Horror At The Border
This is unexpected horror -- for those of us who believe we live in a land where rights are protected. This story lays out the horror of an American citizen experiencing the treatment from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents that we expect in some overblown B movie...a scene with the Stasi or other thug cops.
At The Intercept, Seth Harp, a journalist and an American citizen writes of the utter disappearance of any semblance of rights when he returned to this country and was in the no man's land between CBP first contact and re-entry into the country:
A bespectacled supervisor named Lopez made an appearance. In a polite back-and-forth, I learned that I was not under arrest or suspected of any crime, and my citizenship was not in doubt, but if I didn't answer the question asked by the "incident officer," I wouldn't be allowed into the United States. He handed me some brochures and left the room.Moncivias was joined by an Anglo officer named Pomeroy, who had a shaved head and looked a little older. They stared at me expectantly.
"Fine," I said. "For the last six months, I've been doing an investigative journalism project to determine which restaurant has the best guacamole in all of Mexico."
Moncivias didn't miss a beat. "And what restaurant is that?"
"El Parnita, on Avenida Yucatán in Mexico City," I told him, truthfully.
The flippancy would cost me. From then on out, the officers made it clear that I was in for a long delay. When I saw how mad they were, I lost interest in the principle of the thing. In reality, I didn't care if they knew what the story was about. The draft was done, and my editors had a copy. All I cared about was getting home to a cup of coffee, a sandwich, a shower, and my bed. In an effort to smooth things over, I said that if they really had to know, I was finishing up a story for Rolling Stone about some guys from Texas and Arizona who sold helicopter machine guns to a Mexican cartel and that I'd been in Mexico City to interview a government official who, for understandable reasons, didn't want his name bandied about. I apologized for my grouchiness, blaming it on the stress of travel.
Cooperation didn't earn me any leniency. Next up was a thorough search of my suitcase, down to unscrewing the tops of my toiletries. That much I expected. But then a third officer, whose name was Villarreal, carefully read every page of my 2019 journal, including copious notes to self on work, relationships, friends, family, and all sorts of private reflections I had happened to write down. I told him, "Sir, I know there's nothing I can do to stop you, but I want to tell you, as one human being to another, that you're invading my privacy right now, and I don't appreciate it." Villarreal acknowledged the statement and went back to reading.
That was just the beginning. The real abuse of power was a warrantless search of my phone and laptop. This is the part that affects everyone, not just reporters and people who keep journals.
This is a long read -- and worth reading every word of.
While reading it, I realized I was painfully naive about what really goes on via CBP. It's no man's land for privacy and other rights -- in a way that's terrifying.
I've said that the TSA (which is not security by any stretch of the imagination...missing 95% of mock weapons in tests) is really about obedience training for the American public, training us to be docile as our rights are yanked from us.
I don't know -- but I have to wonder -- if CBP has long been like this or has grown more and more Soviet Secret Police, etc., since the TSA was installed in airports across the country.
You can do great things once you're ready to handle consequences.
Crid at June 23, 2019 2:16 AM
Again - in addition to the zeal we see in prosecuting people who might be minding their own business in public - The American Hoax is Called "Freedom".
It appears to be inherent in the human psyche: if I have nothing better to do, I will be certain that you are not doing anything whatsoever I do not approve, and I will enlist the power of the State to see to that.
Thus, we have become the Soviet Union we deplored at one time - and are blankly ignorant of today.
Radwaste at June 23, 2019 3:21 AM
I trust him like i trust everything else printed in Rolling Stone....
His account is salted through totally imaginary leftie boogeymen, and repeated extrapolations of racism based on "facts" debunked on this very blog.
Yeaah, sure. I believe him.
Ben david at June 23, 2019 5:54 AM
It's a little thing, but in Boston they now take your picture and make you go through an extra level before coming in.
You used to just hand your form to the guard and answer a few questions, and maybe if you were unlucky your luggage got searched. Now there's an extra layer... and it isn't a huge deal, not *really*, but...
It makes me uneasy.
Used to be just the foreigners who got the extra layer. Before that it wasn't anyone. They just keep adding these little things don't they?
NicoleK at June 23, 2019 6:15 AM
Of course, we only have the author's word that CBP had absolutely no reason to suspect him of anything on his return from Mexico.
His hostile flippancy in initially answering the agency's legitimate questions indicates an animosity toward the agency he continues to vilify in the article - with no acknowledgment of the necessity of border and immigration security.
And, whatever really happened, he seems to be using this article as an opportunity to score anti-Trump political points rather than dispassionately report events, "...I knew these were the guys putting kids in cages, separating refugee children from their parents, and that Trump’s whole shtick is vilifying immigrants...." He ignores that "kids in cages" started under Obama and was driven by the Flores ruling, which hamstrung border enforcement agencies in dealing with illegal immigrants accompanied by children.
