Mother, accused of human trafficking while flying with daughter, sues airline

Mary MacCarthy and her 10-year-old daughter, Moira, had just deplaned at Denver International Airport when two Denver police officers met them at the gate, calling them by name and notifying them that they had been reported for suspicious behavior.

The mother and daughter had flown a Southwest Airlines flight to Denver for a funeral. MacCarthy’s brother had died suddenly the night before.

Unbeknown to MacCarthy, a flight attendant had suspected MacCarthy, who is white, of human trafficking, MacCarthy said in an interview Monday. Moira, her daughter, is Black.

The officers questioned them, MacCarthy said, adding that her daughter cried in her arms throughout the entire interaction. MacCarthy showed her driver’s license to the officers; they did not ask for identification for Moira, proving that they were related.

The incident occurred in October 2021, but MacCarthy filed a lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court in Colorado against Southwest, alleging that the airline had intentionally racially discriminated against her family.

“I’ve been raising a biracial daughter for 10 years,” said MacCarthy, who is 44 and a single parent. “I know about racial profiling and I know that ‘suspicious’ is a code word for minority.”

Southwest Airlines declined to comment on the litigation. In a police report filed the day of the incident, a flight attendant made several claims to substantiate her belief that MacCarthy was a human trafficker. The flight attendant said that MacCarthy demanded she sit with her child and that she’d instructed her child not to speak to anyone. This wasn’t true, MacCarthy said Monday.

Federal laws prohibit airlines from discriminating against passengers based on disability, race, color, national origin, sex, religion or ancestry. In February, the month with latest publicly available data, 20 consumer complaints alleging discrimination by domestic airlines were filed with the Department of Transportation’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection. In 2022, 118 discrimination complaints were filed, 7% more than the previous year’s complaints.

In recent years, reports of passengers who say they have experienced racial discrimination while flying have made headlines. In 2016, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania was working on math equations on an American Airlines flight when a seatmate thought he might be a terrorist and alerted flight attendants. That same year, a University of California Berkeley student was removed from a Southwest flight after speaking Arabic on a phone call.

In 2017, the NAACP issued an advisory against American Airlines noting a “corporate culture of racial insensitivity and possible racial bias” and cited three incidents in which Black passengers were removed from their flights, including one involving a passenger who questioned why her seat assignment had changed. The advisory was lifted nine months later, after the airline made several changes.