CUSTOMS TIGHTENS RULES FOR SEARCHES

WASHINGTON -- Caught in the fierce controversy over ``racial profiling,''
the U.S. Customs Service is imposing new limits on its screening of airline
passengers to intercept illicit drug shipments.

Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Wednesday that the agency, which
seeks to catch contraband entering the country, will no longer detain
travelers suspected of smuggling narcotics for more than four hours without
the approval of a federal magistrate.

It will also require customs officers to notify an attorney or friend of the
passenger, if asked to do so, when the traveler is detained for more than
two hours. In cases where no drugs are found, the agency will help travelers
whose trips have been disrupted continue on their way.

The changes come as the Customs Service is facing at least a dozen lawsuits,
including a class-action suit in Chicago covering 100 black women who
alleged they were singled out and searched because of their race and sex.

Customs officials conducted searches of more than 50,000 international
travelers, from pat-downs to strip searches, in fiscal 1998, the service
said.

Top customs officials are vowing to base such searches on concrete evidence
or specific intelligence, rather than picking out people based on race and
appearance. Experience shows that certain flights from certain countries
carry a higher risk of smugglers, they say.

The new measures mark ``a sharp departure from past practice and represent a
self-imposed restraint on customs search authority, which federal courts
have always liberally upheld,'' Kelly said.

The Supreme Court has ruled that customs officers at airports and border
crossings don't need the probable cause or warrants that police need to
conduct searches. Customs agents can perform a strip search based on
``reasonable suspicion'' that someone might be hiding something illegal, the
justices have held.

Under the new rule, effective Oct. 1, the service would have to convince a
federal magistrate that it had ``reasonable suspicion'' for keeping a
passenger in custody beyond four hours. If the magistrate declined, the
passenger would be released.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the move a step in the right
direction.

In recent weeks, the Customs Service also has made government attorneys
available around the clock to advise its officers before intensive searches
are conducted, and it is installing new technology at major airports to
minimize body searches.

In June, President Clinton ordered federal law enforcement officers,
including customs agents, to document the race and sex of those they arrest
or detain. Customs officials said they began recording such statistics in
May.

The greatest single impetus to Custom Service reform efforts was the
class-action complaint filed last year by the Chicago women. One plaintiff,
Gwendolyn Richards, who arrived at O'Hare Airport from abroad, said that
during a five-hour ordeal, ``I was humiliated. I couldn't believe it was
happening.''