Muslim Americans faced routine fingerprinting at border crossings

Evidence

The almost random rounding up of Arabs following homeland terror attacks from Oklahoma City onwards is a predictable extension of this logic. A week or so after the release of the Cornell University survey mentioned above, approximately 40 Muslim American members of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, the largest and most prominent Muslim civil rights group in North America, were returning home from a major conference in Toronto (December 26, 2004). They were held at the border crossing for more than six hours by US Border Patrol officials who, citing orders from the Department of Homeland Security, refused to release them until they agreed to be fingerprinted, a violation of law unless citizens are suspected of a crime. “Traveling while Muslim” seems to have become the latest form of state-mandated racial profiling. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 467

Categorization

• CANDY: ‘Traveling while Muslim’ as a crisp, tweetable coinage parallel to ‘driving while black’.
• SHARE: The specific December 2004 CAIR border incident with its date and six-hour detention detail would interest someone tracking civil liberties enforcement patterns.