One reason I am an increasingly disaffected lefty is that there have been people taping these encounters for years, and yet the silence is deafening. Or worse, the people taping are dismissed as tea partiers. Oh, just tea partiers. Or, oh, it's reason, what would you expect?

Good on this guy. And good on reason.

Question: how do you find an illegal immigrant that is already inside the border?

It is worse than useless. They don't deport those they find, so what is the point of this charade?

Repeat after me - these checkpoints are not about 'immigration' or 'border security', except by chance.

They are about gill-netting for evidence of other criminal activity. As with many warrantless, suspicionless interactions with police these days, the stated justification for the stop is purely pretextual. The actual purpose is to look for any evidence for, or probable cause to suspect, any state or Federal crime, which will open the door to further investigation, arrests, searches, asset forfeiture and more general work product for the CJS.

Which is why many/all of these checkpoints will invariably have officers from a half-a-dozen state and federal law-enforcement agencies other than Border Patrol. They're all trolling for business. And the Border Patrol is happy to develop suspects for them.

I've been through the permanent checkpoint plaza between Del Rio, TX and San Antonio many times. Invariably, there will be 1 or 2 Border Patrol agents doing the actual stopping, plus half-a-dozen cars from state and local agencies, sitting around waiting for the Border Patrol agents to secondary somebody that may be of interest to them. Why is a State canine unit sitting at a US Border Patrol checkpoint? Because he's hoping to exploit the Border Patrol's stops to look for evidence of state crimes.

Note how, during several of Mr Bressi's stops, out in the middle of BFN Arizona, he is almost-immediately threatened with arrest for obstructing traffic. Border Patrol agents don't have powers to enforce Arizona traffic law - which means that an Arizona Highway Patrol officer is right there, waiting for the Border Patrol to pass ready-made suspects to him that he could not stop and develop himself. And, as an added bonus, ready to threaten a citizen with inconvenience, investigation and arrest for asserting their rights in the face of the Border Patrol. There is a Kafka-esque, Soviet-style beauty in the threats to arrest people for obstructing traffic because they are being detained in the middle of the road by the Border Patrol - for asserting their 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer questions.

Everyone laughs at the Border Patrol officers for what looks like their bovine stupidity in constantly repeating the same questions and refusing to answer when the citizen asks whether he is free to go. But they're not stupid - they're extending the contact for as long as humanly possible, in order to give other officers time to get there and see if they can't develop PC to investigate.

It's a blatant, in-your-face end-run around the 4th Amendment, with a tiny fig-leaf of justification provided by SCOTUS which has now been stretched to cover all sorts of other law-enforcement activity having nothing to do with border protection, and nobody seems to give a damn. The original intent of the checkpoints has been morphed into something entirely different and it's high time that they were abolished.

Am I being detained or am I free to go?

I'm not going to answer any questions.

I do not consent to any searches.

llater,

llamas

Mexico has these checkpoints as well, 20 km south of the border. I was stopped several times and asked to show my documentation. The rationale was that people living in the border region cross back and forth all the time so the best way to catch illegals is a bit removed from the border itself.

While I'm not defending this specific behavior I'd point out that it isn't always easy to secure the border at the border. I've walked from Laredo to Nuevo Laredo and back and can attest that there's constant foot traffic over the bridge connecting them. It makes sense, at least in the abstract, to enforce border security a bit north of the border, as long as it's done properly.

Also, I've been stopped at border patrol roadblocks in northern New York several times. They will search your car if they want to. Although they've always done it politely in my experience. So it isn't just in the Southwest that these people do this.

I'm all for securing the borders against illegal migrants. It's just that these in-country checkpoints do a terrible job of doing that. I can't be bothered to look up the last GAO report, but the number of illegals caught at these checkpoints is laughably-minimal compared to the number caught at the actual border crossings - which is the proper place to catch them. The number of drug busts, mind you, is quite impressive - because that's what these checkpoints are really for.

Border Patrol roadblocks away from the border have no more right to search you and your vehicle than any other LEO does. In other words, without probable cause or your consent - none at all. The SCOTUS decision which empowers these roadblocks (something-Fuentes, I can't be bothered to look it up) allows Border Patrol to stop you 'briefly' to determine your citizenship status, nothing more.

A friend of mind from south of here e-mailed me and told me 'at the BP checkpoint in (name of county), you will always find a State commercial-vehicle enforcement officer aka weighmaster. Always. He's looking for cross-border trucks that are overweight, or the driver is off the logbook. He can tell by watching them slow down for the BP checkpoint if they may be overweight, and he pulls them over as soon as they leave - or BP helpfully sends them to secondary for him and he casually engages the driver. He can pull over CDLs without probable cause - he just uses the BP checkpoint as a convenient pre-filter. With fines for CDL running thousands of $$$ at a time, he's a nice little moneymaker for the county.' That's the sort of thing these checkpoints are being used for, Nothing to do with border security.

llater,

llamas

@llamas. I have been through the checkpoint in your example between Del Rio, and San Antonio. My mother and I went to Bracketville. She wanted to show me the house that she had lived in between 1937-1940 at Fort Clark. Lonely stretch of road...