Lawsuit looks at racial profiling at the border

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union accuses some US border guards at the Olympic Peninsula crossing of racial profiling.

Lawyers with the BC Civil Liberties Association say the stories showcased in the suit echo complaints from people in this province.

The lawsuit refers to three cases so far and the ACLU hopes to eventually get class action certification. Micheal Vonn with the BCCLA says a group called International Civil Liberties Monitoring has collected data on this issue.

“When the call was put out for people to tell their stories, there were very clear patterns and trends. It’s very difficult to say, at this point, that there isn’t racial profiling at the border; the evidence of that is very profound,” explains Vonn.

“We’ve got all kinds of border officials, police services and intelligence services saying ‘No, we don’t racially profile. We would consider race as part of a raft of factors that we might look at as we are developing our grounds for suspicion.'”

“I think we would have to say that in the number of cases that are brought forward as complaints, racial factors are very, very highly weighted in terms of how people are treated,” she claims.

She hopes hard facts on what exactly is going on at the border will be revealed as the lawsuit moves through the courts.

“We are quite dependent on people trying to gather data of individual experiences from actually having been through the border. It’s very difficult to go about,” she adds.

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