This is heartbreaking.
Maha Elgenaidi, the executive director of a nonprofit community organization in Santa Clara, California, outlines her experience being detained and interrogated at US customs after a trip to Malaysia, an experience all too common for American Muslims. Excerpt:
I was told to take my bags and put them on the table. They then began to search all of my belongings, taking out and looking through each and every item including my laundry, private articles, books, and folders. When they were done with each item, they literally tossed it aside, without any care or respect; all of this was occurring in public view of people just arriving into the US.
At one point a few of my books and folders fell to the floor. When I asked them if I could pick them up they responded with a no. When I asked why, one agent said, “Because you may use these items as a weapon against us.” At that point, I broke down crying, in shock. There were five agents surrounding me at that point, three watching me, and two going through my belongings. They even went through my wallet, taking out business cards I had received, receipts, car registration, driver’s license, everything it contained.
One of the agents tried to comfort me by telling me that she goes through a similar inspection when she travels. This was difficult for me to believe, but even taking her for her word, I imagine it’s a much different experience to suffer humiliation at the hands of authority as a person of color, belonging to a minority religion who also wears the hijab as I do, than for a White American who’s an officer of law enforcement.
During all of this back and forth, I was asked to step away from the people searching my bag. I asked, “Why can’t I collect my things that have been searched?” They responded, “Because we don’t know who you are and what you might do.” This was a refrain they repeated frequently, as if to add insult to injury.
Believe it or not, I, a blonde haired, blue eyed, anglo-saxon Englishman was treated in much the same way while transitioning through Heathrow (catching a connecting flight to Newcastle) a couple of years ago. The offender was a young Pakistani woman who seemed to think that if her job was shitty then everyone else should feel the same way. She had a white anglo-saxon male supervisor watching this going on but he didn’t intervene until he saw I was on the point of really ‘losing it’ with her. He stepped up to me and asked “What’s the hurry, you got a party to go to or something?”. I told him firmly that I was on my way to bury my dead father. He looked shocked, mumbled an apology and ushered me away. I found the whole thing so disturbing that I made an official complaint to BAA who run the airport and I actually received a apology and an assurance that the culprits were being ‘retrained’.
I can only imagine how this woman felt.
