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Horrifying details about invasive customs searches experienced by women of color
In horrifying detail, women accuse U.S. customs officers of invasive body searches
Tameika Lovell, pictured in Queens on May 13, 2017, claims she was racially profiled and inappropriately searched at John F. Kennedy International Airport. (David Wexler)
By Susan Ferriss | Center for Public Integrity
August 19 at 7:00 AM
Tameika Lovell was retrieving luggage at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport when Customs and Border Protection officers detained her for a random search. It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just returned from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped before, but this time a CBP supervisor began asking questions she hadn’t heard previously.
“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls a CBP supervisor asking.
What happened next is the subject of a harrowing lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Inside a secure room, Lovell’s litigation alleges, a female CBP officer searched Lovell’s belongings, presumably for illegal drugs, and asked if she was using a tampon or sanitary pad. The question upset her, but Lovell replied “no” and complied when told to remove her shoes, lift her arms and spread her legs.
As a second female officer observed, hand on her firearm, the lawsuit says, the first officer touched Lovell “from head to toe” before ordering her to squat. Lovell was clothed, but the lawsuit claims that the officer squeezed Lovell’s breasts, and, “placed her right hand into [Lovell’s] pants ‘forcibly’ inserting four gloved fingers into plaintiff’s vagina” before parting Lovell’s buttocks “for viewing.”
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CBP officers intercepted the woman at customs and took her to a screening room to search her belongings and allegedly interrogate her about suspicions that her short trip might indicate drug smuggling. The woman allegedly explained that she travels often on airline employee discounts available to family members.
Her suit says that she was told she would be released after a pat-down. But after seven hours — and attempts to get her to consent to an X-ray — the woman was allegedly handcuffed, shackled and “dragged” from the airport and taken to a hospital, court documents say.
Officers “provided false and misleading information” to staff suggesting she was packing drugs, the woman’s suit alleges, and that she would have to remain in a room “until she had urinated and defecated into a plastic container in the presence of an officer.”
After a staff shift change, the suit alleges, a nurse announced that the woman’s heart rate was elevated, and doctors “involuntarily” admitted her due to “possible drug toxicity.”
According to the suit, the woman was tied to a bed with restraints, stripped naked by medical staff and had a tampon removed from her vagina during a body search. In court filings, the hospital does not deny conducting an exam, administering sedatives intravenously, catheterizing the woman to collect urine, and conducting X-rays and abdominal and pelvic CT scans.
www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-horrifying-detail-women-accuse-us-customs-officers-of-invasive-body-searches/2018/08/18/ad7b7d82-9b38-11e8-8d5e-c6c594024954_story.html?utm_term=.ca34238c22b1
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