The case raises concerns that border patrol agents are targeting minorities more broadly in the wake of Donald Trump’s travel ban

Concerns that US border patrol agents are targeting minorities have grown in the wake of Donald Trump’s executive order blocking refugees and visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries from entry into the US.

The order caused chaos at US ports of entry when it was enacted two weeks ago and though a federal court has blocked it from being enforced, claims of aggressive, and potentially illegal, treatment have lingered.

Travel ban decision suggests supreme court would be tough to convince Read more

This week, Canadian citizen Fadwa Alaoui said she was denied entry to the US after border officials asked probing questions about her Muslim faith and her views on Trump.

Alaoui was born in Morocco but has lived in Canada for more than 20 years, traveling to the US regularly to visit family. But on her way to Vermont for a day of shopping with two of her children and an adult cousin, she was stopped for four hours at the border.

Alaoui – who wears a hijab – said border officials asked her several questions about her faith. “He said ‘Do you practice? Which mosque do you go to? What is the name of the imam? How often do you go to the mosque? What kind of discussions do you hear in the mosque? Does the imam talk to you directly?’”

She said they also examined her phone and asked questions about Arabic videos on the device. Alaoui told them they were videos of daily prayers she had received from friends, to help her and her son as he went through chemo. An agent later explained that the videos were why she was being blocked from entry.

“I felt humiliated, treated as if I was less than nothing. It’s as if I wasn’t Canadian,” she told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Morocco is not one of the seven countries covered by the executive order, feeding fears that US Customs and Border Patrol has been emboldened by the decree.

“We have heard reports that CBP has been exceeding its authority or targeting Muslims and members of specific racial and ethnic communities in the chaos surrounding the implementation of the executive order,” said Hugh Handeyside, a staff attorney for the ACLU.

Handeyside said the reports are consistent with a trend the ACLU has observed for years at ports of entry: people from specific ethnic groups being subjected to excessive force, intrusive searches of electronic devices and questioning about their religious and political beliefs. “We have heard reports recently that those have continued or possibly gotten worse,” he said.

The ACLU’s national security project director, Hina Shamsi, said the questioning she has received after the executive order was implemented was “unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in over 25 years of travel into and out of this country”.

Shamsi had Pakistani citizenship, but has been a legal permanent resident in the US for more than 10 years. In that time, her work has taken her around the world for cases that directly challenge the past two presidential administrations.

“Over all those years, government officials made their views known about this work – often in opposition, sometimes in support,” Shamsi wrote in a blogpost. “But no government agent ever asked the chilling question I was asked this time: ‘Do you understand why someone might have a different perspective about you?’”

An average of 1.2 million people a day try to enter the US, according to the CBP. The agency said of those, an average of between 300 and 500 are denied entry.

But the circumstances that lead to those denials are murky. “In many instances, CBP officers treat the border and ports of entry as constitution-free zones, but the constitution most certainly applies at the border and each CBP officer has sworn an oath to uphold the constitution,” Handeyside said.

A CBP spokesman, David Long, said the agency does not discriminate on the entry of foreigners into the US and officers’ decisions are cross-checked by supervisors and other managers. “Although frontline officers do have some discretion in carrying out their duties, they ultimately work with a team of personnel within a chain-of-command construct to achieve CBP’s mission,” he said.

Long said reports of inappropriate and unprofessional behavior are taken seriously and investigated.

In Texas, attorneys are considering taking legal action against the agency on behalf of a Jordanian teenager, who was detained for more than a week after attempting to return to his home in Houston.

Jordan is also not one of the seven countries listed in the order, but the 16-year-old, Mohammad Abu Khadra, was detained for two days before being moved to a juvenile immigration facility in Chicago.

Mohammad’s attorney said after being detained, the teen may have told border officials he was attending public school in the US, in violation of his tourist visa.

His case is in immigration court.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is working to expand the legal boundaries of appropriate security checks.



This week, the Department of Homeland Security said it was considering forcing refugees and people from the seven countries covered in the executive order to surrender their login details for social media sites. “If they don’t want to cooperate then you don’t come in,” the DHS secretary, John Kelly, said this week.

The White House is also discussing the possibility of asking all foreign visitors, not just those cited in the order, to share social media account information and their cell phone contacts, according to CNN.

For the Canadian blocked from crossing the border to shop in Vermont, these type of searches were a shock.

Alaoui said she still hasn’t found the words to explain to her son what exactly had happened. She told the CBC: “I don’t want him to feel like we were discriminated because I raise my kids that we are all the same. We are Canadians. Yes, we have different names, but we are all the same.”