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‘Racist assumptions’: California mother accused of human trafficking while travelling with biracial daughter
A white mother was accused of human trafficking by a Southwest Airlines employee while travelling with her biracial daughter.
Mary MacCarthy and her daughter were travelling on a Southwest Airlines flight in 2021 for her brother's funeral when she was accused of human trafficking by an airline employee present on the scene. Following the event, she filed a lawsuit against the airlines for racial profiling.
In October 2021, Mary took a flight from San Jose, California to Denver, Colorado with her 10-year-old daughter. Upon their arrival in Denver, Mary and her daughter were separately confronted by armed police and a Southwest staff who suspected she was trafficking her biological biracial daughter.
Mary V/S Southwest
In a lawsuit filed on Thursday in the District Court of Colorado, Mary has accused Southwest of racial discrimination.
The complaint claims that Southwest employees reported her to law enforcement “based on a racist assumption” about a biracial family.
David Lane, the attorney representing Mary, said the lawsuit is designed to have the airline re-examine its policy and “bring some” accountability to the company.
‘Just as the police are constitutionally not permitted to stop-and-frisk young men of colour 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’, Lane added.
In 2021 the airline said that it was conducting an internal review of the incident and that its employees do undergo robust training on human trafficking. No further comment has been made by them due to the pending litigation.
Denver police received ‘racially charged information’
Post boarding the flight, a Southwest flight attendant reported Mary to the police as she was ‘suspicious’ of the pair. The two were last to board the flight and did not speak during the voyage, she said.
Therefore, upon reaching Denver the pair was surrounded by Denver Police Department officers and a member of the airline staff who began to question them.
A video from the incident showed the airline employee and an officer speaking to the pair about their suspicious behaviour while the cries of Mary's daughter could be heard from the background.
"While they were in the air, a Southwest employee called the Denver Police Department to report Ms MacCarthy for suspected child trafficking for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own," the complaint alleges.
The incident has proven to be “extremely traumatic for the 10-year-old girl”, according to the complaint.
Are racial discrimination lawsuits not new for Southwest?
In January of the same year, Southwest employees pulled a white father, travelling with his black daughter, off a plane for questioning.
The father filed a complaint with Southwest following the event, but the business "did not take steps to correct the racist assumptions its employees make" about mixed families travelling together, according to the lawsuit.
"Southwest again claimed that the fact that a white parent was travelling with a Black child was evidence, in and of itself, of human trafficking," the lawsuit alleges.
This incident has also been mentioned in Mary's lawsuit, advocating to the fact that the airline employees are racially discriminative.
