Wild Horse Port of Entry
The following paragraphs are from ProPublica and were written by Patrick G. Lee about crossing the nation’s border. Valier is 67 miles from the Canadian border. We hear stories. I can’t cross the border because my passport has expired and I don’t have the money to renew it. Otherwise, I would continue to use the University of Lethbridge resources on Blackfeet matters. (BlackFOOT, up there.) Luckily, a lot of material is online now.
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This story has been updated to add that Customs and Border Protection agents must have probable cause of wrongdoing to make stops outside the 100-mile border zone within which they have broad search powers.
A NASA scientist heading home to the U.S. said he was detained in January at a Houston airport, where Customs and Border Protection officers pressured him for access to his work phone and its potentially sensitive contents.
Last month, CBP agents checked the identification of passengers leaving a domestic flight at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport during a search for an immigrant with a deportation order.
And in October, border agents seized phones and other work-related material from a Canadian photojournalist. They blocked him from entering the U.S. after he refused to unlock the phones, citing his obligation to protect his sources.
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In short, the “Medicine Line” is electrified again, this time not as a way of evading the cavalry and Mounties, but as a way of wringing information out of business, government, or shady people. This story is earlier than Trump’s various anti-Islam moves and later than my own experiences. (By the way, treaty law exempts “Indians” from being stopped at the border, but doesn’t address any iPhone issues, such as forcing disclosure of passwords.)
I once nearly lost a couple of boxes of printed pamphlets meant to support a Unitarian conference class about the history of the movement, because the law in Canada is paranoid about Americans dominating their print industry. They were going to be impounded as an invasion of Canadian culture, though the Unitarian movement is active in Canada.
Seizing books is obsolete now. What “print” industry? But seizing iPhones would be a way of finding some remains. I do not have an iPhone nor do I want one. I have a “1950” rule — if it didn’t exist in 1950, I don’t have it. Except my desktop computer — where my Safari is now jiggered by some mysterious Force to not open ProPublica or any other of my wiseass searches. Luckily, there is Firefox, Opera, Dogpile, Yahoo, etc. etc.
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Below is another way of using borders to filter opportunities for extortion. It’s called “Civil Asset forfeiture”. This one comes from the writer using the pseudonym Fenster at “Uncouth Reflections,” he writes:
I posted here, in a critical way, of the practice of civil asset forfeiture.
You may know that the law often allows police or other authorities to keep the ill-gotten gains from a criminal transaction. That’s bad enough as far as creating a financial incentive. But the moral hazard is serious enough that police often take assets when no criminal action has been shown to have occurred, or if the owner of the asset was not aware of the crime. Spending sprees are known to result as well.
As I read more about this practice I came across the legal distinction that supports forfeiture. Typically, when the state proceeds against a defendant in a criminal law setting it does do "in personam"--that is, against the actual person. It is this proceeding against an actual person that in turn gives rise to the full range of criminal procedure protections such as a right to a jury trial and heightened standards of evidence.
But the legal theory underpinning asset forfeiture is not "in personam" but rather "in rem"--that is, against "the thing" itself. As Justice Thomas wrote in a recent Supreme Court opinion we will get to below, the use of "in rem" for forfeiture has a long history in American law, with early statutes "permitted the government to proceed in rem under the fiction that the thing itself, rather than the owner, was guilty of the crime.”
Lawyers are permitted to concoct any number or counterintuitive and indeed absurd devices, and sometimes they will even make sense. But I must confess I was stumped when I got here. A person is pulled over in a routine traffic stop and is found to have several hundred thousand dollars in cash in the car. The police do not like the explanation, conclude it is ill-gotten in some manner such as a drug transaction, and seize the money without benefit of trial, conviction or criminal standards of evidence. And this is to be deemed somehow reasonable on the grounds that the cash is guilty of a crime?
Oyez, oyez now comes Justice Thomas writing in Lisa Olivia Leonard v. Texas. The facts of the case are similar to the ones sketched out above. It is a one-justice opinion in which Thomas declines to hear the case. But he uses the opportunity to send a clear shot across the bow of the legal theory justifying forfeiture.
He starts by acknowledging that the use of civil "in rem" proceedings instead of criminal "in personam" proceedings has a long history in the United States. Forfeiture arose in the context of customs violations and piracy, with the "offending" vessels being seized without the need for the full range of procedural protections.
Thomas quotes from an earlier case dealing with the historical context:
One unaware of the history of forfeiture laws and 200 years of this Court’s precedent regarding such laws might well assume that such a scheme is lawless—a violation of due process.
But rather than endorse the idea that this historical context supports current practice Thomas goes the other way:
I am skeptical that this historical practice is capable of sustaining, as a constitutional
matter, the contours of modern practice . . .
. . . and he takes this view for two reasons.
First, he argues that historical practice and law were substantially narrower than current practice and law. Cases arose out of customs and piracy matters. The actual "in personam" person was often overseas and out of reach of the criminal system and so the offending thing was taken "in rem" under a preponderance of evidence standard. And the asset seized were limited to the instrumentalities of the crime (i.e., the vessel) and did not include criminal proceeds. The taking of criminal proceeds, or what is held to be such proceeds in the absence of procedural safeguards, is a modern invention.
Second, Thomas argues that there is more than a thread of early legal thinking that clearly recognized that standing behind some of the legal fiction of civil "in rem" proceedings stood a recognition that criminal matters were being addressed. It is as though a legal fiction was permitted for practical reasons but that there was still an underlying awareness that taking something from a person is still taking something from a person, and that criminal issues lurked near the surface.
Thomas turned down a review of the case, citing the fact that the petitioner Leonard only introduced a due process argument for the first time in its brief to the Supreme Court, and not in the Texas Court of Appeals case he was reviewing. Still, it is an encouraging sign that at least one member of the Supreme Court is willing to tackle this important problem.
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These matters and some others are what cause me to say that the best moralists in our society today are screen and television writers. Specifically, the issue of “civil forfeiture” is addressed in a sense by the several films about “wreckers” — people along the coast of Britain who first profited from shipwrecks among the thriving commerce of the Empire by intercepting what was lawfully claimed by the king: whatever of value washed up on the shore, and then — greedy — began to lure the ships into trouble with false lights, and killing whatever sailors didn’t drown. Wikipedia claims it never happened. Some films romanticize it (“Poldark”) and others paint it pure evil in the surf ("Jamaica Inn").
Such civil seizures today are justified by drug trade, trafficking, and spying with the highways as the shipping routes, but one could argue also that they are just more inevitable ways of shaking down the poor and the outliers. It will only take lawyers a short time to argue that “taking” of passwords is equivalent to the “taking of potential profits”.
PS: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-long-struggle-to-reform-the-system-that-lets-cops-casually-seize-property-and-cash?utm_source=vicetwitterus
PS: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-long-struggle-to-reform-the-system-that-lets-cops-casually-seize-property-and-cash?utm_source=vicetwitterus
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