A woman and her 10-year-old daughter were reportedly stopped at Denver International Airport last month after a flight attendant flagged them as suspicious. It’s an incident the mother says is steeped in racism.

The Denver Post reports on Oct. 22 Mary MacCarthy, who is white, and her 10-year-old daughter, Moira who is Black, flew from San Jose, Calif. to Denver to be with family after the sudden death of her older brother who died the night before. They say that when they arrived in Colorado, they were met on the jet bridge by a Southwest Airlines employee and two Denver Police officers.

Originally, MacCarthy believed police were there to inform her about another death in her family. Instead, the officers began talking to MacCarthy and her daughter separately. According to a Denver Police report, authorities reportedly wanted to question the two because a Southwest employee had reported them as suspicious and flagged MacCarthy as a potential human trafficker.

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“The officer said, ‘We’re talking to you because you were reported to the pilot for suspicious behavior,'” MacCarthy said. “And 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 had to explain that the two were traveling together and that Moira was her daughter. Officers and the employee let the pair go after MacCarthy explained why they were traveling.

MacCarthy says she’s not upset with the officers or Southwest employee who stopped her on the jet bridge, but is at the Southwest employee on the plane who reported her without speaking to her first.

The Post reports that the flight attendant who reported the mixed-race mother and daughter did so because she was suspicious of them being the last two to board the flight, their request to sit together, and that they didn’t speak during the flight. MacCarthy says they were assigned the last boarding group and that passengers did not mind rearranging their seating.

“The whole thing is based on what I believe to be a racist assumption about a mixed-race family,” MacCarthy said, according to The Post.

MacCarthy now wants an apology from Southwest Airlines for its employee’s racist assumption about her and her daughter.

“Southwest regrets that this family reports anything less than a positive experience while traveling with us,” the company said in an emailed statement to The Post. “The customer’s report has been shared with Southwest’s Customer Relations Team, and they will be following up with the customer directly.”

MacCarthy says the incident at the airport has made an already difficult day even harder for her daughter.

“She just kind of clams up when we talk about it,” MacCarthy said.