In October 2021, Mary MacCarthy and her 10-year-old daughter, Moira, stepped off a plane at Denver International Airport and were greeted by two Denver police officers who approached them by name — they had been flagged for suspicious activity, The New York Times reported.
A flight attendant had harbored suspicions about MacCarthy, who is white, regarding her daughter, who is black. The officers questioned the passengers due to a suspicion of human trafficking.
Last week, MacCarthy initiated a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines in the Federal District Court of Colorado, alleging intentional racial discrimination against her family.
“I’ve been raising a biracial daughter for 10 years,” MacCarthy told The Times. “I know about racial profiling and I know that ‘suspicious’ is a code word for minority.”
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Entrepreneur has reached out to Southwest Airlines for comment.
A police report from the day of the incident contained multiple claims from a flight attendant, such as insisting she sit with her daughter and that the mother instructed her not to speak to anyone — which MacCarthy has disputed.
MacCarthy told The Times that her intention with the suit is to curtail race-based profiling in the airline industry.
“Racial differences are a physical reality, but there’s a big difference between that and a flight attendant who didn’t even ask if we had the same last name, let alone make any effort to get to know us,” MacCarthy told the outlet. “We have a lot of similarities.”
A 2018 study by the anti-trafficking organization Polaris revealed that airlines are less frequently used for labor trafficking operations compared to other forms of transportation. Of the 127 human trafficking victims surveyed, 38% reported using planes during their exploitation.
Still, Polaris emphasized the role of airlines in recognizing potential trafficking situations, urging vigilance beyond surface-level indicators such as appearance or ethnicity — instead taking note of behaviors like wearing inappropriate clothing for the current climate, adults not handling their own identification, and same-day cash bookings.