A Pakistani-born member of the New South Wales parliament has been detained at a US airport after immigration officials questioned how she was granted an Australian passport and where she was “originally from”.

Mehreen Faruqi, a Greens member of the NSW legislative council, was detained for more than an hour with her husband after trying to clear immigration at Los Angeles international airport on Thursday, in a case of what she called “racial profiling”.

She said she had presented her passport and been fingerprinted by officials at the airport before being asked “how we got Australian passports”.

“We said it was because we lived there and they asked where we were originally from,” Faruqi said. “When we said Pakistan we were told that someone would be escorting us to the interview room.”

The MP, who was elected in 2013, said she was asked in a “really aggressive” manner if she could present identification other than her Australian passport.

She was taken with her husband to an interview room in which the pair were separated and interrogated in front of about 10 others waiting in the room.

“The interview was along the same lines: why are you here, do you have a Pakistani passport, have you been to Pakistan, what do you do there,” she said.

Faruqi has lived in Australia for 24 years and has been a citizen for 22 years.

“To be asked how I got an Australian passport is ridiculous on one level and heart-wrenching at another,” she said. “You don’t expect it, you know you haven’t done anything. It’s a little bit embarrassing.”

The pair were eventually allowed to proceed with their trip to the US, where Faruqi, the Greens spokeswoman on drugs and harm minimisation, will meet drug law reform experts and campaigners in California and Oregon.

She said her case might be noticed because she held a public office but “I know that people are treated this way every day”.

“The concern for me is that the political debate about racism and Islamophobia is at a very low level at the moment and it feeds into this sort of thing,” she said.

In December 2014, the then US attorney-general, Eric Holder, revised US justice department rules to prevent FBI agents from considering factors such as religion and national origin when opening cases.

But the federal government granted exemptions to parts of the Department of Homeland Security, effectively permitting racial profiling to continue in airports, the Washington Post reported.

The US embassy in Delhi apologised in 2012 after the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan was detained for 90 minutes by border protection officers at a New York airport.



Last month, eight members of the South Korean pop group Oh My Girl elected to return home after being detained for 15 hours at the same airport when officials mistook them for sex workers.

Stuart Khan, an associate professor in environmental engineering at the University of New South Wales, said on Twitter that he, too, had been detained at LAX and interviewed in the same room, including about his last name.