Clayton County Police End Airport Drug Searches in Settlement With Eric André and Clayton English
The Clayton County Police Department has agreed to end its “jet bridge interdiction program” at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as part of a settlement with comedians Eric André and Clayton English, who sued after being stopped and searched on their way to board flights.
Under the deal, the department will permanently halt the airport interdiction stops, require officers assigned to the airport to wear body-worn cameras, and train them on constitutional limits governing police encounters. The county also agreed to pay André and English $15,000 each. The settlement was announced this week by the Policing Project at New York University School of Law, which helped represent the two men.
André first went public with his experience in an April 2021 tweet. “I was just racially profiled by two plain clothes Atlanta PD police in @Delta terminal T3 at the Atlanta airport,” he wrote. “They stopped me on the way down the bridge to the plane for a 'random' search and asked [if] they could search me for drugs.” English, an Atlanta-based comedian, reached out to André and said he had been subjected to the same treatment months earlier.
Their lawsuit described a more systematic practice. Officers from the Clayton County Police Department, the suit alleged, waited in jet bridges — the narrow walkways between airport gates and airplanes — to selectively intercept passengers, take their boarding passes and IDs, interrogate them before boarding, and search their carry-on bags. The department framed the encounters as consensual, but both men said they did not feel free to walk away. “When two cops stop you, you don't feel like you have the right to leave, especially when they start interrogating you about drugs,” André said at a press conference in October 2022. English said he felt “completely powerless.”
The lawsuit also laid out numbers that made the program hard to defend. Over an eight-month period, CCPD conducted 378 passenger interdictions in jet bridges and recorded the passenger's race. Fifty-six percent of the passengers stopped were Black, even though only 8 percent of American airline passengers are Black. The drug results were minimal: out of 402 stops, officers found drugs three times, and only two of those cases led to charges.
What the program did produce was money. During that same stretch, police used civil asset forfeiture to seize $1,036,890.35 in cash and money orders from 25 passengers, with individual seizures ranging from $10,000 to $118,880. In 24 of those cases, the passenger was allowed to continue on their travels, often on the same flight. Only two were ever charged with a related crime.
Civil asset forfeiture has long been a source of controversy because it allows law enforcement to take property suspected of being connected to crime, even when no charges are filed. The burden then shifts to the owner to prove the money was legitimate, and protections against abuse vary widely by state.
The end of the Clayton County program follows a similar move by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which shut down its own airport interdiction operation last year after years of lawsuits and constitutional complaints. “For the first time, the Clayton County Police Department has publicly confirmed that it has ended the airport interdiction program at the center of the lawsuit,” the Policing Project said in a statement.
The settlement is a clear example of legal pressure changing police practices. But it also leaves intact a broader reality: constitutional protections at airports and border crossings are not applied the same way they are elsewhere. Courts allow airport security officials to conduct “administrative searches” without probable cause or a warrant, and that exception gives the government wide latitude. “The administrative search exception functions as an enormously broad license for the government to conduct searches free from constitutional limitation,” University of Michigan law professor Eve Brensike Primus wrote in 2012.
The notion of “consensual” encounters adds another problem. Passengers may technically have the right to refuse a search, but in practice, the power imbalance makes that choice hard to exercise. At the border, the rules are even more lopsided. This week, Reason's Matthew Petti wrote about being detained for four hours by border authorities who declined to let him contact an attorney when he asked. “Crossing the U.S. border is the closest most Americans will come to experiencing life under the foreign dictatorships I report on,” he wrote.
For now, the airport settlement is a meaningful change for travelers passing through Atlanta. It is also a reminder that, in the security state’s gray zones, the Bill of Rights can still read less like law and more like suggestions.