Canadian Customs strip search woman back from grandmother's funeral - racial profiling suspected

A Ottawa, ON woman of Carribean decent alleges that she was singled out for a strip search by the Canada Border Services Agency (Canadian Customs) because she was a Jamaican born woman. Charmaine Archer, a 42 year old nurses aide at a nursing home, was pulled over with her cousin and 4 year old son by Canadian customs agents as they were headed home from their grandmother's home in Jamaica. The cousin and son were inspected without further incident, but Archer was forced to undergo a strip search.

Agents told Archer, who is a Canadian citizen, she was flagged because she paid for part of her ticket with a credit card, because she booked last minute and because she only stayed for four days.

Agents took what she described as gauze swabs and ran them over her wallet, the lining of her suitcase and even her toothbrush. This took over an hour, Archer said. Her toothbrush, agents said, tested positive for heroin and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Archer said to the agents that “You’re a liar. I don’t do drugs, I don’t know anybody that does drugs, and I wasn’t around drugs when I was in Jamaica … I come from an upstanding family and nobody touched that toothbrush but me.”

Canadian officers told Archer that she would have to undergo a strip search. “I said to her, ‘No way that’s going to happen! My husband don’t know what’s inside my rectum and neither will you.” After the customs agents handcuffed Archer and threatened to take her son away from her, she submitted. Archer describes what happened next.

 I got undressed. There were three women in the room — quite humiliating, quite degrading. I’m a big person, very conscious of my body … you can imagine how I felt. They made me stand up and hold my arm up and they made me lift up my breast. Then she told me to turn around and bend all the way over with my feet wide apart. And then she told me to use my hand and open my rectum.

 They told me to put one foot forward then squat and cough … they told me to lift up my belly and they told me open my feet apart and to pry my legs apart and they looked underneath my crotch. When it was over they asked if I wanted to take a minute to sit down.

“This is by no means isolated,” said Ewart Walters, editor of the Spectrum, a monthly newspaper aimed at Ottawa’s black community. “There have been enough incidents over the years of people being picked on.”

He pointed to Leon Stewart, who was held for three hours at the airport in March, 2000. Like Archer, he was strip searched, only Stewart was asked to produce a bowel movement to satisfy customs agents he wasn’t concealing drugs.

“There is an overwhelming number of black people coming from Jamaica who get stopped and asked questions.” Walters said.

Archer's travel agent, Kermit Dougan of Voyages G Travel in Gatineau, PQ, across the river from Ottawa, said that Jamaica is on a list of destinations with a reputation for drug use. Even so, many of his clients, who are black and “not happy about how they’ve been treated,”  have used Toronto's Pearson International Airport, Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau AIrport, and even Syracuse NY's Hancock International Airport to avoid the racial profiling at Ottawa's airport.

Archer says that she is retaining a lawyer since “I want to know what my rights were. I hope no one will ever have to feel the form of degradation that I felt. And that lack of power.”

Pierced flyer wins a victory after humiliating search

A Dallas area woman who was forced to remove her nipple piercings, but not ber navel piercing February 24 won a reprieve for all other pierced flyers. Mandi Hamlin, 37, was forced to remove her piercings during a flight from Lubbock to LA, all the while male TSA agents allegedly laughed.

Her attorney, Gloria Allred of Los Angeles, said her client needed pliers to remove one nipple ring after the jewelry set off a screener's handheld metal detector.

Hamlin told the officer she had nipple piercings, Allred said, and that officer called over another officer, who told her she would need to remove them.

"Ms. Hamlin did not want to remove her nipple piercings," Allred said, reading from a letter she sent TSA. "After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove. In addition, once removed, the pierced skin may close up almost immediately, making it difficult and painful to reinsert the piercing."

More officers were called over, and the group grew to four male and two female TSA officers, according to Hamlin. Also, a small crowd of onlookers had started to gather. The officers insisted that Hamlin remove the nipple rings, Allred said.
"She felt humiliated by the scene that the TSA officers were making," Allred said.

"With tears streaming down her face, she again asked to show the piercings to a TSA officer instead of having to remove them. She was told, however, she would not be allowed to fly unless she removed them. Had she been told that she had a right to a pat-down, she would have chosen that option."

She eventually was taken to a private area behind a curtain to remove the piercings, Allred said. One came out easily, but the other would not, and she called to an officer that she was having trouble and would need pliers. She was handed a large pair, Allred said.

"As Ms. Hamlin struggled to remove the piercing, behind the curtain she could hear a growing number of predominately male TSA officers snickering in the background," Allred said in the letter.

"Mandi Hamlin was publicly humiliated. ... Clearly, this is not how passengers should be treated."
Afterward, Hamlin underwent another scan, but realized she had forgotten to remove her navel ring. She offered to remove it, Allred said, but an officer told her it was not necessary because he could see it. Hamlin wondered why a similar visual inspection of her nipple rings would not have sufficed, Allred said.

"I wouldn't wish this experience upon anyone," Hamlin told reporters. "I felt surprised, embarrassed, humiliated and scared. No one deserves to go through this."

The officers "rightly insisted that the alarm that was raised be resolved," the TSA said in a statement posted on its Web site Friday afternoon. "TSA supports the thoroughness of the officers involved as they were acting to protect the passengers and crews of the flights departing Lubbock that day."

However, "TSA has reviewed the procedures themselves and agrees that they need to be changed," the statement said. "In the future, TSA will inform passengers that they have the option to resolve the alarm through a visual inspection of the article in lieu of removing the item in question."

The TSA said Friday that though its procedures were properly followed in Ms. Hamlin's case, they "caused difficulty for the passenger involved and ... [the TSA] regrets the situation in which she found herself. We appreciate her raising awareness on this issue and we are changing the procedures to ensure that this does not happen again."

The agency said that in the future, passengers will be informed they have the option to undergo a visual inspection, rather than remove such jewelry.

Ms. Allred commended the agency for its prompt action.
"Within 24 hours, to have change in policy nationwide is an awesome achievement," she said.
Ms. Hamlin and her attorney said they will take no further legal action.