War on Drugs

Police in Atlanta Settle Eric André Lawsuit, End Airport Drug Searches

While the settlement is a good thing, it's unfortunately still the case that at airports, the Bill of Rights is more of a list of suggestions.

Joe Lancaster | 8.21.2026 2:35 PM

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This week, a county police department in Atlanta settled a lawsuit brought by two comedians who were stopped and searched in the city's airport. As part of the settlement, police will no longer conduct such searches.

Unfortunately, airports still occupy a legal gray area where the Bill of Rights is more like a list of suggestions.

"I was just racially profiled by two plain clothes Atlanta PD police in @Delta terminal T3 at the Atlanta airport," comedian Eric André tweeted in April 2021. "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." Atlanta-based comedian Clayton English later reached out to André and said he had been subjected to the same thing months earlier.

@Atlanta_Police "I was just racially profiled by two plain clothes Atlanta PD police in @Delta terminal T3 at the Atlanta airport. They stopped me on the way down the bridge to the plane for a "random" search and asked they could search me for drugs. I told them no. Be careful.

— Eric Andre (@ericandre) April 21, 2021

As André and English later elaborated in a lawsuit, the stops were part of the "jet bridge interdiction program" at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the world's busiest. According to the lawsuit, jet bridge interdictions involve officers from the Clayton County Police Department (CCPD) "waiting in jet bridges—the narrow tunnels that connect airplanes to airport gates—to selectively........

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