Zainab Merchant has a long and growing list of achievements. She is the Orlando-based founder and CEO of ZR Studios, a multimedia site about current affairs, politics, and culture. She is also a graduate student at Harvard University and mother to three young children.

But for the last two years, Zainab, who is a U.S. citizen, has been subjected to excessive and humiliating searches, questioning, and detention by federal officers every time she has traveled by air or reentered the United States from a trip abroad. This abusive treatment — most likely because she has been placed on a government watchlist — has affected her in profoundly negative ways, both psychologically and professionally. Yet the government refuses to tell her why it keeps happening or give her a meaningful chance to correct whatever error is causing it.

That’s why we’re filing a formal complaint on Zainab’s behalf with the Department of Homeland Security. You can read more about Zainab’s ordeal and the steps we’re taking to defend her rights here.

Zainab’s travel experiences follow a clear pattern. She is unable to obtain or print out her boarding passes before arriving at the airport, so she has to wait an hour or more at the ticket counter while airline employees call a number in Washington to see if they can clear her to fly. Transportation Security Administration screeners then run her through a gauntlet at security checkpoints — a process that can take another hour.

Instead of a quick turn in a scanning machine, she must undergo thorough pat-down searches, during which TSA screeners place their hands all over her body, including private or sensitive areas. They remove and inspect all of the contents of her bags, in full view of other travelers passing through the checkpoint. When she finally arrives at the gate, TSA officers are waiting for her there and require her to undergo additional pat-down searches — even though she cleared security only minutes earlier — in front of the passengers who will travel with her on the flight.

^{A TSA officer searches Zainab at the airport in Orlando. | Credit: Nadia Hallgren/ACLU}

Reentering the country from abroad can be even worse. Zainab has had to wait six hours in the middle of the night in a cold customs inspection area with crying children and no access to food or phones. Despite First Amendment protections, she has been questioned about her religion or why she wrote a blog post criticizing U.S. Customs and Border Protection for racial and religious profiling — border officers even blatantly suggested that she refrain from criticizing CBP in the future. She has been subjected to unconstitutional searches of her laptop and smartphone, which included personal pictures of her without the headscarf she wears in public in accordance with her religious beliefs.

The toll this has taken on Zainab has been severe. She avoids flying if possible because of the anxiety and humiliation she experiences when she does fly. She and her husband also avoid flying with their children, in order to spare them the awful experience of watching their parents demeaned and stigmatized by government agents. Faced with the prospect of undergoing the same invasive, duplicative screening protocol every time she flies, Zainab decided not to enroll in courses at Harvard during the fall of 2017. Compounding all of this is the knowledge that she has done nothing wrong and doesn’t know why the government is treating her this way — but she can’t get anyone inside the government to put an end to it.

This pattern of harassment, intrusive searches, and detention during travel is likely the result of unfair blacklisting: being placed on a government terrorism watchlist. We have long criticized the federal government’s watchlisting system as a due process nightmare. The government uses vague criteria and a very low standard to place people on its master watchlist, which as of June 2016 had ballooned to about 1 million people. According to the government’s own watchlisting rules, “concrete facts are not necessary” to meet the standard for blacklisting, and uncorroborated information of doubtful reliability can suffice. That leaves the door wide open to relying on rumor, bias, or false statements.

%3Ciframe%20allow%3D%22autoplay%3B%20encrypted-media%22%20allowfullscreen%3D%22%22%20frameborder%3D%220%22%20height%3D%22315%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FStXLEsaqx8E%3Fautoplay%3D1%26version%3D3%22%20...

Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube.com.

The consequences of blacklisting can be harsh and wide-ranging. Blacklisted individuals and their families have been subjected to harrowing displays of force and lengthy seizure at the border, surveillance and unjustified stops by domestic law enforcement, and detention and interrogation by authorities abroad. That’s to say nothing of the psychological and emotional damage that comes with constantly being stigmatized and demeaned as a suspected terrorist — an important but often ignored consequence of blacklisting.

As with other national security-related policies in the post-9/11 era, available information indicates that these consequences are borne overwhelmingly by members of American Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

To top it all off, the government’s system of “redress” for people who are or may be blacklisted is completely inadequate. Under it, the government won’t even tell people if they’ve been blacklisted, let alone give the reasons why or a meaningful opportunity to clear their names and get off the list.

