U.S. customs accused of invasive searches
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.”
Lovell has accused CBP officers of violating her constitutional rights and sidestepping the agency’s rules prohibiting officers from conducting invasive body searches. Her case is one of at least 11 since 2011 examined by the Center for Public Integrity. Each raises unsettling questions about authorities’ considerable power to detain people at the nation’s 328 ports of entry, underscoring critics’ concerns about CBP officer accountability as the Trump administration seeks to expand the agency and significantly enhance immigration enforcement.
These alleged invasive searches “should give everyone pause,” said Adriana Piñon, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Texas. “The touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness,” she said. The Constitution, she said, protects people from having their bodies searched based “on a whim.”
The government has settled some of these cases before they could go to trial, thus avoiding potentially incriminating testimony from CBP officers accused of wrongdoing. Six of the lawsuits resulted in financial settlements costing taxpayers more than $1.2 million. Others are pending. One claim lost in a jury trial.
In Lovell’s case, the Justice Department has sought to dismiss CBP and the individual officers, but not the U.S. government, as defendants. CBP officials declined to comment on any specific litigation, settled or pending. A spokesman said that misconduct is taken “seriously” and that “our mission is to facilitate legitimate travel and trade while preventing illicit drugs, weapons or other contraband from entering our country.”
If they can justify suspicions, federal officers at U.S. ports of entry are authorized, without the need for warrants, to require some disrobing for genital and rectal inspections, and monitored bowel movements to check for drugs, according to a CBP handbook. At the same time, the detention-and-search handbook instructs officers to record a solid justification for every step beyond a frisk, and to respect detainees’ dignity and “freedom from unreasonable searches.” The handbook also warns against what could be considered a “visual or physical intrusion” into body cavities.
The women who’ve brought these lawsuits, including two minor girls, say CBP officers subjected them to indignities — such as strip searches while menstruating and prohibited genital probing — despite finding no contraband. Four women further allege they were handcuffed and transported to hospitals where, against their will, one underwent a pelvic exam and X-rays. In one of the cases, the woman’s lawsuit asserts she was intravenously drugged at the hospital, according to lawsuits.
Such invasive medical procedures require a detainee’s consent or a warrant. In two cases, the plaintiffs say they were billed.
A lawsuit filed in San Diego federal court on behalf of a Hispanic 16-year-old identified as C.R. alleges CBP strip-searched her last September as she and her adult sisters returned from a family visit to Mexico through the San Ysidro pedestrian port. The sisters were flagged after a false drug-sniffing dog alert, the lawsuit asserts. Female officers took C.R. aside and allegedly told the tearful girl to disrobe, hand over a sanitary pad, and squat and cough “while officers probed and shined a flashlight at her vaginal and anal areas,” the lawsuit says.
Justice Department attorneys representing officers have filed to dismiss C.R.’s suit, arguing that it was not filed properly.
The CBP handbook says officers should “weigh all factors” before an officer, who should be of the same gender, searches a minor. Officers are told to seek parental consent for a stripsearch and refrain from touching or inspecting a minor’s body cavities. If a parent refuses consent, officers should seek advice from CBP legal counsel.