A Los Angeles mother claims she and her 10-year-old daughter were racially profiled and harassed by Southwest Airlines.
Mary MacCarthy said she and her 10-year-old daughter Moira, who is bi-racial, flew from Los Angeles to Denver on Oct. 22 after Mary’s brother suddenly died.
When the mother and daughter landed in Denver, police officers and a Southwest Airline employee stopped them.
MacCarthy began recording when they tried to talk to her young daughter Moira, she told KPIX.
“They tried to speak individually to my daughter. I said, ‘No, she’s only 10. You’re not questioning her by herself,'” MacCarthy recalled to the news outlet. “I took out my phone and started recording.”
In the video, a Southwest Airline employee could be heard saying, “The flight attendants were just concerned about the behavior when you boarded the aircraft ... We’re not suspecting anything.”
MacCarthy explained to news outlets since Southwest Airlines did not have assigned seating and when the flight attendants said they wouldn’t be able to help MacCarthy sit next to her daughter. MacCarthy asked passengers who did exchange seats with them, she said.
After explaining why she and her daughter were in Colorado, MacCarthy said they were let go. Days later, MacCarthy said she received a call from the Denver Police Department.
“She was calling on the suspicions that I am a human trafficker. They saw a white mother, they saw a child with a different skin tone, and said that’s suspicious. That could be a crime, and we’re reporting that,” she recalled. “That’s not OK. This is the United States of America in 2021.”
MacCarthy also said when she got a hold of the police report, employees reported she and her daughter did not talk during the flight and that she had told her daughter not to talk to anyone. MacCarthy said both accusations were false.
MacCarthy has reached out to attorneys for help as Southwest Airlines said it was conducting an internal review on the incident.
“We would not have been reported for anything if my daughter were white and blond,” MacCarthy told KPIX.
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