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racial profiling
The TikTok Ban Is Discriminatory and Unlawful. Here’s Why.
What Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required. That is racial profiling and an affront to the Constitution.
Jan 17, 2025
Today, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s wrongheaded decision to ban TikTok in a unanimous decision. The ban on TikTok is set to take effect on Sunday January 19, 2025.
Ahead of this misguided ruling, 15 racial justice nonprofits submitted an emergency filing to the Supreme Court, explaining how the TikTok ban violates the rights of 170 million U.S. users and echoes a disgraceful history of anti-Asian racism.
It is no secret that our government wrongfully uses “national security” as a weapon against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Stop AAPI Hate’s research highlights how the government routinely scapegoats our communities for economic downturns, public health crises, and national security threats—often without any evidence.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same.
In the case of TikTok, the government claims that a ban is necessary to protect U.S. national security against China. However, the government also filed an affidavit in open court, signed by a senior U.S. national security official, stating there is “no information” that China had ever tried to use TikTok for nefarious purposes in the United States.
In other words, what Congress is telling the world is that being a person or company that simply has origins in Asia is enough to be labeled a national security threat—no evidence required.
That is racial profiling, plain and simple. And it is an affront to the Constitution.
It is disappointing, though unsurprising, that our government is targeting Asian American communities solely because of our race and national origins. Since our nation’s founding, our government has repeatedly trampled on the rights of Asians, Asian Americans, and other minority groups by relying on so-called “national security” concerns as a basis for outright racial discrimination.
Take, for example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese American incarceration during World War II, and government-sanctioned racial profiling and surveillance of innocent Muslim communities following the 9/11 attacks. More recently, we saw the China Initiative, a Department of Justice operation from 2018 to 2022 that unjustly targeted Chinese and Chinese American academics, ruined careers and livelihoods, and chilled scientific research.
Every time the government insisted that such laws or programs targeting Asian Americans were necessary, it reinforced the pernicious “perpetual foreigner” stereotype or the idea that all Asian people in America are inherently suspicious and disloyal to the United States based on our ancestry, skin color, or religious faith.
Those laws and programs were based on fearmongering and scapegoating. All three branches of government—the president, Congress, and the Supreme Court—eventually admitted that Japanese American incarceration violated the Constitution. Both the House and the Senate officially apologized for the Chinese Exclusion Act and other discriminatory laws. And the DOJ eventually shut down the China Initiative, acknowledging it perpetuated a discriminatory double standard against people with any ties to China, though President-elect Donald Trump wants to revive it.
Our government never seems to learn and instead continues to pass laws motivated by anti-Asian prejudice, like this TikTok ban.
The TikTok ban has real human costs. The ban will silence 170 million U.S. users, including communities like ours that rely on TikTok to build solidarity, share valuable information, practice their faith, and engage in free expression.
But what worries us even more is how the TikTok ban fuels hateful rhetoric and actions against Asian Americans. It is clear that Congress targeted TikTok because the company is Chinese. Other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube collect vast amounts of user data and have had major privacy and security issues—yet the government is not applying the same level of scrutiny on those companies.
When our government engages in anti-Asian racial profiling and biased enforcement, it encourages everyday people to do the same. We saw this exact ripple effect of hate during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At the start of the pandemic, then-President Trump spewed racist, anti-Asian rhetoric blaming Chinese people for the virus, fueling a torrent of hate against AAPI communities. In fact, from 2020 to 2022, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,000 reports of hate acts in which offenders mimicked Trump’s language. His rhetoric emboldened people to spit racist vitriol at our community members as we shopped for groceries, dropped our kids off at school, and took the bus to work. They shouted that we were diseased and told us to go back to our country. Since our founding in March 2020, we have received over 12,000 reports of anti-AAPI hate acts from across the country—and we know racism and discrimination increase when politicians target our communities.
That’s why AAPI communities must tell our leaders that we disagree with the TikTok ban. This decision is not only an affront to our civil liberties and free speech, it is also an affront to our safety. We need leaders who will defend our rights and safety—not strip it away.
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For Democrats, Debate Night Means Being Quizzed From the Right by Corporate Media
Dec 23, 2015
The Democratic and Republican debates have this asymmetry: Republican candidates are presumed to need ideological sympathizers among their questioners--Fox News, for example, or Salem Media, which teams up with CNN for GOP debates--while Democrats are thought content to be quizzed by representatives of mainstream corporate media outlets like CNN, CBS and ABC (FAIR Action Alert, 10/9/15).
This setup resulted, on the Republican side, in the spectacle of Salem Media's Hugh Hewitt pressing GOP contender Ben Carson to declare his willingness to "kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and the thousands." (Carson's response: "You got it. You got it.")
And on the Democratic side, the result is debates like the one we got on December 19.
