Comedians Eric André and Clayton English have settled their years-long lawsuit against Clayton County over a jet bridge drug-search program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, with the county agreeing to pay $30,000 and confirming it has already shut the program down. Both men say officers stopped them separately, questioned them about drugs, and singled them out because they are Black.
According to the Independent, the Clayton County Board of Commissioners authorized the $30,000 settlement payment, split evenly at $15,000 for André and $15,000 for English. The county also agreed to require airport-assigned police officers to wear body-worn cameras and undergo training on the constitutional limits of airport encounters, and it settled each of eight separate seizure challenges brought as part of the case. André called the county's confirmation that it ended the program a major victory, and English said what happened to him was wrong and that he would not let it happen to other people, per the same report.
André and English say they were racially profiled during separate stops by Clayton County police about six months apart, and their lawsuit, filed in October 2022, alleged that officers used racial profiling and coercive searches against airline passengers, particularly Black passengers, rarely finding drugs and rarely bringing criminal charges. The Independent notes a county spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement agreement.
How Two Separate Stops Became One Federal Case
The legal fight traces back to April 2021, when André posted viral social media messages accusing airport law enforcement of “Jim Crow racism,” which prompted English to reach out after he had experienced a nearly identical jet bridge stop about six months earlier, in October 2020, according to Reason Magazine. At the time, the Clayton County Police Department publicly defended the interaction with André as a “pleasant” and “consensual encounter,” claiming he voluntarily spoke with officers and agreed to a bag search that officers ultimately deemed unnecessary, as reported by 11Alive.
The case survived a rocky path through federal court before reaching this settlement. U.S. District Judge Mark H. Cohen in Atlanta dismissed the lawsuit in September 2023, siding with Clayton County's argument that the airport encounters were voluntary and consensual rather than police seizures, per the Policing Project at NYU School of Law. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit revived the lawsuit in August 2025, ruling the comedians plausibly alleged Fourth Amendment violations by finding that Clayton County officers effectuated coercive seizures by blocking paths and holding travel documents inside confined jet bridges — a development Hoodline covered in an earlier report on the appeal. The appeals court, however, affirmed dismissal of the comedians' Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection claims, finding the complaint lacked sufficient evidence of explicit discriminatory intent by individual officers.
What the Numbers Showed
Police records covered 402 jet bridge stops from August 30, 2020, to April 30, 2021, and listed passenger race for 378 of those stops, according to the Independent's reporting. Black passengers accounted for 211 of the 378 stops with race recorded, or 56%, while people of color overall accounted for 258 of 402 stops, or 68%. Legal researchers at the Policing Project separately calculated that Black travelers represented only 8% of domestic airline passengers nationwide during the same period, putting the odds of that disparity occurring randomly at less than 1 in 100 trillion.
Of the 402 stops, only three resulted in reported drug seizures — about 10 grams of drugs from one passenger, roughly 26 grams of suspected THC gummies from another, and six prescription pills without a prescription from a third. The first and third of those subjects were charged with offenses related to the seizures. Separately, 25 passengers had cash or money orders seized, totaling more than $1 million across all 402 stops, yet 24 of those 25 travelers were allowed to continue their trips without charges. Only eight of the 25 challenged the seizures, and Clayton County police ultimately returned much of the money, per the Independent.
A Financial Incentive Under Scrutiny
That gap between seizures and charges was central to the lawsuit's claim that the program functioned less as drug enforcement and more as a revenue tool. A separate Forbes analysis of the program's financial records found that only 8% of travelers who had cash confiscated were ever charged with a crime, even as officers seized over $1 million overall. The lawsuit alleged that seized cash provided a financial windfall for the police department, a dynamic made possible by civil forfeiture laws that let agencies retain seized funds without securing a conviction.
The jurisdictional setup that allowed Clayton County officers to operate inside the terminal in the first place is itself unusual. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is owned and operated by the City of Atlanta and policed primarily by the Atlanta Police Department, but Clayton County law enforcement maintained jurisdiction over portions of the terminal complex, letting it run an independent drug interdiction unit, according to Capital B News.
A High-Profile Coalition Backed the Appeal
The comedians were represented pro bono by a legal team that included the Policing Project at NYU School of Law along with the private firms Jones Day, Lawrence & Bundy, and Canfield Law LLC. Entertainment figures including Tyler Perry, Jamie Foxx, Taraji P. Henson, and Sterling K. Brown joined organizations such as the Cato Institute, the ACLU of Georgia, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in filing amicus briefs supporting the appeal. Perry had authored a 2024 op-ed describing the jet bridge searches as “flying while Black.”
Clayton County plans to take steps to prevent similar abuse in the future, according to the Independent's report by Kate Brumback. André described the ordeal as “dehumanizing and demoralizing,” a characterization that has run through the case since he and English first went public with their stops nearly five years ago.
