FlyingHoustonian

I know this will be a blow to your "cause", but in reality they also harass White people too, a lot, as has been noted ad nauseam in this and other forums. In fact White men returning from SW Asia and AMS and heavily targeted and oft presumed to be kiddie diddlers or porn smugglers and what not...to name just one example.

The issue is the agency, its outdated TTPs and SOPs and general employee morale and management incompetence (to name a few).

s0ssos

Actually, I think what you actually mean is that American (government) does plenty of things wrong but never admits it.

s0ssos

Um, I think the white person is much less likely to get stopped than the Muslim.
For example, police do pull over white people for no apparent reason as well. But proportionally to black people? It is an obvious fact.

And I think it is obvious to most flying that most people who work at airports cannot distinguish between Middle Eastern, South Asian, ... I guess in general non-white, non-black, non-East Asian appearances. So they lump them all together as potential terrorists.

asiantraveler

I'm curious...so do we want to let everyone go in and out of the country without checking/verifying or just take the traveler's words just because the individual is a usc?

GUWonder

Single European-American men returning from SE Asia to say the West Coast of the US are indeed far more likely to be subjected to a computer or phone check by CBP than say North African women returning to the US from SE Asia. And such men coming into the US from AMS are more likely to be searched for drugs, drug-related financial proceeds and illegal pornography than Egyptian-American men coming into the West Coast of the US. On different routes they harass different sorts of people in different ways.

CBP has issues, and all subject persons flying into and out of the US pay the price for it in one way or another. Some groups at some US POEs pay more of a price for it than others.

Loren Pechtel

Muslim shouldn't matter--but do you have a Muslim name perhaps? Not that that in itself would draw this sort of scrutiny but Muslim names are much more likely to end up on the watch list and you might simply have the misfortune to share a name with someone on the watch list. If this (sharing a name with someone on the watch list) is the culprit getting a redress number is supposed to help.

GUWonder

There are now certainly more people on US blacklists with perceived Muslim names than there were say even 12 years ago. US blacklists have become huge and the notion of shrinking all these blacklists just isn't there.

Even when names of a given passenger are not a match with the names of blacklisted persons, the chances of a perceived Muslim passenger with a perceived Muslim name being pulled for a secondary in LON when booked on a LON-US flight are much higher than the same happening to those from various other demographic groups with even the same travel pattern. It's no coincidence that DHS and DHS cheerleaders/accomplices in the airline industry continue to rally on behalf of racist profiling already in play by DHS and airline security contractors.

jphripjah

I think what many want is that US citizens should be allowed to enter and leave the country and roam around the country as they see fit, subject to luggage checks upon entry of course, but without being detained and interrogated as to whether they are involved in criminal activity.

Blogndog

I know this to be a verified fact -- arriving at HNL from NRT I was subjected to questions and a bag search, which I objected to. When the agent finally declared that I was "legit" (I reminded her that being "legit" was not a US entry requirement), she finally acknowledged openly that I was being looked at because I had a recent Thai stamp in my passport, and that they routinely question single males coming from there. Also, several whistleblowers have reported a culture of deep seated racism within CBP. Patrick Leahy sponsored legislation that would addres this problem, but it did not receive adequate political support. The problem appears to me that they have no tools, procedures or mechanisms in place for understanding how to actually deploy their resources optimally, so they fall back onto comfortable but misleading stereotypes. They are also substantially over-resourced, since everytime the House wants to look "tough on terror" or "tough on illegals" they appropriate a few more billion for Homeland Security. Hence, you have thousands of neely recruited agents, wearing brand new uniforms and armed to the teeth with shiny new weapons, driving around in shiny mew SUVs over potholed roads and crumbling bridges, because nobody gets political brownie points for infrastructure spending.

asiantraveler

I see what you're saying. I guess I'm the only one in here or one of the very few people in here that doesn't mind being questioned or being detained for additional questions by cbp or tsa or airport police. I'm a usc and by my screen name you can guess I'm a minoity. I too had been questioned and detained and searched by cbp maybe because I'm a minority or I travel alone (for mileage run)for a brief period.

I guess it's an American thing to feel empowered for the entitlement and to whine and complain about everything. Just like how I complain about flying Business class and having to queue up with economy class when boarding

GUWonder

In most of the sort of developed world that has been democratic for at least the past twenty years and doesn't have English as the de facto language of national government, returning citizens are welcomed back in a way that is rather different than what goes on for returning US citizens to the US.

When a country views its own citizens as if they are criminal suspects even in the absence of articulable evidence of the individual citizen having engaged in a criminal act, there is a problem. Perhaps the so-called Communist North Koreans and Vietnamese welcome this kind of approach by governments going against their own so-called ethnic/national kin, but others -- even those who may not be American -- do have an issue with this kind of approach by government authorities.

FlyingHoustonian

Well, seeing as how there are millions of "white" Muslims, and blonde haired, blue-eyed ones, and many red haired ones at that, it seems you have no idea about the topic at all. (And I do not mean that because legally the US government considers those from Southwest Asia and North Africa white; I mean the more "traditional" colour term American media seems obsessed with.)


Well, it is actually not an obvious fact, unless your stats are different from others out in the ether. Please share...and make it obvious for us.

And since the FBI and US in general does a poor job of tracking such things the discussion is a tangent anyway. I was not actually talking about LEOs outside of an airport but those specific to CBP in US airports (and pre-clearance) locations. CBP is the most diverse it has ever been, and as you like to type, "it is obvious to those of us who travel extremely frequently" that CBP is not staffed by all "white" people (or East-Asians since they make more money than white people, graduate more, and actually have the lowest kill rate by police to touch on a few of your topics )

Well, seeing as how there are thousands of airports around the world, many in those "suspect" countries of yours, it would seem your hypothesis has some holes in it.

I stand by my earlier statement about the feckless nature of CBP and its TTPs and SOPs in general as endemic to the agency.

DBCme

Thanks for sharing that video - superb.

I do believe honesty and answering questions by the police (assuming one is innocent), is the best way to go, but this video articulates how this is not necessarily the case.

ss2000

Hey,

As an update. I was able to fly domestic without any issue, drive into canada and come back to the US by land without any questioning and then fly back home.

So, hopefully, that was an one time thing!

GUWonder

So you're not on a bunch of nasty blacklists. Or at least you managed to not get hit by them more recently than the LON-US flight you took. Sounds good to me, and thanks for the update.