Tameika Lovell filed a lawsuit alleging that a CBP officer at Kennedy Airport in New York used a gloved hand to probe her private parts to look for contraband. Suits filed in other states allege that CBP officers strip-searched teens and transported women from the border or airports to hospitals where pelvic exams and other procedures were forcibly carried out to look for drugs.
Credit: David Wexler
Tameika Lovell was retrieving baggage at New York City’s Kennedy Airport when two female U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stopped her for a “random search.”
It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just arrived from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had been stopped and felt profiled before, but this time a CBP supervisor began posing questions she hadn’t heard previously.
“Don’t you think you’re spending too much money traveling?” Lovell, 34, recalls him asking.
What allegedly happened next is outlined in a harrowing civil lawsuit Lovell filled in March in federal court. And […]
All this was happening during the Obama years, so I see no hope in the Democrats on this issue.