Inquiries into Transportation Security Administration practices began after a June Star-Ledger report
Newark International Airport in this May 2010 file photo.NEWARK — An internal TSA report finding that Hispanic passengers were racially profiled at Newark Liberty International Airport has revived concerns that security screeners may have engaged in racial profiling at airports nationwide.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, has written to Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole, demanding that a program designed to detect suspicious behavior at airports be suspended because it may be biased.
In June, a story in The Star-Ledger revealed that a TSA inquiry had concluded that behavior detection officers were routinely singling out Mexican and Dominican passengers for scrutiny of passports and visas and questioning, even though they exhibited no signs of suspect behavior.
Thompson has been critical of the TSA program since 2010, when an audit by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found that immigration violations accounted for nearly 40 percent of all airport arrests initiated by the behavior detection program, known by acronym SPOT, which stands for Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques.
"I feel this statistic implies that there could be racial or ethnic biases influencing SPOT referrals," Thompson wrote in his June 21 letter to Pistole.
The Star-Ledger report raised new questions he said.
In fact, recent media reports about minorities being targeted by behavior detection officers at Newark Liberty International Airport have verified this concern, he said.
The GAO audit of the SPOT program attracted limited attention immediately after its release in May 2010 even though the report raised questions about the program’s overall effectiveness.
For example, the audit noted that in contrast to the high number of immigration-related arrests, not a single terror suspect was arrested resulting from a SPOT referral. The GAO said the SPOT program involved 3,000 TSA employees at 161 airports last year, at an annual cost of more than $200 million.
Rep. John Mica, the Florida Republican who had requested the audit, was one of the few lawmakers to react to the GAO audit at the time, calling the SPOT program a waste of taxpayer money.
"The bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems," Mica said in May 2010.
Specifically, the GAO found that 39 percent of the 1,083 arrests initiated under the SPOT program during a four-year period from 2004 to 2008 were for immigration violations. Immigration violations were precisely what screeners in Newark were looking for when singling out Mexican and Dominican passengers for scrutiny of their documents at security checkpoints during much of in 2008 and 2009, according to the TSA internal report.
Asked to comment on Thompson’s letter, the agency said it would respond directly to the congressman. A spokesman for Thompson, Adam Comis, said yesterday that he was unaware of any response.
Regarding the arrest statistics cited in the GAO report, TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein issued the following statement: "We have document checkers who are trained to detect fraudulent documents such as licenses, boarding passes, passports and the like. As part of their jobs, they are focused on the validity of the documents that people present at the checkpoint." Nonetheless, Farbstein said the TSA took Thompson’s concerns about racial profiling very seriously, and she pointed to steps the security agency had taken at Newark Liberty to quash the practice there.
In Newark’s case, the internal TSA report attributed the racial profiling there to a group of rogue screeners and managers, nicknamed "the Great Mexican Hunters" by TSA colleagues, who used the practice to boost their referral numbers in an attempt to appear productive. In response to the report’s findings, the TSA said it retrained the airport’s entire behavior detection unit to ensure that racial profiling did not recur.
Other lawmakers who have expressed concern over racial profiling under the SPOT program include the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), and a member of New Jersey’s House delegation, Rep. Rush Holt, who has also criticized the TSA’s use of full-body scanners for privacy and health reasons. Mica, now chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, added racial profiling to his list of concerns after his initial criticism of the SPOT program last year.
"It’s not a racial detection program," said Justin Harclerode, a spokesman for Mica. "It’s a behavior-detection program."