Secondly, while admitting that there is no conclusive body of law on searching a laptop or phone of someone re-entering the US from abroad, he maintains that a "warrantless search of [his] phone and laptop" was an "abuse of power."
With only the facts reported (by the subject of the search, no less), it does sound like the agency abused its power. However, we still have no indication whether CBP had a legitimate suspicion of wrongdoing on his part that merited investigation.
Admittedly, CBP is most likely using the current immigration issues as a pretext for expanding its power and reach. Bureaucracies do that; which is why the number and reach of them should be kept to a strict minimum.
Again, Congress sets immigration policy and law and needs to put in place procedures that both protect the country and respect the rights of citizens, at a minimum, to be safe from abuses by the nation's law enforcement agencies. Chastising political opponents for trying to work under a hodgepodge of contradictory laws and court rulings is not a policy, it's political partisanship.
Conan the Grammarian at June 23, 2019 9:35 AM
Does anyone else remember Obama’s DOJ arguing hard that customs and immigration should be allowed to search your cell phones and computers at immigration check points?
Then if you read the article, this born yesterday journalist assumes that this started with the Trump administration. Because Orange Man Bad, I guess.
Isab at June 23, 2019 11:01 AM
I read as far as :
"Trump’s whole shtick is vilifying immigrants"
and knew the "journalist" was full of manure.
charles at June 23, 2019 11:17 AM
Used to be just the foreigners who got the extra layer. Before that it wasn't anyone. They just keep adding these little things don't they?
It isn't that surprising. Only subjecting feriners to it is racist, so everyone gets the same treatment now. Don't you feel equal?
I R A Darth Aggie at June 23, 2019 11:56 AM
Congress sets immigration policy and law and needs to put in place procedures that both protect the country and respect the rights of citizens, at a minimum, to be safe from abuses by the nation's law enforcement agencies.
Congress hasn't got time to craft legislation that detailed. In general, they draw a broad picture of what it is they want accomplished, then leave it up to the bureaucracy to fill in the details.
Bureaucracy - the forth branch of government. Unelected, nameless, faceless and nearly impossible to fire, even for serious cause.
I R A Darth Aggie at June 23, 2019 12:09 PM
In 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson opened a now classic essay in The Economist with "It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
Dr. Parkinson went on the theorize that any bureaucracy will grow at an approximate rate of 5.89% per year, regardless of the amount of work done or even whether any work is done at all.
This growth is due to two factors:
Conan the Grammarian at June 23, 2019 1:30 PM
More thoughts on bureaucracy and the rule of law, from National Review:
But Kagan is not wrong to affirm the legislature’s need to entrust the executive apparatus with certain discretionary questions about how a law is enforced. That is how governance works, and it is why we have an executive branch. It is difficult to get delegation just right. But convenience, no matter how needful, is not an unrestricted license. Congress cannot simply pass a law declaring “Americans shall have good health care, and the secretary of health and human services is hereby empowered to do what is necessary to make that happen.” A little more work is necessary. The so-called Affordable Care Act was a litany of “the secretary shalls.” Some of those delegated powers were very broad, for example the power to provide exemptions to certain parties (favored political constituencies, inevitably) from parts of the law. That is one of the reasons why it has failed, and why it remains controversial. That kind of delegation begins to resemble lawlessness, or at least arbitrariness in government, which amounts to much the same thing.
AND
Governments that do bureaucracy well — that achieve excellence in administration — are effective. That, and not sentimentality about “the people” and their wishes, much less vague notions of fairness, is what really separates effective governance from ineffective governance. Much of what is admirable about governance in Denmark or Switzerland has to do with institutional effectiveness. They have built high-functioning bureaucracies.
We have not.
Conan the Grammarian at June 24, 2019 8:45 AM
Neil Gorsuch joins the Court's liberals in holding Congress' feet to the fire about writing vague laws that put too much power in the hands of bureaucracies:
Only the people’s elected representatives in Congress have the power to write new federal criminal laws. And when Congress exercises that power, it has to write statutes that give ordinary people fair warning about what the law demands of them.
AND
Vague laws transgress both of those constitutional requirements. They hand off the legislature’s responsibility for defining criminal behavior to unelected prosecutors and judges, and they leave people with no sure way to know what consequences will attach to their conduct.
Conan the Grammarian at June 24, 2019 9:29 AM
Anyone else see any irony in the rhetoric that any detention of an undocumented immigrant is equivalent to the Armenian Genocide, with nary a word about this happening to a documented citizen?
bw1 at June 27, 2019 5:19 PM
"Congress hasn't got time to craft legislation that detailed."
Good thing they don't have to - it is already law.
Radwaste at July 1, 2019 1:54 PM
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