ACLU Suit Alleges ‘Racial Profiling’ by U.S. Customs

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the U.S. Customs Service, accusing inspectors of engaging in “racial profiling” in singling out an African American woman for a body search that the woman says was sexually abusive and humiliating.

The ACLU filed the suit in federal District Court in Newark, N.J., on Friday on behalf of Yvette Bradley, a 33-year-old New York advertising executive at SpikeDDB, a firm co-owned by filmmaker Spike Lee.

Bradley says that upon returning from a vacation in Jamaica in April last year, she and other black women were singled out for a luggage search at Newark International Airport and that she was then subjected to an intrusive physical search. After she contacted the Customs Service late last year, Bradley said she was told it was simply a routine “pat down” search.

“It was absolutely humiliating,” Bradley said in an interview after a Manhattan news conference called to announce the lawsuit. “All I kept thinking was, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ I was just stunned. It was degrading, and I was absolutely helpless.”

The lawsuit follows complaints from other black women that Customs Service agents unfairly target them for pat-downs and intrusive searches. A class-action suit filed by a group of women in Chicago is pending.

A report issued last month by the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency, found that black women were nearly twice as likely to be strip-searched on suspicion of drug smuggling than white men or women, a practice not supported by a higher rate of discovery of drugs or other illegal substances among minority groups.

Customs officials declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit Friday but said that Customs Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has made elimination of any racial profiling--never an official agency policy--a priority and that steps have been taken to reduce intrusive searches, including the use of sophisticated X-ray machines.

“Our commissioner has done a very good job in not only pinpointing the problem but in addressing it,” said Customs Service spokesman Bill Anthony. “We take our responsibilities very seriously. Ideally, we would like to have a situation where we inspect 100 people and we arrest 100 people. But that is not practically possible.”

ACLU attorney Reginald Shuford said not enough has been done. “We believe that what happened to Yvette is a textbook example of racial profiling. If they deny that, then how can we believe they are really trying to fix this problem?”