Two recent articles appearing in the New York Times highlight the burgeoning American police state compliments of the Department of Homeland Security.
It seems that the Border Patrol has as much difficulty finding the Northern border as its Southern counterpart, choosing instead to harass domestic Amtrak train passengers traveling between Chicago and New York City with nary a stop near anything resembling an international border.
That’s rights, armed federal agents are routinely boarding trains traveling along Northern domestic routes between major U.S. cities. Once onboard. with the full knowledge and complicity of Amtrak, these armed agents walk up & down the passenger cars, roust passengers from a sound sleep, shine flashlights in their faces and demand that they state their citizenship without any reason to believe any particular passenger is inside the country illegally.
How do they get away with it you might ask? Here’s an explanation from the article:
“Legal scholars say the governments border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.
Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nations population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, ‘Technically, we can, but we dont.’ He added, ‘Our job is strictly cross-border.'”
On a side note, it’s interesting that the article explicitly acknowledges the right to refuse to answer questions. This is something I’ve been demonstrating for the past 2 1/12 years at suspicionless Border Patrol checkpoints in the Southwest. I also find it interesting to note that the Border Patrol mouthpiece acknowledged that their job is ‘strictly cross-border’ but failed to acknowledge they were interfering with the traveling public along train routes having nothing to do with the border.
Links to the two New York Times stories in question appear below:
Additionally, links to related articles on this blog can be found at:
- ACLU Exposes Homeland Security Enforced ‘Constitution Free Zone’
- U.S. Border Patrol Responds To Questions In Washington State
- DHS Targets Amtrak Train Passengers For Random Searches & Seizures
Finally, I note that these counter-productive, un-American Border Patrol policies will only stop when a critical mass of individuals come to the realization that giving up essential liberty for faux security is a poor trade indeed. A good place to start fighting back is to stop patronizing entities such as Amtrack, Greyhound and various airlines that allow government enforcers to harass its customers absent suspicion and with impunity. Another thing to do is to stop cooperating with Border Patrol agents interfering with your travels no where near the border they’re paid to patrol.
The text of the articles linked to above appear below:
Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 29, 2010“ROCHESTER The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.
Are you a U.S. citizen? agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. What country were you born in?
When the answer came back, the U.S., they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sisters in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.
He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nations northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrols growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.
The checks are a vital component to our overall border security efforts to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.
The patrol says that answering agents questions is voluntary, part of a consensual and nonintrusive conversation Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agents flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.
The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.
The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.
But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.
For some, the patrols practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.
The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a reasonable distance from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizonas law, the change is happening without public debate.
Its turned into a police state on the northern border, said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. Its essentially become an internal document check.
Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.
In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.
Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons, said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nations immigration laws.
Legal scholars say the governments border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.
Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nations population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, Technically, we can, but we dont. He added, Our job is strictly cross-border.
Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.
Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrols costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interiorenforcement to sweep up farmworkers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.
One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitors visa.
Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.
I was shocked, said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.
Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his Asian appearance, he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.
Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the womans graduation from Vassar College.
At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped, said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. Here, youre sitting on the train asleep and if you dont look like a U.S. citizen, its Wake up!
Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries. Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passengers demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.
Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. It makes me feel safe, volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. I dont mind being monitored.
To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face, recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.
Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.
As a citizen Im offended, he said. But he added, To say I didnt want to answer didnt seem a viable option.”
When the Border Patrol Comes Aboard
“Nina Bernstein has an article on the front page today about American Border Patrol agents who board trains running completely within the United States looking for undocumented immigrants. Here is her first-person experience on such a train in upstate New York. If youve had an encounter with the Border Patrol, let us know in the comment box below.
Traveling from New York City to Buffalo on Amtraks Lake Shore Limited last month, I wondered what I would say if Border Patrol agents showed up on the train at Syracuse or Rochester and asked, Are you a U.S. citizen?
My plan was to politely decline to answer, and see what happened next.
