[Eclyps]

I know that there is racial profiling going on, and travel to certain countries will have higher numbers of individuals with certain ethnic backgrounds, but how often is this happening to middle-class white Americans? I used to travel a great deal but haven't done much over the past 5 years.

I remember being questioned for about 15 minutes on my flight from the UK to Paris back around 2008. My trip from the US to Turkey from 2013 was pretty timid, maybe 2 minutes of questions and a mandatory body scan (stopover in Amsterdam). From the US to South Africa completely painless. I did get my hands swabbed for explosive residue on a trip from Detroit to Las Vegas a couple years ago.

I'm just curious if anyone here has personal experience as a middle class white individual getting treatment as harsh as I read in some of these articles.

[arethuza]

Maybe 5 or 6 years ago I got a very unpleasant grilling traveling to the US when they noticed that I had multiple passport stamps from Turkey and Egypt.

I had to explain repeatedly why I liked Turkey in particular and kept getting asked over and over "Why Turkey?".

[NB Turkey used to be an extremely popular holiday destination for people from the UK and I've been traveling there regularly for 20+ years].

[sullenpaladin]

White middle class non-dissident man with a wife and kids here. I have had my hands swabbed for explosive residue on multiple occasions for domestic flights. We were also pulled aside for additional screening once (the whole family), but it went fairly quickly. One time I forgot a pocketknife in my carry-on and the TSA agent found it. We laughed about it and she confiscated it, no further action was taken.

[emodendroket]

There have been a few such stories but the people involved were prominent political dissidents like Jacob Applebaum.

[shrimp_emoji]

https://www.aclu.org/government-data-about-searches-internat...

>Between October 2008 and June 2010, over 6,500 people traveling to and from the United States had their electronic devices searched at the border. Nearly half of these people were U.S. citizens.

... and none of them were non-belligerent white individuals traveling to/from non-suspicious countries.

Okay, I made that last part up, but c'mon.