miracle, a member of Local 856 in San Bruno, Calif., knew that something strange was going on when she noticed that the two teenage girls didn’t have much luggage.
“Normally, if a teenager is travelling, they have a lot of stuff—these two girls only had two small carry-ons, and their parents weren’t even with them,” Miracle said. “Some kids are really travel savvy, but not these two. They didn’t even have ID. I had an internal instinct that said, ‘Something is not right.’”
Miracle notified her supervisor then called the local sheriff’s department. They arrived on the scene shortly.
“Pretty Serious”
“The police came and checked it out. I could tell something was going on,” Miracle said. “There was one, then two, then three, then four…I went about my day checking people in, but I realized something pretty serious is going on over there.”
The sheriff’s deputies investigated the situation, and discovered that the tickets had been bought with a stolen credit card.
The 15-year-old and 17-year-old girls told police they met a man on Instagram and he invited them to go to New York for a modeling job. They said he was going to pay them $2,000 to model in a music video.
Were it not for the intervention of Miracle, things could have been much worse.
The deputies told Miracle that had the two girls gotten on the plane, their parents never would’ve seen them again.
“I’m very, very thankful Ms. Miracle with American Airlines was able to use her intuition and concern and actually say something,” Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Sanderson told The Sacramento Bee. “Without her, I wouldn’t have been called and we wouldn’t have intervened with these girls.”
Front Lines
The incident speaks to the importance of airline workers who are constantly at the front lines of protecting their passengers.
Working as pilots, customer service representatives, mechanics or dispatchers, all workers in this industry are on the front lines of protecting human life every day.
Customer service representatives in particular are uniquely positioned to fight human trafficking as they are often in the best position to rescue victims of human trafficking.
In recent years, initiatives such as Airline Ambassadors and the Blue Campaign have sought to bring awareness to this very important issue, and workers in the industry are increasingly being taught to spot victims of this horrific practice.
“We check people in every day and we try to interact with people, even if it’s just for a second,” Miracle said. “We’re the first face that they run into, so anything you see that’s out of the ordinary, maybe take a minute to evaluate the situation and ask why some young people are by themselves.
“I’m a proud union member, and American Airlines is very committed to fighting human trafficking,” Miracle said. “Any and all training we can get to not just American employees, but other airline employees; that can only help.”