After all, the train was not crossing an international frontier. At the train stations and bus depots in western New York where such citizenship checks began on a small scale in 2006 and are now a little-publicized but regular feature of domestic travel, the Canadian border is far away, in the middle of Lake Ontario.
The Border Patrol said it had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border. But it also said that its agents questions were a part of consensual, nonintrusive conversation. In theory, that means that people are free to refuse to answer and walk away. One goal of my reporting trip was to see for myself, and for readers of The New York Times, how such conversations played out in practice.
Thousands of passengers have been taken to detention because they answered that they were not United States citizens, and then could not show immigration documents that satisfied the agents. Other passengers simply declared American citizenship and stayed in their seats. The inland transportation checks have increased as the number of agents deployed in the region has grown sixfold since 9/11.
Joanne Macri, director of the Criminal Defense Immigration Project of the New York State Defenders Association, who frequently travels by bus or train between Albany and Buffalo, told me she had never seen anyone refuse to answer in the many encounters she had witnessed.
Once, Ms. Macri said, an agent prevented her from handing her organizations card to two Latino men he was taking from the train, and asked her if she knew what obstruction of justice was. Another time, at 1 a.m. on a Trailways bus in Rochester, a young man who showed agents a drivers license was questioned about what hospital he had been born in, and then taken off the bus for further inquiries before eventually being allowed to reboard and travel on to Buffalo.
Ms. Macri has always answered the agents, even though I know everybody has a right to remain silent, she said.
Its 1 oclock in the morning, she said, and reality sets in: Do I really want to be kicked off the bus?
It was 4:20 a.m. by the time my train limped in to the Buffalo-Depew station, more than four hours late too late for the Border Patrol, it appeared. But by 9 a.m., when a train on the return journey pulled into the same station, half a dozen men in green uniforms with pistols on their hips strode down the platform toward me and a family that included two women wearing saris.
An agent with a shaved head and sunglasses stopped beside me. Are you a U.S. citizen? he asked.
I dont want to answer that question, I replied.
Fine, he said, and promptly turned to the family two children, their parents and grandmother.
Unlike me, a white woman in jeans who had spoken American English with no accent, they looked and sounded like immigrants. If they said they were citizens, would they be asked for identification? If they refused to answer, as I had, would the agent just move on? Or, as upstate immigration lawyers maintained, would the agent take their silence as a justification for further inquiry?
I would never know, because the father readily replied that they were all legal permanent residents of the United States from India. He handed over all their Indian passports as soon as the agent asked for them.
A minute or two later, on the Rochester-bound train, I caught up with the same agent just as Ruth Fernandez, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was giving him her United States passport. These days she feels obliged to carry it whenever she visits her sister in Ohio, she told me later.
Checking people, I see every time, she added in imperfect English, as her grandchild slept beside her. I dont like it. Not supposed to. In Spanish, she added: He said it was because of terrorism that they do this. I think its for the immigrants.
Overhearing her complaint, another passenger, Katie Miller, objected, praising the officer for his politeness. He wasnt threatening anybody, she said. With so many television reports of children being kidnapped, and the Canadian border nearby, she added, the presence of the patrol made her feel safer.
But Ms. Millers father, Fred Linxweiler, was not so sure. What I worry about is how he picked her, he said, referring to the agents decision to ask Ms. Fernandez for identification. Its O.K. if its really random. Otherwise, its going to look like this new Arizona law.
Most passengers answered the agents readily. Others, startled from sleep, simply stared, and the agents prompted them: State your citizenship for me, please, sir. What country were you born in?
Some had been on the train overnight, since Chicago; many had boarded at dawn. Their features reflected ancestry from every continent: a stout black grandmother in a Brooklyn T-shirt. A graybeard wearing a yarmulke. A pale young man lost in his iPod, who said later: Im clueless. I dont pay attention to news and politics. Arent they doing that in Arizona or something?
By then, after a stop scheduled for five minutes had turned into 15 or 20, the agents had left the train. Other passengers, too, turned out to have Arizona on their minds, including Joe Hedger, 37, a blond graduate student in philosophy who was moving to Syracuse from Tempe with his wife and 2-year-old son.
