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Old 08-13-2019, 02:20 AM   #1
xoxoxoBruce
The future is unwritten
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 71,105
The CBC is Out of Control

Quote:
Politicians have begun to take note of CBP’s culture of impunity. In 2008, Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont, was stopped at a temporary immigration checkpoint in New York—125 miles from the border. Agents ordered Leahy to get out of his car and asked him to prove that he was a US citizen. When Leahy asked under what authority the Border Patrol agent was acting, the agent pointed to his gun and said, reportedly, “That’s all the authority I need.”

Like Leahy’s, O’Rourke’s opposition to CBP’s sweeping powers stems in part from his own encounter with border agents. In 2009, he and his two-year-old son were detained at a checkpoint more than seventy miles from the border while agents pulled his truck apart. “They don’t have to explain why they’re holding you,” he said, “and you’re not given the right to an attorney.” O’Rourke told me that he and his son were held in a cell for close to thirty minutes before they were allowed to leave. “It was a strange feeling to be held against my will and to have my car searched,” he said. “I hadn’t committed any crime. I hadn’t even crossed the border.”
The Border Patrol is authorized by congress to within 100 miles of the border which covers the entire states of ME, NH, MA, CT, RI, NJ, DE, FL MI, and HI. but are operating with impunity far far beyond that.

But this is ridiculous...
Quote:
American citizen coming back from Mexico showed her American passport.
But the officer said she had been randomly selected for additional screening. Sandoval was led to a secondary inspection area nearby, where two more officers patted her down. Another walked toward her with a drug-sniffing dog, which grew agitated as it came closer, barking and then circling her legs. Because the dog had “alerted,” the officer said, Sandoval would now have to undergo another inspection.

She was taken to a fluorescent-lit, windowless room inside the port of entry office. Two female officers entered and announced that they were going to search her for drugs. They patted her down again, but found nothing. At that point, Sandoval assumed they would release her, but instead they told her they were going to conduct a strip search. The officers put on latex gloves, picked up flashlights, and asked Sandoval to remove her clothes and bend over so they could look for signs of drugs in her vagina and her rectum.
By the time they finished, Sandoval had been detained for more than two hours in the stifling room. Her passport and cell phone had been confiscated; her husband and children had no idea where she was. Sandoval begged to be released. “I was shaking and I was in tears,” she told me.

Saying nothing, the officers put her in handcuffs and led her to a patrol car waiting outside. They left the international bridge and drove north into Texas. Frightened, Sandoval asked the officers if they had a warrant for her arrest. “We don’t need a warrant,” one of them replied. Sandoval, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, told me that after the officers forced her into the squad car, they drove her to University Medical Center, a public hospital in El Paso. The officers found an empty room and shackled her to the examination table. A nurse entered and asked her to swallow a laxative so they could observe her bowel movement.

Then a group of doctors came in. Sandoval pleaded with them to let her go. “A nurse told me to calm down,” she said. “That this was something they did anytime Border Patrol brought people in.” One of the doctors conducted a vaginal and rectal search using a speculum and his hands. “The agents kept saying that they knew I had drugs,” Sandoval told me. Still not satisfied, the doctor ordered an X-ray and a full-body scan. Again they found nothing. “The only thing left was to cut me open,” Sandoval said.

Finally, the officers drove her back to the bridge. At the port of entry, a third officer tried again to persuade her to sign the consent forms. He let her smoke a cigarette. “He said I probably needed it after what I’d been through.” Sandoval still refused to sign. By the time she got back to her car, it was eight o’clock at night—six hours after her encounter with CBP began.

Sandoval tried to forget about what had happened to her. She figured it would be too costly to fight the government. But then the bills from the hospital started to arrive. For the cavity searches, the X-ray, and the CT scan, the hospital was charging her $5,488. “I pay all my bills, but I was not going to pay these,” she told me. “So I started looking for a lawyer.”

In 2014, University Medical Center agreed to a settlement of $1.1 million for its role in Sandoval’s cavity search. Two years later, CBP settled for $475,000 without admitting guilt.
Since 2010, watchdog groups have counted seventy-seven CBP-related fatalities—at least a fifth of them US citizens.

Probably 95% of them a decent human beings, but like cops, that 95% will cover for the bad apples.

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