Excerpt:
Twin Cities Somali-American and Muslim leaders condemned racial profiling Monday after allegations by a Minneapolis Transportation Security Administration official that he had been told to target the community.
Leaders praised Andrew Rhoades, an assistant federal security director for the TSA in Minnesota, for coming forward last week to describe how he was ordered to provide names of Somali-Americans visiting his TSA office so they could be screened for terrorist ties.
"We are proud of his courage and his faithfulness, and we hope that he is a model for law enforcement officials," Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota, said at a news conference at the Abubakar Islamic Center in Minneapolis. "We cannot allow our own government to engage and fuel Islamophobia by treating and targeting Somali-Americans as a community of suspect."