Key passages from the opinion
- The panel said plaintiffs “plausibly alleged that [the] drug interdiction program directs the county’s officers to violate passengers’ Fourth Amendment rights” by conducting unreasonable seizures. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
- By contrast, on Equal Protection, the complaint “is devoid of any allegations that any individual defendant acted with a discriminatory purpose,” which doomed those claims at this stage. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
The numbers behind the challenge
Counsel’s records—obtained via open-records requests—report 402 jet-bridge stops over eight months. For the 378 stops with recorded race, 56% involved Black passengers, compared with 8% of domestic travelers at the airport. Plaintiffs’ appellate brief and a subsequent statement by the NYU Policing Project peg the odds of that pattern happening randomly at less than one in one hundred trillion. The brief also notes just three drug seizures and over $1 million in cash taken from 25 travelers, with few charges filed. (These figures are allegations sourced to plaintiffs’ filings, not findings by the court.) The Policing Project
