A Los Angeles woman flying through San Jose to Denver following the sudden death of her brother last month was surprised to be stopped by a Southwest Airlines employee and two Denver police officers.
Mary MacCarthy, who is white, and her 10-year-old daughter, Moira, who is Black, were questioned separately by police. A Southwest employee had reported the elder MacCarthy as a possible human trafficker.
"The whole thing is based on what I believe to be a racist assumption about a mixed-race family," MacCarthy told the Denver Post in a story published on Thursday.
KCBS Radio obtained the police report about the incident, which said a Southwest Airlines flight attendant reported the MacCarthys as suspicious because they boarded the plane last and Mary MacCarthy asked other passengers to switch seats so she could sit next to Moira.
The flight attendant alleged that MacCarthy didn’t speak to her daughter during the flight.
In an emailed statement to the airline’s media team provided by the Denver Police Department, MacCarthy said that officers told her that she and her daughter had been reported for "suspicious behavior prior to boarding in San Jose" and that they "had boarded suspiciously late."
MacCarthy stated that “Neither of those statements make sense,” because if “passengers are acting suspiciously prior to boarding, they should not be allowed to board,” she wrote. And secondly, “We boarded according to the instructions on our boarding passes (in the final boarding group).”
According to another emailed statement MacCarthy sent Denver police, she and her daughter were part of the final boarding group, and they didn’t speak to one another much because the younger MacCarthy was listening to an audiobook while her mother tried to sleep. That she and her daughter weren’t speaking at all, “is an outright lie, and I can corroborate it with witness statements,” she wrote.
MacCarthy told the paper she and her daughter were part of the final boarding group, and they didn’t speak to one another much because the younger MacCarthy was listening to an audiobook while her mother tried to sleep. She told the Mercury News "it's absolutely not true that we were not talking to each other."
When officers explained why she and her daughter had been reported, "it immediately occurred to me what was going on. This is the type of situation that mixed-race families and families of color face all the time while traveling," MacCarthy told the Denver Post.
In 2019, Cindy McCain, the widow of former U.S. Sen. John McCain and the American ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, apologized after claiming she stopped an instance of human trafficking when saw a toddler with a woman of a different ethnicity at the Phoenix airport.
Brain Smith, a white Arizona man, said he was approached by Phoenix police at the city’s airport in 2017 after a Southwest Airlines flight attendant "had some concerns about the person" he was with. The man sat next to his daughter, a 16-year-old he and his wife adopted from China.
In a statement provided to KCBS Radio, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson said the company was "disheartened" to learn about MacCarthy's experience. The company began an internal review and would reach out to MacCarthy "to address her concerns and offer our apologies for her experience traveling with us," according to the spokesperson.
Southwest Airlines announced in a 2019 press release it had launched an online curriculum on human trafficking, including tips for how to identify it. Southwest later launched training for its flight attendants, pilots and ground operations employees.
Polaris, an anti-human trafficking organization that Southwest calls a "longstanding community partner," helped craft the curriculum. After the attacks on three Atlanta-area Asian massage parlors in March, Vice's Motherboard reported that Polaris removed multiple pages from its website claiming massage parlors serve as sex trafficking dens.
A Southwest Airlines spokesperson told KCBS Radio in a statement that the company doesn't make its training policies public. The spokesperson said that, last year, 10,000 employees "learned how to identify" potential human trafficking and "take action, if necessary" through an online course.
MacCarthy doesn’t hold anything against the officers who responded to the incident, she wrote in her email to Southwest. After they understood the situation fully, “they were crestfallen ‐ it was absolutely devastating to see a grieving ten-year-old retraumatized in a situation like this.”
To rectify the situation, MacCarthy is requesting a written apology from the airline, a reimbursement for the price of their tickets, and additional compensation to account for the trauma inflicted upon her family.
“I have traveled the globe, and never once in my life have I experienced this sort of frightening, harassing treatment. I won't accept it for myself, and certainly cannot accept my daughter being treated that way,” she wrote.
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