Cindy McCain was buying sari cloth for her daughter from a “tiny wooden kiosk” in Kolkata, India, some years ago, she said, when she saw “little eyes” through the floorboards, peering up at her. The shopkeeper told her they belonged to members of his family, she recalled in an interview with a Phoenix radio program this past February, but she remained unconvinced. “There were just too many faces, too many eyes.” After returning home, she decided, “that man was trafficking little girls, right from underneath his shop … selling them on the open market, I’m sure.”

McCain has told this story many times: Sometimes, there are as many as “100 sets of eyes,” but she’s always certain they belonged to “little girls.” It was an unsettling awakening, she says, launching her new public persona: a concerned mother turned anti-trafficking leader.

McCain may lack the on-the-ground expertise, research background, or rigorous training to make her an expert on trafficking; it’s her philanthropy that elevates her to thought leader status. With $9 million in leftover campaign funds from her late husband’s 2008 White House bid, she helped launch the McCain Institute for International Leadership in 2012. Its trafficking advisory council now includes a former ambassador, a Republican strategist, and Ashton Kutcher. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement veteran heads its training programs, and in 2018, Uber and the McCain Institute offered a crash course for 750,000 drivers in how to spot human trafficking. Look for someone who “displays uncharacteristically promiscuous behavior or clothing” for their age, Uber now advises, someone with “tattoos or other forms of branding,” who “requests to be taken to a hotel or multiple hotels.”

Trafficking, McCain told the Phoenix local news outlet KGUN in January, is “something that all of us can see, every day, in the streets, in the malls, in the schools—and not recognize.” This, for McCain, is the white mom’s burden. She has spent years telling Americans to look out for suspicious men, particularly of a different ethnicity, coming to enslave their daughters. Now, she is left watching a man she abhors run away with her crusade.

Donald Trump has seized on human trafficking far more dramatically than any of his predecessors. Days after his inauguration, he claimed that “sophisticated” human trafficking networks were bringing “a significant increase in violent crime.” By that April, he was lying regularly about an “epidemic” at the southern border that only he could end. Trump’s lies had a deeper political purpose: They lent his “big, beautiful wall” a humanitarian gloss, while stirring up racist panic about immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who, Trump says, use “blue tape” to gag women and girls, “tying up their hands behind their back and even their legs”—a disturbing, baseless detail Trump mentions frequently (at least ten times in one month earlier this year, according to The Washington Post). Less fetishized forms of trafficking—in which immigrants are forced into domestic or agricultural work—went largely ignored by his administration, which also denied a record number of protective visas to immigrant victims. Trump instead imagines immigrants as criminals encroaching on the American border and on American women. “Traffickers,” he says, not his own violent decrees, are to blame for the cries of children in cages.