ACLU Report On Successes In Limiting Racial Profiling

In a March 3, 2010 posting at its “Blog of Rights,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that the Human Rights Fund (HRF) has released a report profiling how groups like the ACLU have used international human rights standards and strategies to improve people’s lives in the United States.  According to the posting, the report discusses how the ACLU Human Rights Program worked with the Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) to make the U.N. Human Rights Committee aware of the problems of racial profiling and harassment of people who live in the Texas-Mexico border region and the overall militarization of the border.  As stated in the blog, residents of that region were the targets of Operation Linebacker, a federally financed law enforcement program meant to target violent crime and drug trafficking at the border.  The ACLU contends that instead of arresting drug runners, the initiative ended up ethnically profiling brown-skinned people.  As a result of the ACLU and BHNR’s advocacy to the U.N., the ACLU reports that the drumbeat of local coverage put pressure on the mayor and legislators in Austin, the state capital, to rethink support for the policing initiative, which was later de-funded.

More information about the ACLU and this report is available at www.aclu.org .