Detroit Record-Label Owner Alleges Bias, Sues Canadian Officials for $900 Million

A Detroit-based record-label owner has filed a $900 million lawsuit against two former Canadian cabinet members and a slew of border guards, alleging that they conspired to racially profile him during numerous trips across the U.S./Canada border. Jerome Almon, owner and executive producer of Detroit- and Toronto-based Murdercap Records, says that he was harassed and detained for secondary inspection by border patrol officers at least 117 times from 1998 to 2004. His lawsuit, filed on Friday (Jan. 12) in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, names rappers, such as Jay-Z and 50 Cent, as potential witnesses, as well as Toronto Mayor David Miller and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay. Defendants in the case include Elinor Caplan and Denis Coderre, the former minister of national revenue and the former immigration minister, respectively. In an interview with Canada’s National Post, Almon commented, “Border services, the people in charge, see rappers as the epitome of Black. They see rappers as the representation of Black Americans and American culture overall in the worst sense—aggressive, rude, violent—and they want it stopped.”