Now From Frontier Airlines: Free Strip Search

Don't think you're safe because you look like a Ril Murkin; they can do this to anybody they decide they don't like that day.

Firedoglake:

On the ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, an Ohio mother was flying on a Frontier Airlines flight from San Francisco to Detroit. The plane landed and heavily armed agents boarded the plane and removed her. She was handcuffed, pat searched and then strip searched and locked in a cell at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. There she was interrogated and then released with no charges after being detained for four hours. She has now filed suit against Frontier Airlines and government agents and officers involved in arresting and detaining her without probable cause.

 

In a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it describes how Shoshana Hebshi is an American citizen, who was born in California. Because she has an “Arab last name and was seated next to two men of South Asian origin, who each allegedly used the lavatory for ten to twenty minutes during the flight,” Frontier Airlines staff provided her name to both federal and state authorities when reporting the “suspicious conduct” of the two men sitting next to her. Mark Fraley, Frontier Airlines Sector Operations Control Shift Manager, provided the names of the men engaged in “suspicious conduct” and added Hebshi’s name because he thought she might be with the two men.

Heshi did not know the two men and there was no evidence to suggest that she did. That did not matter. As the complaint argues, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Wayne County Airport Authority Police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), arrested her even though they had “no articulable facts” connecting her to “criminal activity” and no probable cause. (Both South Asian men were arrested as well.)

Don't tolerate racial profiling. And don't fly Frontier.