Air passengers of Mideastern descent feel singled out

Associated Press

When Kareem Shora recently flew home from a legal conference in Tucson, he was asked to do something curious: remove his shoes so they could be run through the X-ray machine.

When Khaleda Bhuiya headed to graduate school in Chicago, her carry-on bag was double-checked for explosives and she was asked for her passport even though she was traveling on a domestic flight.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, airport security has increased, more random checks of travelers are being conducted and new measures are being proposed to weed out dangerous passengers.

While civil rights and some Arab groups say they see no widespread signs of racial profiling, some travelers with Mideastern or Asian roots suspect they are facing extra interrogations and intrusive searches because of their names or skin color.

"I was born in the U.S.," says the 24-year-old Bhuiya, a Ph.D. candidate in genetics at the University of Chicago. "In this country, you’re taught that you’re innocent until proven guilty. I was thought of being guilty until I proved myself innocent."

Bhuiya, who is of Bangladeshi descent, believes she was singled out because she is dark-skinned and wore a Muslim-style head scarf when traveling from Baltimore last month. She was so worried about flying she didn’t pack her tweezers and carried her passport.

Shora, 28, a legal adviser to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C., won’t call his experience racial profiling. Still, he saw no other passengers patted down or asked to remove their shoes after they passed through the metal detector.

"I was a single male in my upper 20s, flying alone — that might be enough for them," says Shora, who is of Syrian descent. "I’m hoping they didn’t do it because they saw my name on a driver’s license."

Ahmar Masood, a 24-year-old technology consultant in Chicago, says when he was in line at the Boston airport, he was the only one police asked for identification. He says an officer took it and made a call, checking him out.

"It does anger me that things like that are happening," says Masood, a Pakistani native who became a U.S. citizen this summer.

Allegations of racial profiling on airlines are not new. Officials say 165 discrimination complaints have been filed with federal authorities since 1997, many by people of Arab descent.

Some have dubbed it "flying while Arab," a phrase that recalls "driving while black." Some blacks say they are pulled over by police disproportionately because of their race.

The complaints came after the federal government implemented a program in 1997 called the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System. CAPPS collects information on passengers’ travel history in the airline reservation system and, based on secret criteria, it flags those who might pose a security risk.

Those people have their bags screened with an explosive-detection device, or if there is none, luggage is matched to the passenger, says Paul Takemoto, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman.

In addition, passengers are chosen at random for these security steps.

After Sept. 11, the number of travelers selected for CAPPS screening and those chosen at random increased significantly, Takemoto says.

CAPPS does not select passengers based on race, color, name or ethnicity, officials say.

"It’s not a racial profiling system," says Michael Wascom, spokesman at the Air Transport Association, the nation’s largest airline trade group. "It focuses on your travel patterns more than anything else. … As an example, if you arrive at an airport within 30 minutes of departure and pay cash for a one-way ticket, that is likely to be a red flag."