After Zainab submitted a redress petition last year, DHS sent her a form letter stating that it “can neither confirm nor deny any information about you which may be within federal watchlists.” Since then, nothing has changed, and she continues to experience harassing searches and detention whenever she travels.  

Zainab’s terrible experience is yet another indication of the unfairness of the watchlisting system and the harms it inflicts on individual lives. We’re calling on DHS to stop singling Zainab out for this treatment, investigate the conduct of TSA and CBP officers, and turn over any relevant records. It’s the least that justice demands.

Nusrat Choudhury, Deputy Director, ACLU Racial Justice Program & Emily Dindial, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU

Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaled federal government retrenchment on ending debtors’ prisons — the unlawful incarceration of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees — when he withdrew a critical 2016 guidance on the constitutional principles violated by this practice. 

But civil society has stepped in to take the lead. 

Last week, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates voted unanimously to adopt 10 guidelines on ending debtors’ prisons and related practices that criminalize poor people, marking the 400,000-member organization’s most expansive policy position on a criminal justice issue taken in the past 15 years. This move signals growing bipartisan agreement that no court should lock people up or take away their driver’s licenses or voting rights simply because they do not have money — and that the integrity of our country’s legal system and law enforcement depends on this. 

The ABA’s “Ten Guidelines on Court Fines and Fees” are the outgrowth of a task force convened in 2016 to tackle the problem of growing public distrust in the justice system in the wake of high-profile killings of Black people by police. To counter this distrust, a subsequent working group decided the ABA needed to take a strong stand against court practices that treat poor people like ATM machines — the collection of payments toward court fines and fees through warrants, illegal jailing, the coercive suspension of driver’s licenses, voting prohibitions, and even the separation of children from parents who are simply too poor to pay. The ACLU has exposed these modern-day debtors’ prisons in at least 15 states, including through ongoing federal lawsuits like Brown v. Lexington County, South Carolina, which challenges a county system that locks up hundreds of impoverished people each year simply because they cannot pay fines and fees to courts. 

The guidelines take a decisive stand against practices that foster a justice system that treats poor people — disproportionately people of color — more harshly than people with money, funneling them into cycles of poverty and punishment, and hurting their families and communities. Take, for example, Guideline 3: “A person’s inability to pay a fine, fee or restitution should never result in incarceration or other disproportionate sanctions.” Or Guideline 5: “Failure to pay court fines and fees should never result in the deprivation of fundamental rights, including the right to vote.” And Guideline 8: “An individual who is unable to afford counsel must be afforded counsel, without cost, at any proceeding, including ability-to-pay hearings, where actual or eventual incarceration could be a consequence of nonpayment of fines and/or fees.” 

It means something that these guidelines come from the ABA. ABA members have radically different political and ideological views, and they are affiliated with organizations ranging from the Federalist Society to the National District Attorneys Association to the Black Lives Matter movement. After a year of dialogue and debate amongst hundreds of diverse ABA members, the ABA House of Delegates unanimously adopted the guidelines. This signals a powerful and growing consensus that debtors’ prisons, wealth-based driver’s license suspensions, and other practices that sanction the poor more harshly than the rich are a shameful smear on our country and contrary to our most basic, shared values of due process and equal protection of the law.  

The Supreme Court ruled more than 30 years ago that people should never be locked up behind bars solely because they are unable to pay court fines and fees they cannot afford. The ABA has created a tool that the public and every actor in the legal system — legislators, litigators, judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys — can use to do their part to ensure that debtors’ prisons are truly a thing of the past. 

“You’ve come a long way, baby.” That was a slogan of my youth. It was a marketing campaign for Virginia Slims, a cigarette marketed to women. The ads featured sexist images of the past — “Give women the right to vote and, by heavens, next thing you know, she’ll want to smoke like a man” — to mark progress. 

Now, nearly two decades into the 21st century, I wonder how far we have really come. More than 20 states explicitly prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ people; a Black woman is the candidate of a major party to be governor of Georgia; and sex discrimination is banned in employment, education, housing, and federally funded health care. 

