Indians Interrogated on 9/11: Why Were They Held? They Spent Too Long in the Airplane Restroom

From the archive: first published September 13, 2011. This short report reflects what was known at the time; no charges were ever filed.

On September 11, 2011 — the tenth anniversary of 9/11 — Frontier Airlines Flight 623 flew from Denver to Detroit. Before landing, the crew alerted authorities that three passengers were behaving suspiciously.

The three passengers were Shoshana Hebshi, an American citizen who described herself as a "half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio," and two Indian men seated next to her. What the crew had flagged: the men had spent what the crew considered too long in the airplane's restroom.

When the plane landed in Detroit, all three were handcuffed and detained; Hebshi was strip-searched and interrogated for about four hours. No charges were filed against any of them. Hebshi later wrote a widely read account of the ordeal on her blog, describing the experience of being racially profiled and cuffed on the anniversary of 9/11. In 2013 she sued Frontier Airlines and federal agencies over the incident.

The incident became a snapshot of post-9/11 airport anxiety at its most arbitrary: three ordinary passengers pulled out of their lives for hours because a crew saw ordinary behavior as a threat. Years later, the federal government paid Hebshi $40,000 to settle the lawsuit she and the ACLU of Michigan filed over the ordeal.