The suit was filed in the Northern District of California on Chowdhury’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) and the Washington, DC, based civil rights law firm Relman & Associates.

"This ruling is significant because it recognizes that longstanding civil rights protections apply to individuals who suffer discrimination at the hands of airlines after Spetember 11, 2001,” said Jayashri Srikantiah, a staff attorney with the ACLU-NC.

“The airlines were indulging in discrimination, not enforcing security, when they ejected our client from this flight,” said Kelli Evans of Relman & Associates.
On October 23, 2001, Chowdhury was returning to Pittsburgh after a weekend in San Francisco when Northwest Airlines refused to allow him to board his Detroit-bound flight. Even after the FBI and local law enforcement authorities had determined that he was not a security threat, airline employees told Chowdhury that the pilot had decided that he would not be allowed to fly on Northwest. Northwest booked him on a US Airways flight instead. Despite the security clearance by federal and local law enforcement professionals, Northwest input Chowdhury’s name into a database that included the names of known terrorists, and failed to remove his name.

“I love America intensely and was deeply affected by the events of September 11,” said Chowdhury. “I’m gratified that my case is going forward.”

Chowdhury, a U.S. citizen of Bangladeshi descent and an MBA student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, worked as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in and across the road from the World Trade Center between 1998 and April 2001.

On October 18, 2002, federal district judge Dickinson R. Debevoise of the United States District Court in New Jersey allowed two similar lawsuits against Continental Airlines to proceed, ruling that the ACLU had “sufficiently alleged” that their clients’ removal from flight on January 31, 2001, “was the production of intentional discrimination and not of a rational determination that their presence was ‘inimical to safety.’”

Less than one week earlier, a federal judge in Los Angeles permitted similar claims against United Airlines to proceed, saying that pilots' discretion "does not grant them a license to discriminate."

All five cases were filed by the ACLU on June 4, 2002, on behalf of men who were ejected from flights based on the prejudices of airline employees and passengers and for reasons wholly unrelated to security.