A white mother who was flagged as a potential human trafficker by Southwest Airlines employees while traveling with her biracial daughter has sued the carrier for racial discrimination.
Two years ago, cops confronted Mary MacCarthy when she landed in Denver with her 10-year-old daughter as they traveled to her brother’s funeral. They informed her that flight attendants had suspected the mom of human trafficking.
The suspicions were “based on a racist assumption about a mixed-race family,” she claims in her lawsuit filed in Denver Federal Court on Thursday.
Southwest flight attendants had called the police from the air “for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own,” the lawsuit said.
“There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter, and the only basis for the Southwest employee’s call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy’s daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child.”
The flight attendant in question had found it suspicious that the pair had boarded at the last minute and that MacCarthy had worked to get them seats together, that the two didn’t speak during the flight, and that MacCarthy had told her daughter not to talk to the flight crew.
MacCarthy, 42, had just lost her 46-year-old brother to a blood clot, she told People magazine at the time, and he had been like a father to the single mom’s daughter. They had taken off from Los Angeles and hurriedly changed planes to make their connection from San Jose to Denver.
She said she was blindsided when a Southwest employee and Denver police intercepted them as they deplaned. During “significant questioning” that brought MacCarthy’s daughter to tears, the two were subject to “extreme emotional distress,” she said in the suit. MacCarthy called the incident “extremely traumatic” for her daughter, who sobbed throughout the ordeal.
To this day, MacCarthy’s suit alleged, the girl “goes silent and does not speak about it” if the incident is mentioned.
“I want Southwest Airlines and the Denver police to be held accountable for what is undoubtedly a case of racial profiling involving a 10-year-old Black girl who was already suffering the worst day in her life — a death in her family,” MacCarthy told People at the time. “An incident like this can scar a child for life.”
