Racial profiling made a strange entrance into an Illinois congressional race Thursday night with a police stop in west suburban Cicero.
Ben Lowe is the 25-year-old Democratic nominee for Congress in Illinois' 6th District, a suburban Chicago area currently represented by Republican Pete Roskam. Lowe is a pro-life evangelical, but he's also an ardent environmentalist, a local organizer and has no interest in overturning Roe v. Wade.
Raised in Singapore, Lowe is half-Chinese and half-white. And, oddly enough, that's where the trouble starts.
Lowe told the Chicago Sun-Times that a car he was riding in with several friends was stopped by police in Cicero, Illinois. According to Lowe, the officers "told us we looked like we could have been light-skinned Hispanics, and they have been having problems with Hispanics trafficking drugs along that road."
The men were removed from their car, lined up, and searched by police. The officer in the case, according to both police sources and Lowe himself, was Hispanic.
Like any good politician, Lowe used the event to speak out on his beliefs about immigration in America:
"This experience highlights that our immigration system is broken and that we must fight for the liberties of our Hispanic brothers and sisters and other minorities not just because it is right but because the best way to protect our own liberties is to ensure that we continue to live in a land of freedom and justice for all."