Muhammad Ali Jr. was at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport when he was detained on Feb. 7. He and his mother, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, were returning from a trip to Jamaica, where Camacho-Ali had delivered a speech for Black History Month. When immigration agents stopped them, Camacho-Ali showed them a photo of herself and the legendary boxer to whom she was once married. They let her go. Ali Jr., who was born in Philadelphia in 1972, did not have such a photo. He was questioned for two hours. A family spokesman, Chris Mancini, said it was the pair’s Arabic-sounding names that raised flags, but Customs and Border Protection officials told the Washington Post that “CBP does not discriminate based on religion, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.” Mancini said Ali Jr., who is Muslim, was repeatedly asked about his religion and that “to the Ali family it’s crystal clear that this is directly linked to Mr. Trump’s efforts to ban Muslims from the United States.”
Something similar happened to Mem Fox, an Australian woman in her early 70s who is best known for writing the children’s book Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. She had just landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 5, en route to a Wisconsin State Reading Association conference where she was to be the keynote speaker. The theme of the event: “Reading our world, composing our lives, realizing our humanity.” Fox was detained for nearly two hours at LAX, apparently for having the wrong kind of visa. She said she was treated roughly. “The belligerence and violence of it,” Fox wrote in The Guardian, “was really terrifying.” This was her 117th trip to the U.S.; the first 116 times through American security were uneventful. She has no plans to return for number 118. “The U.S. is changing its mind about what the U.S. is,” she told the Washington Post. “That is what is coming through. That is the tragedy.”
Two well-known individuals, a black man and a white woman. Two different airports on two different coasts, with different circumstances surrounding their detainments. Ali Jr. believes he was profiled because of his religion; Fox believes she was a victim of a nation that has just recently ceased to be polite. But they agree that what happened to them happened because Donald Trump is president.
Both of them are wrong. Abuse at the hands of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents didn’t originate with the Trump administration.
Consider these three stories cited in a March 2013 ACLU-San Diego report headlined “National wave of complaints highlights rampant abuse by U.S. Customs and Border Protection”:
“CBP agents apprehended three women at the Texas-Mexico border and detained them in a freezing cold cell called the hielera” until “the women’s fingers and lips turned blue.” After six days of being held in dire conditions, the women couldn’t take it anymore and signed documents they didn’t understand. As it turned out, they had agreed to expedited removal.
“CBP agents forced a 63-year-old woman with no criminal history off a Greyhound bus in Ohio, subjected her to hours of interrogation, and refused to let her use the bathroom for so long that she urinated on herself.” She later suffered a stroke at an immigration detention facility.
“CBP agents at Dulles International Airport unlawfully detained a 4-year-old U.S. citizen child for more than 24 hours without adequate food and water, deprived her of any contact with her parents, and sent her back to Guatemala. CBP agents informed the child’s father that they could not return her to ‘illegals.’ ”
The problem of U.S. customs agents abusing their power was a problem in Bush’s America and Obama’s America, just as it is in Trump’s America. The only thing that has changed is that the White House’s public rhetoric on immigration is now more closely aligned with the way Customs and Border Protection has long treated immigrants, tourists and citizens.