– Two women who were detained in northern Montana by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents for speaking Spanish while shopping at a convenience store have reached an undisclosed monetary settlement in their lawsuit against the agency, the ACLU of Montana announced Tuesday.
“Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” O’Neill said in the video.
“We stood up to the government because speaking Spanish is not a reason to be racially profile and harassed,” Suda said in a statement provided by the ACLU.
In gathering information for the lawsuit, the ACLU said Customs and Border Protection agents in northern Montana acknowledged they routinely profiled non-white people.
“If there's somebody speaking Spanish down there it's like all of a sudden you've got five agents swarming in, ‘What’s going on?'