Muhammad Ali​ Jr. Victim Of Suspected 'Profiling' At FLL

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL — Muhammad Ali Jr., the son and namesake of "The Greatest," Muhammad Ali, never set foot in a boxing ring, but an incident at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport this month has turned him into an unlikely champion for religious freedom and civil rights.

His opponent may be the biggest heavyweight of them all — the Trump administration.

"This stinks. This just stinks what they did here," lamented Ali family friend and former federal prosecutor Chris J. Mancini as he described the sequence of events that took place at the Fort Lauderdale airport on Feb. 7.

"There was no reason for this at all except if you are a Muslim, you are a target now, and Donald Trump has created all that mess," he insisted. "It doesn’t matter if you are a good person. It doesn’t matter who you are. He just labeled these people, and he’s going after them. It’s not right. It’s just not right."

A former chief in the U.S. Attorney's Office in South Florida, Mancini said that Ali was detained for about two hours at the customs area of the Fort Lauderdale International Airport as he and his mother, Khalilah Ali — the boxer's second wife — attempted to reenter the United States after landing on a Spirit Airlines flight from Jamaica.

"He did what everybody does. He just presented himself and his passport for clearance into the country," Mancini said of Muhammad Ali Jr.

"It was at this point where this officer looked at his name, saw that it was an Arabic name and asked him what his date of birth was, where he was born and then asked him if he was a Muslim," Mancini explained. "When he said ‘yes,’ the officer took out some type of a form, stamped it and told him to go into secondary inspection which he did. There was no discussion with that officer about was he Muhammad Ali’s son? Was he a red-blooded American? Nothing. As soon as he heard he was a Muslim, off he went to secondary inspection."

t was at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1964 — as the Vietnam powder keg smoldered and President Johnson campaigned for the White House against Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater — that the brash 22-year-old overcame seven-to-one odds to best the all-but-invincible Sonny Liston in what would become known as the “upset of the decade.”

Ali won his Miami Beach fight by a technical knockout at the opening of the seventh round when Liston gave up after being dominated in the sixth. Ali’s contribution to civil rights and his legendary athletic accomplishments made him an iconic role model in the African-American community as well as an American sports legend.

The 44-year-old Ali Jr. believes he was detained primarily because of his Muslim faith but "he also thinks it was because he was black," said Mancini, who added that Ali and his mother are both residents of nearby Deerfield Beach.

Now, the Ali family is weighing its legal options and hoping to be a lightening rod for other Muslim people to share similar experiences.

The larger concern, according to Mancini, is whether such incidents represent an attempt by the Trump administration to use federal agencies to circumvent the legal obstacles standing in the way of the president's planned travel ban.

Based on his decade of experience as a former employee of the U.S. Justice Department, Mancini said he is convinced the federal agents who detained Ali were simply following a script.

"That’s how these generally are done. They create a series of questions which are intended to both collect information, test the truthfulness of the traveler’s answers and act as a database so that they can feed all of these answers into some kind of intelligence analysis," he asserted. "So, to me this is a clear case of profiling. Now we’re hoping that other people who have been treated similarly will step forward, and then we’ll discuss what our legal options are as a group."

Two days after Ali's fight in Miami Beach, the fighter still known to the world at the time as Cassius Clay, announced his membership in the Nation of Islam, which was soon followed by a name change to Cassius X and ultimately Muhammad Ali.

Ironically, the fighter was mistakenly picked up by law enforcement on multiple occasions back then.

"Muhammad used to go jogging when he was getting ready for his fights in Miami, and they kept arresting him all the time because a black man running down the street with a hoodie," Mancini explained. "They kept putting him in the back of a squad car. It just goes to show you about how life turns, turns and turns and turns."

Ali Jr. and his mother were returning from a black history event in Jamaica, where she was a speaker.

"She speaks quite frequently about police, the Black Lives Matter issues, the civil rights issues that are prevalent now," said Mancini. "She believes this is a matter — as does Muhammad, where they’ve been tasked, they’ve been chosen — whether they like it or not — to defend their religion and to defend ... their race in the face of what appears to be overreaching by the U.S. government."

Photo of the 1964 Miami Beach fight courtesy of State Library and Archives of Florida via Wikimedia Commons