FEDS WILL LOOK INTO DRUG BUST IN TEXAS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department has opened a criminal
investigation into whether civil rights were violated in a local police
drug bust that rounded up 40 black people in a small, predominantly white
Texas farming town last year.

Justice spokeswoman Kara Peterman said yesterday the department's civil
rights division is investigating the case, which has attracted national
attention. Federal law forbids local police to deprive citizens of their
constitutional rights.

Some 43 people, 40 of them black, were rounded up in an undercover
operation on July 23, 1999, in the northwest Texas town of Tulia. The
others were two whites and one Hispanic.

In October, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with the Justice
Department charging racial bias was behind the arrests.

The groups described the arrests as an "ethnic cleansing of young male blacks."