Arab American family ejected from O'Hare flight sue United Airlines
By William Lee
The Chicago Tribune
Nearly a year after their family was removed from a flight at O’Hare International Airport, a Muslim couple from the north suburbs filed a federal lawsuit against United Airlines, claiming they were discriminated against based on their faith.
Attorneys with the local chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations filed the suit in federal court Friday on behalf of Mohamad and Eaman Shebley in connection with the March 20, 2016, incident aboard the SkyWest flight, operating as United Express from Chicago to Washington.
An attorney for the couple said they think “inherent bias” prompted flight crew members to kick the Shebleys off United Flight 5811 — after Eaman Shebley asked for assistance with a child booster seat.
The suit comes at a time of growing anxiety among Muslims who worry they can be targeted and removed from flights just for making other passengers feel uncomfortable, CAIR officials noted. That’s only intensified with President Donald Trump’s travel bans — the latest barring the issuance of new visas to citizens of six Muslim-majority countries for 90 days and suspending the refugee program for 120 days. Attorneys for the couple also cited at least a dozen incidents in the last year and a half in which Muslims reportedly were asked to leave flights or were harassed because of unfounded fears of passengers or crew members.
“We believe the time is right now to bring this to the attention of the courts and the federal government and ask for some accountability on behalf of the airlines — that’s really what this suit is about,” Phil Robertson, CAIR Chicago’s lead attorney who is representing the Shebleys in the suit, told reporters at the council’s downtown offices.
“This affects more than the Shebley family. … It affects our entire community,” said Ahmed Rehab, CAIR Chicago’s executive director. “There is a real strong sense of apprehension every time one of these stories emerge. People start to think, ‘Can I speak Arabic in an airport?’ Nobody should have to bite their tongue and start to feel as if they’re committing a crime just because they need to communicate with their elderly mother or father-in-law while standing in line in an American airport,” he said.
The Shebleys, of Libertyville, did not attend Friday’s news conference. CAIR officials said they preferred to stay out of the limelight.
Maaria Mozaffar, an attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, speaks on behalf of Eaman and Mohamad Shebley during a press conference to announce the filing of a federal lawsuit against United Airlines. The Shebleys were removed from a United Airlines flight March 20, 2016, after asking for an extra strap to safely fasten their youngest child’s booster seat. (Phil Velasquez / Chicago Tribune)
The couple have previously said they were humiliated when their family was ushered off the plane after they sought help with their youngest child’s booster seat. The family’s removal from the flight came after the parents requested an additional shoulder harness that goes around the back of the seat and attaches to the lap belt for their youngest daughter’s booster seat, which they had tried to check at the gate.
The 15-page, three-count suit repeats many of the claims the couple made to the Tribune a month after the incident — that they’d sought a strap for their child sitting in the booster seat, but were told by a flight attendant that the airline didn’t provide over-the-shoulder harnesses for passengers, despite information on the United website that said they did. Another crew member told the family the child could not sit in a booster seat but ignored subsequent questions from Eaman Shebley, a Lebanese-American who wears an Islamic headscarf.
Despite removing the booster chair and storing it, the Shebleys said they were asked to leave the plane by the flight attendant and the plane’s pilot.
“Something doesn’t add up to me,” Eaman Shebley, an accountant who recorded her family’s encounter, told the Tribune last April. The couple were aboard a SkyWest flight, a United Airlines carrier. “We weren’t rude. We didn’t do anything wrong. I’m in customer service. This is not normal for someone to treat someone this way. I felt singled out right from the get-go.”
Before disembarking, she told the Tribune, she asked the pilot if the family’s removal was a “discriminatory decision.” The pilot responded that it was a “safety of flight issue.”
The couple and their children completed their spring break journey to the nation’s capital on a later flight with the booster seat without incident and were later offered reimbursement for their flights and any expenses incurred for the inconvenience, as well as five free round-trip tickets anywhere in the continental United States.
Before filing the lawsuit Friday, the family had filed a formal complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration.
A year later, the Shebley family — particularly the Shebleys’ young children — continue to struggle with the incident.
“That lasts a lifetime, to be honest with you,” said Maaria Mozaffar, another attorney working on the case. “When you remove the problem from the plane without just cause, that results in a demoralizing situation for a human being. And that should matter.”
Mozaffar also said: “What we saw here is the staff and the pilot, with their inherent bias, basically asked them to leave the plane despite the fact that they never not followed any directions. They were not a threat to any of the other passengers and, in fact, all the other passengers on the plane around them were supporting them.”
In a statement, a spokeswoman with United declined to comment on the suit, but added, “Both SkyWest and United hold our employees to the highest standards of professionalism and have zero tolerance for discrimination.”
The suit seeks unspecified damages from United.
