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In mid-June 2018, fanning the uproar over the Trump administration's policy of separating families detained at the U.S.-Mexico border, a Facebook post allegedly written by a commercial flight attendant painted a heartrending picture of scared little souls being flown to a detention facility in the middle of the night. The text was posted by a Facebook user who identified herself as a coworker of the author: In a subsequent post, the Facebook user, Anika Lodzinski, declined to identify her coworker, whom she said was unwilling to risk his job by going public. Nor did she name the airline they both work for (reposts of the text variously named Southwest Airlines or American Airlines as the carrier, but neither company would confirm or deny those claims). Lodzinski told us via e-mail that she had been directed to refer all media questions to her union (the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA). The incident did happen, Lodzinski wrote. She said didn't expect her post to garner so much attention. AFA-CWA e-mailed us a statement saying they had confirmed that the Facebook post was real, and written by a flight attendant. Though they would not confirm or comment on any details pertaining to the incident beyond that, AFA-CWA also provided a statement from International President Sara Nelson, who said: We also requested verification of the incident from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but they did not respond to our request in time for publication. Questions have been raised about the stated boarding and deplaning times (12:30 A.M. and 2:30 A.M., respectively), which are two hours apart. Typically, a non-stop flight from Phoenix to Miami takes around four hours, though there is nothing in the original text to indicate that the flight discussed was non-stop, nor that the 12:30 A.M. departure was from an Arizona airport. A reporter for the Arizona Republic ascertained that an American Airlines flight departing from Phoenix on the afternoon of 14 June would have arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina in plenty of time to connect with a late evening (10:40 P.M.) flight to Miami whose departure time on that date was delayed until almost 12:30 A.M. It didn't arrive in Miami until 1:52 A.M., which lines up reasonably well with the times mentioned in the Facebook post. After the anonymous post went viral, two more first-person accounts by workers on flights that transported immigrant children emerged that echoed its observations and lent credence to its author's observations. On 19 June, the Houston Chronicle published a lightly edited version of a Facebook post by Hunt Palmquist, who said he has been a flight attendant for a major commercial airline for 29 years. Several weeks ago, he wrote, I worked two flights (one to San Antonio and the other to McAllen) which proved to be two of the most disturbing flights I've ever experienced in my career. He continued: Palmquist vowed he would no longer be complicit in what he described as a disgusting and deplorable cause, and pledged to remove himself from any such flights in the future. That same day, American Airlines flight attendant Ian Funderburg posted the text of a letter he had addressed to a vice president of the company, in which he wrote: Funderburg, too, vowed not to participate in such flights in the future. I refuse to be complicit in carrying out the abhorrent and abusive anti-immigrant agenda of the Trump Administration, he wrote. On 20 June 2018, American Airlines issued a statement both reaffirming their unawareness of cases of the Department of Homeland Security transporting immigrant children separated from their families on their airplanes and asking the federal government to immediately refrain from doing so (only to be attacked by a DHS spokesperson for buckling to a false media narrative). Frontier, Southwest, and United Airlines issued similarly worded statements. Soon afterward, President Trump signed an executive order calling a halt to his own administration's family separation policy.
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