Rep. King: Spot Illegal Immigrants by Their ‘Shoes,’ ‘Grooming,’ ‘Accent’ or ‘a Sixth Sense’

Created: June 15, 2010 14:25 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

In defense of Arizona’s immigration crackdown, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said he believes appearance-based profiling can play a valuable role in law enforcement.

“It’s not wrong to use race or other indicators for the sake of identifying that people are violating the law,” King said on the House floor, calling for “common sense indicators” to be used in the process.

“Those common sense indicators,” he explained, “are all kinds of things, from what kind of clothes people wear — my suit, in my case — what kind of shoes people wear, what kind of accent they have, um, the, the type of grooming they might have, there are all kinds of indicators there and sometimes it’s just a sixth sense and they can’t put their finger on it.”

King said he was once a victim of profiling when a cab driver stopped for him without request because he was wearing a suit. Watch the video from Media Matters:

The remarks came the same day King alleged that President Obama has a “default mechanism in him” that “favors the black person.”