A mother has filed a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines after a flight attendant accused her of trafficking her own daughter in 2021. The mother is white and her child is biracial.
According to the lawsuit, Mary MacCarthy was traveling from Los Angeles to Denver with her 10-year-old daughter when the airline employee made “a racist assumption about a mixed‐race family” and reported her to police.
In her lawsuit filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, the California resident said she was flying to Denver to attend the funeral of her older brother when she faced the accusation. According to CBS News, MacCarthy said two armed officers from the Denver Police Department confronted her when she landed.
“The officers informed them that they wanted to question Plaintiff MacCarthy and her daughter because a Southwest Airlines employee had reported them as suspicious and Plaintiff MacCarthy as a potential human trafficker,” the lawsuit states. “As the officers spoke with Plaintiff MacCarthy, Plaintiff M.M. began to sob, fearing that she and/or her mother were in legal trouble for some reason.”
MacCarthy and her daughter were allowed to go after the mother showed her identification and explained why she traveled to Denver.
“I travel with my daughter’s birth certificate because I’m ready to answer any questions if necessary,” MacCarthy said at that time according to NBC Chicago. “The fact that we’re mother and daughter, the fact that I’m a single parent traveling with my daughter, it’s the right of TSA to ask those questions. I’m open to that. But the way this was handled was so unprofessional.”
MacCarthy said the incident caused “extreme emotional distress” for herself and her daughter. The California mother is now seeking economic damages and compensatory damages in her complaint, as well as punitive and exemplary damages.
Attorney David Lane, who’s representing MacCarthy, said the airline needs to re-examine its training and policies.
“In using racial profiling to cause the Denver police to stop innocent travelers, Southwest Airlines has attempted to address the serious crime of sex-trafficking through use of a stereotypical, easy formula,” Lane told CBS News. “Just as the police are constitutionally not permitted to stop-and-frisk young men of color based upon their race, corporate America is similarly not permitted to resort to such profiling in using law enforcement to stop and question racially diverse families simply based upon their divergent races, which is what Southwest did.”
A Southwest Airlines spokesperson who spoke with CBS News said the company doesn’t “have anything to add right now on this pending litigation.”