Weve had Sheriff Arpaio doing this for a while, he said, referring to Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, who patrols metropolitan Phoenix and administers the jails, just pulling people over and asking if theyre citizens, and if theyre not, just carting them away, I guess. I was really surprised that this was happening in New York.
He added, Its just like theyre authority figures, so you answer.
Sheldon and Pam Cole of New Canaan, N.Y., who had promptly replied both U.S. citizens when the agent asked, also had second thoughts about the exchange.
I am a U.S. citizen, but I could have been a German who spoke good English, said Mr. Cole, 65, whose gray ponytail could be seen under his baseball cap. It didnt make a whole bunch of sense. It bothers me, because in America weve never been expected to carry around and produce proof of citizenship on demand.
Without such a document requirement, he added, Its virtual racial profiling.
But a couple from Norfolk, N.Y., Charlie and Sheree Frego, strongly disagreed. Theyve got a good eye, Mr. Frego, 51, said of the Border Patrol, citing his years of living near the Canadian border. They can tell by your response.
The Fregos had encountered the patrol before on buses near the border, they said. Once, at Watertown, on a bus that stops near a prison, they said, they saw agents take an African-American man off for extra screening. I thought they did the right thing, Mr. Frego said, adding, He got back on the bus after 20 minutes.
My conversations were interrupted by an Amtrak conductor who insisted that I needed written permission from the companys media relations department to interview the passengers. I disagreed, citing the First Amendment and my ticket to Rochester.
Are you a passenger or a reporter? the conductor demanded.
Both, I said, and went back to work.
Much later, I called Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, seeking a clarification of the railroads role in the patrol checks.
Amtrak does not delay the train, Mr. Cole said. Its a Border Patrol initiative with which Amtrak has been cooperative and will continue to be cooperative.
Its a security measure, he added. They come on the train to do what they have to do just like you would have air marshals on an airplane.
As for my asking fellow passengers about the experience, he said, Amtraks media relations policy is if you want to conduct a story and interview our passengers on a train, it must be done with prior permission.
He did not respond to complaints from immigrant advocates that the company gives no prior notice of the requests for documents made on the Lake Shore Limited, though it warns passengers on its international routes. Others have contended that illegal immigrants should not expect a warning that they are risking apprehension when they travel.
The same issues swirled around the bus station in Rochester two days after my train trip, when agents emerged from waiting vans and boarded the Boston-to-Cleveland bus. I asked the dispatcher if I could get on to observe.
Its up to you, but be careful, he said. They dont like traffic once theyre started asking questions theyre nice guys, but they can get kind of ornery.
The empty aisle seat I chose turned out to be a problem.
Move out of the way, please, an agent told me, gesturing at the young Latino in the window seat. I need to get this gentleman off the bus.
I complied, as the agent asked in Spanish if the man had found his missing papers. He had not.
As the agents hurried him off the bus and into a van, I followed, calling out to ask his name. He tried to answer, but the words were lost as the bus behind us pulled away.
Other passengers had been taken off another bus early that morning, I learned a Bangladeshi family of four, including a woman and her son, a minor. If these apprehensions had been criminal arrests, I could have quickly learned names, ages, charges and where those arrested were being held. But no such transparency exists in these cases.
Rafael LeMaitre, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection in Washington, said privacy law did not allow the agency to say anything about the young man, or to confirm the family relationship of the Bangladeshis. Eventually, in response to repeated inquiries, he said the young man was Mexican, accused of returning to the United States illegally after accepting voluntary departure, and had probably been taken to detention in Batavia, N.Y. though he could have been transferred anywhere in the country.
By then, I had traveled south from Rochester on the Lake Shore Limited, missing the patrols reappearance at Buffalo-Depew, according to a train attendant, Hamat Kumar, who described an unusually large contingent this time 17 agents, including a dozen trainees.
They always get on in Buffalo, said Mr. Kumar, 30, a naturalized citizen born in India. Theres nothing I can do about it.
If I say no, he added with a laugh, they take me, too!”