Amir Makled thought he was being racially profiled. A Lebanese American who was born and raised in Detroit, the attorney was returning home from a family vacation in the Dominican Republic when he said an immigration official at the Detroit Metro airport asked for a “TTRT” agent after scanning his passport, reported The Guardian. Makled said the expression on the agent’s face changed. He felt something “odd” was happening.
“So I Googled what TTRT meant. I didn’t know,” Makled said.
“And what I found out was it meant Tactical Terrorism Response Team. So
immediately I knew they’re gonna take me in for questioning. And that’s when I
felt like I was being racially profiled or targeted because I am Arab.”
But it quickly became apparent, Makled said, that the stop
was different from the type of so-called random stop
Muslims and Arab-Americans have become accustomed to at US airports.
The plainclothes immigration officer said he knew who Makled was and what he
did for a living, according to the lawyer; agents wanted to search his phone.
“They made it clear right off the top: ‘We know that you’re
an attorney and we know that you’re taking on some higher-profile cases.’ I was
like, ‘OK, well, what do you want from me?’” Makled recalled.
Among the high-profile cases Makled has taken on
recently: a
pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at a demonstration
at the University of Michigan.
Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney at the digital rights
group Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the search of Makled’s phone
“outrageous”.
“CBP or [the Department of Homeland Security] could not show
up at this attorney’s office and say: ‘give me your contact list’ without a
warrant,” Cope said. “That would be completely illegal. But because this guy is
at the border, and they want it for potentially just domestic monitoring and
enforcement, somehow now the fourth amendment goes away.”
Both citizens and non-citizens entering
the US are potentially subject to having their phones searched at the
border. Fourth amendment protections, which guard against “unreasonable search
and seizure”, have been weakened at US points of entry. CBP’s role is to stop
people or goods that could pose a threat to the US from entering the country.
In the case of US citizens, CBP may pull a traveler whom agents have security
concerns about – anything from drug or sex trafficking to espionage concerns –
but must ultimately admit them into the country, Cope said.
However, there have been many recent cases of CBP pulling a
US citizen about whom they have no border security concerns into a secondary
screening at the behest of other federal agencies, Cope said. The FBI, for
example, has in the past asked CBP to put flags on people’s travel profiles so
that when they cross the border they are pulled into secondary inspection, she
said.
“That may be because the person is under domestic
investigation themselves or because the traveler is associated with somebody
who’s under investigation and the government’s just trying to get around the
warrant requirement,” Cope said.
Cope said that, based on the existing information, it doesn’t
appear Makled’s stop was routine. “If they tell him: ‘We know you’re a lawyer,’
and then this terrorism flag popped up, that’s not routine, that’s
pre-planned,” Cope said.
CBP has access to a vast array of databases through which
agents can gain access to personal information about individuals who are
traveling into or out of the US. One of these repositories may have contained a
“lookout” designation for Makled, a flag on his file that can lead to a
secondary screening. Those “lookouts” can remain on a person’s file as long as
CBP deems them “pertinent”,
according to documents revealed in a 2019 case in
Massachusetts federal court.
W hen
Makled was finally released around two hours after he was first detained, he
asked the official if he should expect to be stopped every time he traveled
abroad.
“He’s like, ‘You might be stopped next time,’” Makled said.
“You might not. It depends on the agent that’s working.”
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