Backed by ACLU, Arab-Jewish Woman Strip-Searched at Detroit Airport Sues FBI in Alleged Ethnic Profiling
An Ohio woman who was handcuffed, strip-searched and jailed for hours at Detroit Metropolitan Airport is suing the FBI and other agencies, saying she was the victim of ethnic profiling.
Federal agents zeroed in Shoshana Hebshi, who identifies herself as half-Arab and half-Jewish, and two Indian-American passengers beside her after their Frontier Airlines flight landed on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
The agents handcuffed and forcibly removed Hebshi from the plane. The four-hour ordeal that followed “frightened and humiliated” her.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on her behalf on Tuesday.
During Hebshi’s flight, the plane crew noticed that the two men sitting next to her had spent several minutes in the bathroom. Hebshi did not know the men, according to an ACLU news release.
Flight attendants told the pilot that these two men were “possibly of Arab descent,” the Detroit Free Press reports.
The two men and Hebshi were escorted off the plane at gunpoint and pushed into waiting vehicles.
The 36-year-old was then locked up in a 6-foot-by-10-foot cell with a metal cot and a video camera aimed at the toilet. She was told to strip naked. Officers then asked her to squat down and cough.
She was cleared later that evening.
“They wouldn’t even tell me what was going on,” Hebshi said at a news conference on Tuesday. “No would answer me.”
Hebshi is being assisted by lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union.
ACLU lawyer Michael Steinberg said Hebshi “did nothing that was suspicious” to warrant such treatment.
She has filed a lawsuit against Frontier Airlines, the FBI, the Transportation Security Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and others, according to the release.
She hopes that the suit will bring awareness to the consequences of racial profiling.
Hebshi said on Tuesday that America has a “history of profiling and oppressing people who look different.”
In particular, she pointed out discrimination against Arab-Americans, Muslims, South Asians and Latinos, the Detroit Free Press reports.
Hebshi said that authorities assume that “someone who is brown is a criminal.”
Hebshi, the mother of 7-year-old twins, is a freelance journalist. She was born and raised in California and currently lives in Sylvania, Ohio. Her mother is Jewish, and her father is from Saudi Arabia.
“As an American citizen and a mom, I’m really concerned about my children growing up in a country where your skin color and your name can put your freedom and liberty at risk at any time,” Hebshi said at the conference.
Carol Kuruvilla
New York Daily News