‘Constitution-Free’ Zones Extend 100 Miles from the Border
October 28th, 2008Set your freedom fries down and step out of the vehicle.
Via: Wired:
Government agents should not have the right to stop and question Americans anywhere without suspicion within 100 miles of the border, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday, pointing attention to the little known power of the federal government to set up immigration checkpoints far from the nation’s border lines.
The government has long been able to search people entering and exiting the country without need to say why, which is known as the border search exception of the Fourth Amendment.
After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to use some of its powers deeper within the country, and now DHS has set up at least 33 internal checkpoints where they stop people, question them and ask them to prove citizenship, according to the ACLU.
“It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” said Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., Legislative Office.
The ACLU says it has scores of complaints from citizens and wants Congress to investigate and roll back the buffer zone. According to a map the rights group released Wednesday, some 190 million citizens live within what the ACLU dubs the “Constitution-free Zone.”
DHS spokesman Jason Ciliberti says the ACLU’s description of the zone as “Constitution-Free” couldn’t be further from the truth and that the check points follow rules set by Supreme Court rulings.
“We don’t have the abilitty to just set up checkpoints willy-nilly,” Ciliberti said. “The Supreme Court has determined that brief investigative encontuers do not constitute a serach or seizure.”
When citizens or visa holders encounter a checkpoint, most are waived on after showing identification, but if an agent suspects the person is not lawfully in the country, the agent can detain the person until the agent’s investigation is satisfied.
The government has long had the power to set up such check points, but has recently expanded the number of permanent and ‘tactical’ check points and deployed them in areas they hadn’t before — such as near the Canadian border.
The courts, however, are not on the ACLU’s side — and have regularly ruled that the Fourth Amendment’s protections don’t extend to the border area, airport screening or even to laptops at the border.
100 miles from the border? In this day and age, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “2500 miles from the border”? 😉 (If you consider the coasts to be “borders”, that effectively includes the entire freaking country.)