Never mind the fact that most of the prison population is either black or Hispanic, discrimination is running rampant and the U.S. government is practising an undeclared and subversive form of apartheid that is promoting ghettoization in the inner cities, we now find out that there are also vast areas of the countryside where the federal government has almost total control over who goes where and who does what!
Take the good folks over there at I.C.E. for example: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
All of Michigan, D.C., and a large chunk of Pennsylvania are part of the area where Border Patrol has expanded search and seizure rights.
Here's what it means to live or travel there! (We all know what assholes the border guards can be at the border, but now they can go just about anywhere!)
By Tanvi Misra, City Lab:
While the weight of border patrol’s operations is felt heaviest along the southwest border of the U.S., the “no man’s land” Ragan is talking about actually extends much further into the country. In the “border zone,” different legal standards apply. Agents can enter private property, set up highway checkpoints, have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations—and can even use race and ethnicity as factors to do so.
That’s striking because the border zone is home to 65.3 percent of the entire U.S. population, and around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, according to a CityLab analysis based on data from location intelligence company ESRI. This zone, which hugs the entire edge of the United States and runs 100 air miles inside, includes some of the densest cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It also includes all of Michigan and Florida, and half of Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a prior rough analysis by Will Lowe, a data scientist at MIT.
“It really is kind of a constitution-free zone,”says Patrick Eddington, a policy analyst who has been compiling data on border patrol’s internal checkpoints at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank. “I guess the best way to phrase it is that in this area, [border patrol agents] are being allowed to nullify people's rights.”
According to critics, checkpoints and other internal operations in the 100-mile zone aren’t serving their intended purpose: Just 2 percent of CBP’s total arrests of deportable non-citizens happened at checkpoints. And since 2010, far more people who had legal status and weren’t eligible for deportation were arrested this way. Meanwhile, individuals in this zone—citizen or otherwise—are at risk of having their Fourth Amendment rights violated by border patrol, critics say. (The law within the 100-mile zone allows for profiling.)
CBP can set up checkpoints anywhere it wants within the 100-mile zone and “can temporarily seize all vehicles that drive up to an immigration checkpoint... to conduct an immigration inspection,” a spokesperson said.
If they feel they have probable cause, they can search the vehicles. Agents at checkpoints also have wide discretion to pull people aside for a secondary inspection, which could last, per some accounts, for up to 40 minutes.
Agents in patrol cars are permitted to stop motorists in the zone based on the suspicion [sic] that they have committed an immigration offense, and can also check individuals’ papers on buses, trains, and airplanes.
CBP says the transit checks are conducted “as consensual encounters.” That latter aspect of CBP powers has come to the fore in recent months, after videos surfaced showing CBP agents checking papers on Greyhound buses, Amtrak trains, and airports seemingly far from the Southern border.
The next thng you know Americans will all need to have Identiry Cards and Travel Cards whenever they go out of the house!
The way I see it anyway!
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