SAN FRANCISCO — A traveler says he was stunned and deeply offended after a United Airlines employee at San Francisco International Airport allegedly suggested contacting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a dispute over a ticketing problem.
Julio Varela said the confrontation unfolded last Tuesday, after he had spent roughly three hours trying to fix an error on his daughter’s airline ticket ahead of a family trip to Montreal.
Varela said he, his wife and their two daughters were preparing to fly to Montreal on July 14 when the family realized that one daughter’s ticket listed her middle and last names in the wrong order.
The mistake, he said, left them shuttling between the United Airlines and Air Canada counters at SFO for hours as they tried to get the ticket corrected.
According to Varela, an Air Canada employee was in the middle of helping sort out the issue when a United Airlines employee stepped into the conversation.
“She said ‘I already told you. I can’t do anything. Whether you fly out or not, I don’t care,'” Varela said. “That’s what triggered me to say, ‘you’re rude.’ And I also said you’re rude and you’re lazy.”
Varela said the exchange escalated after he pulled out his cellphone and asked the United employee to provide her name.
He said both he and the employee began recording the interaction.
In video of the confrontation, the employee can be heard saying: “Maybe we should call ICE on you.”
When Varela responded, “You going to call ICE on me,” the employee continued: “Maybe you need to be. Because you don’t act like a citizen.”
We have blurred the employee’s face in video of the exchange.
Varela said the comment escalated the dispute.
“That’s obviously when I lost it even more because I was already angered and bothered angered by the way she didn’t care.”
He said the remark was particularly upsetting.
“My jaw dropped. Number one. I was shocked and immediately I was angry,” Varela said.
Varela, who identified himself as Hispanic and Mexican, said he was especially troubled by the employee’s reference to ICE.
“If she is going to have the gall to say ‘I’m going to call ICE’ on a Hispanic person, Mexican, and to say that in San Francisco…”
He said the comment was especially concerning amid recent public attention surrounding immigration enforcement actions.
In a statement, United Airlines said: “We’re looking into the interaction in this video, but don’t have anything additional to share at this time.”
Varela said he was not surprised by the airline’s response.
He said a United representative contacted him to get his account of what happened and that the two sides communicated briefly by email.
However, Varela said the airline later stopped contacting him.
United has not provided additional details about the incident.
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