American Civil Liberties Union

Reports that the so-called "behavioral detection program" at Logan Airport leads to racial profiling is front-page news in today's Sunday New York Times. You have to admire the courage of the TSA screeners who raised the alarm that pressure from TSA management to meet quotas leads to targeting of passengers based on their race, ethnicity, and religion-- even when they clearly pose no terrorist threat.

Five dollars is apparently all it takes to land a 7-year-old in handcuffs in a New York City public school these days.

Parents across New York City awoke Wednesday morning to the news that Bronx third-grader Wilson Reyes was pulled out of class, handcuffed and interrogated over the course of 10 hours at his elementary school, and later, at a local precinct. Reyes was charged with robbery after someone said he grabbed $5 that a classmate had dropped on the floor, causing a scuffle among several boys.

U.S. citizens are entitled to “equal protection under the law” – that is, unless you look Latino and live in Arizona under the rule of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The nation’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff” took the stand in federal court Tuesday, answering hundreds of questions from our legal team and facing the human targets of his racial profiling policies. These victims -- the very people Arpaio is sworn to protect -- have spent years waiting for the day when the sheriff would be forced to explain his discriminatory practices in open court.

Why can’t President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder do more to ban racial profiling in the United States?  Surely, more so than any of their predecessors, they can understand the injustice and humiliation racial profiling victims feel when they are treated as suspect because of the color of their skin.

Yet, after four years in office, they’ve made no revisions to the Justice Department guidance regarding the use of race in federal law enforcement issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2003.  Ashcroft’s guidance was deficient: though it expressly banned racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies, it left broad exemptions for national security and border integrity investigations.