Although primary debates are ostensibly intended to help members of each major party select their nominee, the questions asked by the debate moderators from ABC--World News Tonight anchor John Muir and national security correspondent Martha Raddatz--consistently posed questions from the right.
When Raddatz pressed Hillary Clinton: "Our latest poll shows that more Americans believe arming people, not stricter gun laws, is the best defense against terrorism. Are they wrong?" Or when she pushed Bernie Sanders on "sending US combat troops to join a coalition to fight ISIS."
She asked a couple of questions "about a new terrorist tool used in the Paris attacks, encryption"--even though, as The Intercept's Dan Froomkin reported, evidence "suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted." Still, Raddatz was able to use the dubious encryption claims to push Clinton to "force [Apple] to give law enforcement a key to encrypted technology by making it law."
As for Muir, he sought an endorsement of racial profiling from Sanders, citing "a neighbor in San Bernardino who reportedly witnessed packages being delivered to that couple's home, that it set off red flags, but they didn't report it because they were afraid to profile." He also pushed Clinton and Martin O'Malley to endorse "the idea of a halt or a pause" in acceptance of Syrian refugees and challenged Clinton to explain what was wrong with Donald Trump's "proposed ban on Muslims coming to America," given that "36 percent of Americans, more than a third, agree with him."
What about the concerns of the nearly two-thirds of Americans who don't agree with Donald Trump? Progressive perspectives on security and foreign policy were hard to discern in the questioning. As with the most recent Republican debate (FAIR Blog, 12/16/15), "terrorism" was treated as it meant "political violence by Muslims," with right-wing mass killings like the Charleston church massacre and the assault on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs going unmentioned.
The drone war was ignored by the moderators, as were civilian casualties. The disastrous consequences of the Libyan intervention that Clinton presided over was brought up at one point, but the premise of the question was that Clinton "should have done more to fill the leadership vacuum left behind"--not that the secretary of State shouldn't have been using military force to overthrow governments she disliked.
Even though the world's leaders had reached a landmark climate change just a week before the debate, "climate change" and "global warming" didn't pass the moderators' lips.
ABC News' approach to domestic issues was not much different. Raddatz pressed on the cost of a single-payer healthcare plan-"Can you tell us specifically how much people will be expected to pay?"--and on his plan to make public colleges tuition-free: "How does that really lower the cost other than just shifting the cost to taxpayers?" She tried to get Clinton and O'Malley to promise not to raise takes on households making $250,000 or less--in other words, families who make more than 97 percent of the country.
Muir asked all three candidates a question about Black Lives Matter-but he focused on the "so-called Ferguson effect, police holding back because they're afraid of backlash." Voters who are worried about "a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement" were represented by ABC News--but those who are more worried about police officers killing unarmed African Americans with impunity were out of luck.
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Americans Win Right to Challenge Inclusion on Government's Secret 'No Fly List'
Court ruling seen as a victory against racial profiling, specifically for Arab-Americans
Oct 26, 2015
A federal court on Monday ruled that a Michigan man can challenge his inclusion on the government's "No Fly List," in a move that is being celebrated as a victory for the hundreds of U.S. citizens assigned to that secretive list, as well as the countless Arab-Americans routinely subjected to similar racial profiling.
Reversing a previous district court ruling, Circuit Judge Julia Smith Gibbons ordered (pdf) "further proceedings" in the case of Saeb Mokdad, a Lebanese-American who has been prohibited three times from boarding a plane to visit his family in Lebanon since September 2012.
The Arab-American Civil Rights League (ACRL), which is defending Mokdad, argues that his placement on the terrorist screening list is unconstitutional. The suit specifically singles out the U.S. Attorney General, the director of the FBI, and the director of the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), who are charged with placing people on the list. The ACRL also argues that the government must explain why Mokdad is included on the Terrorist Screening list and allow for a "meaningful opportunity" to contest his status.
Gibbons also ruled that a district court does have the authority to decide on such a case, which, as Salon reporter Ben Norton notes, "establish[es] a precedent for courts throughout the country."
There are as many as 47,000 people on the U.S. government's "No Fly List," according to documents leaked to The Intercept last year, including 800 Americans.
Following the court ruling, Mokdad's attorney, Nabih Ayad, said, "Today is a good day for our Constitution, a good day for Arab-Americans, and a good day for justice across this nation." Ayad added that the ruling confirms the ACRL's belief that "the unwarranted and unconstitutional profiling of an entire group of people simply based on their ethnicity must be struck down as a violation of this nation's highest law: the Constitution."
He continued, "By issuing today's ruling, the U.S. Sixth Circuit has dealt a huge blow against the continued and unjustifiable intimidation and harassment by the federal government against Arab Americans."
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