My Dad was, back in the early 1970s. The border in question was the Ugandan border. To be more specific, it was the international airport at Entebbe, as he arrived to report on a story. When he landed, there were a half dozen soldiers waiting for the plane as it arrived at the gate. "I wondered who they might be waiting for," Dad would recall.
They were waiting for him. As he walked from the plane with the other passengers, the soldiers approached. One of them pointed at Dad, and signaled him to leave the group. "Me?" Dad mouthed, incredulous. "You," said the soldier, grinning. It was not a nice smile, as Dad recounted it.
My mom, who was back in Nairobi with three year old me and my infant brother, got the news that he had been taken into custody. The US had been recently and publicly critical of the regime of Ugandan dictator General Idi Amin, and as a reprisal, the soldiers had been instructed to detain the first American journalist to enter the country.
So Dad just...disappeared. Ugandan authorities weren't responsive to queries about his location or the reason for his detention.
Eventually, Dad was deported, and the next word from him came after he was dumped off at a US consulate in Sudan.
Dad would tell this story on regular occasion, and it was always one of those things that I understood to be a marker of the difference between the United States of America and the authoritarian regimes of African strongmen.
That changed a little bit when I had the pleasure of being taken into custody at the American border.
This was a couple of years after 9/11, after the creation of the Department for Homeland Security. I, my wife, and my two sons were coming back from a visit with my brother in Montreal.
When we arrived at American customs, we handed over our identification. The agent scanned my wife's first. Then he scanned mine. Mine set off an audible klaxon at his station. He looked at me, and stepped back and away from his computer. As he did so, four more customs agents showed up in a hurry. All had their guns out.
I was told to exit our minivan, which I did. I was then cuffed and frogmarched to a holding cell, where I was cuffed to a table. I was told nothing about the reason for my arrest. I was also not read my rights, or permitted any contact with my wife or with counsel.
I mean sure, I was handcuffed and forcibly detained by agents with guns drawn, but it wasn't an "arrest." I was just being "taken into custody." Totally different thing.
After about fifteen minutes, I was released, with apologies. Following review by an officer in charge, there'd been a misidentification, as the system they were using had incorrectly informed them that I was an armed and dangerous felon. Oopsie doopsie.
After the agents who were tearing apart our van searching for contraband were stopped midway through their task were stopped, we were sent on our way.
Impersonal and imperfect systems make mistakes.
As they can make mistakes now. DHS and ICE aren't constrained to attend to your rights. Maybe you're a citizen. Maybe you're in the country legally. Maybe not. Not their problem. They follow orders, and if sometimes innocent people are swept up, well, so what? What does it matter if there's some collateral damage or bycatch?
ICE agents are already making mistakes, and acting on incorrect information. Citizens in my area have been stopped and forcibly detained, and ICE agents are completely unaccountable for their actions towards those citizens.
If you happen to have left your wallet at home that day, what happens? If you don't always carry your papers with you, how could you prove anything, particularly if the agents in question are either overzealous or, you know, actually a little malicious?
As a soul with anarcholibertarian inclinations, I'm viscerally distrustful of systems of power and control. The point of a Republic is to check those systems, to force those systems to be accountable for their behavior towards persons, to govern them round about with restraints that prevent them from becoming a tool for repression. This is the dark paradox of the police state: In a police state, the law provides no protection.
ICE agents are already arresting people who have broken no laws, and whose only crime was to speak in ways the regime finds unacceptable. For them, the law has become shifting sand. You were here legally, but we've decided to revoke your legal status, so now you're breaking the law.
It's as brazen as the corrupt and unaccountable cop in a dismal hollow of a town, the one who smashes your taillight, then tickets you for driving with a broken taillight, and should you be fool enough to protest, will arrest you for resisting arrest.
In such a system, all of our rights are in jeopardy.
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