DALLAS — A California woman is suing Dallas' Southwest Airlines nearly two years after what she believes was a case of racial profiling: flight attendants assuming the 10-year-old, who turned out to be the woman's biracial daughter, might a victim of human trafficking.
"It's only now, really as of yesterday, the kind of emotional toll of having spoken out is really getting to me," Mary MacCarthy told WFAA of the October 2021 incident and the social media backlash she said has followed.
MacCarthy was traveling from Los Angeles to Denver after the sudden death of her brother. She said that because of that, she bought the tickets at the last minute and she and her daughter, Moira, were among the last to board the plane. Unable to find seats together, she said, other passengers eventually moved so she could sit with her daughter.
"There's just, just something's off," a Southwest flight attendant said to the Denver police officers they summoned to the jetway after the plane landed.
"We don't know if she's lying to us," the flight attendant can be heard telling the officers.
The encounter was recorded on a Denver police bodycam, which is now evidence in the civil lawsuit MacCarthy has filed against the airline.
"Ma'am. Hi. How are you? Is this your daughter?" a police officer asked MacCarthy as they exited the airplane.
"The flight attendants noticed something suspicious," a Southwest employee told her. "Something that we're following up on. We're not speculating anything."
At this point in the encounter between MacCarthy, her daughter, police and the Southwest employees, Moira began to cry.
"She doesn't need to be scared, because you are not in any trouble," a police officer told her.
MacCarthy, who retrieved her cellphone to get her own video evidence of the questions she was being asked for several minutes inside the jetway, was eventually allowed to leave and enter the airport terminal with her daughter.
"No. This isn't OK," she said on the recorded police bodycam. "This isn't OK."
"They basically said we'll just sit down with Ms. MacCarthy and explain to her what human trafficking is... and we'll be good," MacCarthy said of the eventual communication she and her lawyer received from the airline.
"And I found that so disrespectful towards any customer who has a complaint of any degree that they wouldn't even be aware when they sit down with your lawyer what the gravity of the situation is," she said.
Her civil lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court of Colorado, accuses the airline and its employees of a "display of blatant racism by Southwest Airlines (that) caused Ms. MacCarthy and her daughter extreme emotional distress."
"The whole incident was based on a racist assumption about a mixed‐race family," MacCarthy states in the lawsuit. "This is the type of situation that mixed‐race families and families of color face all too frequently while traveling."
"They never issued an apology," MacCarthy said. "Never gave this the basic dignity of addressing how serious things were."
In a written statement after the October 2021 incident, Southwest Airlines released the following written statement:
"We are disheartened to learn of this mother's account when traveling with her daughter. We are conducting a review of the situation internally, and we will be reaching out to the Customer to address her concerns and offer our apologies for her experience traveling with us. Our Employees undergo robust training on Human Trafficking. Above all, Southwest Airlines prides itself on providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for the millions of Customers who travel with us each year."
"At this stage, a formal apology is absolutely not enough," MacCarthy told WFAA. "My purpose in doing this is to raise awareness around this rampant racial profiling that the airlines are engaging in. It needs to stop."
Moira is MacCarthy's biological daughter. Moira's father is Haitian.
In response to the lawsuit, Southwest Airlines told WFAA "we don't have anything to add right now on this pending litigation."
