LOGAN, Utah — A group of men portrayed as possible human traffickers in a Logan TikTok video that went viral turned out to be refugees from Afghanistan who served alongside the U.S. military before fleeing the country during last year’s Taliban takeover.
And people who know them say the allegations are unfounded.
On July 31, Tessah Marie turned to TikTok to post a video she took at the carnival in Cache Valley Mall’s parking lot in Logan. The video shows several men with their phone cameras on, recording the excitement of the scene.
“STOP HUMAN TRAFFICKING!!!” the TikTok video said in red letters. “These men were walking around on FaceTime with people & recording kids on rides at our local carnival! They had no children or family with them!”
Marie also posted still frames of the video on Cache Valley 411, a local Facebook group with over 22,000 members. While at the carnival, she called the police, who arrived and informed her that recording in public is not illegal.
“However, the officer offered to walk around and make contact with the individuals,” said Logan City Police Department Assistant Chief Jeff Simmons. “They weren’t able to locate the individuals matching the description that she’d provided.”
According to Cache Refugee and Immigrant Connection Director Danny Beus, the men featured in the video are refugees who were members of the Afghan military before the Taliban gained control of their country after the U.S. withdrew. They assisted U.S. troops.
When the U.S. left Afghanistan, Beus said, the established resettlement agencies were not equipped for the thousands of Afghan immigrants.
“The State Department said, ‘Well, we got to get these people placed, and so we’re going to reach out to organizations that do similar work. We’re going to ask them to help resettle Afghan refugees,’” Beus explained. “So, we were asked to do that.”
Beus also said the men at the carnival were video chatting with their families in Afghanistan, showing them the carnival.
“They all have like, three, four, five kids back stuck in Afghanistan where, you know, they obviously have, like, a target on their back,” Beus said.
The original TikTok post, which has since been taken down, garnered over 2.5 million views and 15,000 shares according to Cache Valley 411 moderator and TikTok user Stacie Lynn, who said Marie’s original post was only removed after she and others repeatedly reported it to TikTok.
Copies of the unblurred video are still circulating the internet through TikTok users who used the original video for duets, a feature that TikTok’s support website says “allows you to post your video side-by-side with a video from another creator.”
Lynn, who has over 180,000 followers on TikTok, said she believes social media users are responsible for the content they distribute.
“She (Marie) is like, ‘Well, if I’m wrong, then I’ll apologize to them.’ Well, apologizing to them is not going to change how many times that video has been shared,” Lynn said. “It takes one person that feels like they want to be a vigilante not knowing the whole story that is like, ‘Oh, those guys tried to kidnap children.’”
Several arguments were held in the comments of the original TikTok video as well as follow-up posts where Marie tried to explain the situation from her perspective.
“Why are these guys reputation more important to you than making people aware of what they were doing? What I saw with my own eyes?” Marie said in one comment on the original post. In the comment section of a later post, she stated, “Refugee doesn’t mean they are good people and not capable of doing bad things!”
Beus acknowledged the spread of misinformation surrounding the incident, but also expressed worries about Marie receiving backlash.
“We don’t necessarily want to victimize this lady,” Beus said. “I don’t want her being dragged through the mud or anything.”
Marie declined multiple requests for public comment.