But in America today, a woman makes on average 80 cents to a man’s dollar. A Black woman makes only 62 cents to a white man’s dollar. Federal law prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation based on race, religion, and other categories, but not based on sex, including sexual orientation or transgender status. There are still police departments in this country that don’t make clear in policies or training materials that on-duty sexual misconduct against civilians is prohibited. 

Six of the nation’s 50 governors are women. Five are white. None is transgender or lesbian. Eighty-one percent of women report having been subject to sexual harassment. More than a third have experienced intimate partner violence. Those companies that provide paid family leave — still less than 40 percent — often offer significantly less leave for men, reinforcing the notion that raising children is women’s responsibility. Federal health plans, including Medicaid, ban coverage of abortion unless the pregnancy results from rape or incest or is life-threatening. 

This list could go on.

The following are some approaches other countries have taken to the combat gender inequity. This list does not constitute an endorsement of any country’s commitment to gender equality or to the effectiveness of the law in practice. We well appreciate that the countries below are not free of gender discrimination — some are arguably far more discriminatory than the United States — and the laws may be imperfect or more for show. But they nonetheless offer approaches that may merit our consideration. 

1. Argentina’s Gender Identity Law

Argentina’s law, adopted in 2012, allows for legal gender recognition based solely on an individual’s self-determination and makes sex-change surgery a legal right, covered by public and private insurance. 

2. Germany’s Wage Transparency Act

As of January 6, 2018, German law allows workers at companies with more than 200 employees to find out the median remuneration of a colleague of the opposite sex in the same or a comparable role. The median remuneration is based on that of at least six opposite-sex colleagues. 

3. Rwanda’s Political Representation

Rwanda’s Constitution, adopted in 2003, mandates that 30 percent of parliamentary seats be reserved for women. Today, 61.3 percent of the lower chamber and 38.5 percent of the upper chamber seats of the Rwandan parliament are held by women, the highest representation of women parliamentarians in the world. 

4. Pakistan’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act

Pakistan’s new law, adopted in 2018, prohibits discrimination against transgender people in schools, at work, on public modes of transit, and while receiving medical care. It also allows people to choose their gender and to have that identity recognized on official documents, including national IDs, passports, and driver's licenses. 

5. Iceland’s Equal Pay Law

Gender-based pay discrimination has been illegal in Iceland since 1961. But in the face of a gender wage gap of nearly 6 percent, Iceland adopted a new law in 2018 that requires companies to demonstrate that their wages are fair. By 2022, any public or private body in Iceland employing more than 25 people that has not been independently certified as paying equal wages for work of equal value will face daily fines. 

6. Sweden’s Parental Leave

Sweden provides 480 days of paid parental leave, to be used before a child is eight. Two-parent households get the full benefit only if each parent takes ninety, non-transferable days off, an effort to ensure that no one parent or gender is seen as the sole caregiver.  

7. Norway’s Board Membership Rule

Since 2008, Norway has required that women make up 40 percent of publicly listed company boards. Companies that fail to comply risk dissolution. 

8. New Zealand’s Sex Work Decriminalization

New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003 with the Prostitution Reform Act, which protects sex workers rights through employment and human rights legislation. 

9. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service

The U.K.’s National Health Service covers abortion and treatment for gender dysphoria. 

10. Canada’s End to Its Tampon Tax

In 2016, Canada eliminated its 5 percent tax on tampons and other menstrual products. 

11. Morocco’s Law on Domestic Workers

In 2016, Morocco passed a law that requires proper labor contracts for domestic workers, limits their daily working hours, guarantees days off and paid vacations, and sets a minimum wage. The law also provides financial penalties for employers who violate these provisions and even prison sentences for repeat offenders. 

12. Around the World: Women Leaders

In more than 70 countries women have served as president or prime minister. Those countries include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Liberia, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. The first woman to become a head of state was Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who served as prime minister of Ceylon and Sri Lanka beginning in 1960. 

Later this week, the ACLU will unveil a plan that calls out the ongoing problems of discrimination in the United States and pledges our commitment to achieving progress in each area over the next 12 months. To make progress, we need you. What policies do you think would advance gender justice in the United States? Please let us know in the comments section below.