Racial profiling is law enforcement and private security practices that disproportionately target people of color for investigation and enforcement. The ACLU works on behalf of individuals who have been victims of racial profiling by airlines, police, and government agencies. Our work also encompasses major initiatives in public education and advocacy, including the creation of essential resources, lobbying for the passage of data collection and anti-profiling legislation, and litigation of airline and highway profiling cases.
As the immigration debate continues across Arizona, most pragmatic people seem to agree on a few undeniable facts: racial profiling is illegal. Stopping a motorist for no reason other than their skin color is wrong. Terrorizing American citizens under the guise of immigration enforcement is intolerable.
This week, a class action lawsuit brought by the victims of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s racial profiling practices will get underway. These proceedings will hopefully change the way Arpaio runs the Sheriff’s Office and prevent future instances of discrimination. Among our goals: helping deputies return to pursuing outstanding felony warrants and child rape cases that have been ignored for years, rather than being forced to detain law-abiding citizens for “traffic violations.”
For 19-year-old Hugo Carrillo Escobedo, SB1070 is about more than just “showing your papers.” After “squealing” his tires, Hugo wound up in immigration detention for eight hours. Hugo’s story is particularly compelling because he was initially just given a citation for the traffic violation and immediately released. But the police officer later showed up at his house, saying: “Do you know about SB1070? If I don’t report you, I could lose my job.”
By Elora Mukherjee, Staff Attorney, ACLU Racial Justice Program at 11:22am
On Friday, the ACLU settled a class action lawsuit, pending court approval, against officials in the East Texas town of Tenaha and Shelby County over the rampant practice of stopping and searching drivers, almost always Black or Latino, and often seizing their cash and other valuable property. The money seized by officers during these stops went directly into department coffers. It was highway robbery, targeting those who could least afford to challenge the officers’ abuse of power, under the guise of a so-called “drug interdiction” program and made possible by Texas’s permissive civil asset forfeiture laws.
By Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts at 6:10pm
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.
By Alison Silveira, Paralegal, Racial Justice Program, ACLU at 3:01pm
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.
By Cecillia Wang, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project at 3:46pm
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.
By Kara Dansky, Senior Counsel, ACLU Center for Justice at 11:19am
President Obama is the first sitting president in recent history to speak out against criminal justice policies that hurt inner city and rural communities. This is a big deal.
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:18pm
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.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:36pm
On July 30, the Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia announced a review of license plate scanning programs by law enforcement in the province. If the United States had an analogous institution embodying /enforcing our privacy values, maybe we’d see something like that here instead of untrammeled expansion and retention of license data. We’re still waiting for the “missing in action” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to turn into something real. From 2007 until late 2011, neither President Bush nor President Obama even nominated anyone to fill the independent oversight board; we finally now have four members—but still no chair.
