Here's a summer travel tip to keep in mind: Even if your vacation plans, or those of your loved ones, involve nothing more than traveling from one city to another within the same state, proof of citizenship may be required. At least if that state is New York.
This past week on my vacation, I decided to travel through the Empire State to visit some old friends and former co-workers I hadn't seen in years. Because I do not own a car, and one of my stops was not along the Amtrak route, I chose to take a bus. It wasn't a bad way to travel—with one startling exception.
Having boarded the bus in Cleveland, I had to change buses in Buffalo to continue my trip, and change again at Rochester. When the bus I boarded in Buffalo reached the Rochester station, before anyone could disembark, uniformed agents of the US Border Patrol entered it. These men asked each of us on the bus to state our citizenship. In some cases, riders were asked to produce passports or visas as proof.
I was stunned. While I have dealt with many an immigration and customs agent on the way back and forth from trips to Canada by bus, train and car, this was the first time I had ever seen agents from either side of the border coming onto a bus and quizzing passengers at a station rather than at a border crossing—not to mention at a station so far away from any border crossing. All of us on the bus could safely be presumed to either have passed through immigration in Buffalo when coming down from Canada, or to have boarded the bus only after it arrived in Buffalo. In either case, it appeared entirely unjustifiable that these agents were asking us questions about our citizenship—just as much as it would be if we were stopped on a street corner, or received a knock on the door of our homes, asking the same question.
I did not want to answer—not because I have anything to hide, but because the entire situation struck me as wrong on principle. Why I should be required to prove my citizenship, or even possibly be asked to produce proof of it, in order to simply ride a bus within New York State? What was this, Nazi Germany? Couldn't a native-born citizen ride a bus in this country anymore without having to prove she belonged here? At the same time, I was just as frightened of refusing. What if I told them it wasn't any of their damn business? Would I be removed from the bus? Detained? Sent to Gitmo?
As it so happened, my birth certificate was in my suitcase; I keep it there so it's available when I make the border crossing to Canada and back, even though I wasn't making that crossing on this trip. But what if I hadn't had it with me? (I had never been advised by Greyhound that I would need proof of citizenship to travel within the country on their bus lines. They do ask for identification when purchasing a ticket, just as Transportation Security Administration officials usually request that passengers show ID before boarding a plane—but identification alone doesn't prove citizenship.) What if, having decided a successful vacation mattered more to me than defending a principle, I said "yes," but was not believed? Would I have to produce my birth certificate? (I have yet to obtain a passport.) What if they didn't believe it was really mine?
I'm not pleased with myself that I decided to make things easier by just answering "yes," but I am happy that I was believed. Even so, when I was finally allowed off the bus and permitted to transfer to the next one, I was questioned yet again. And this time, I was not only asked about my citizenship, but where I was born.
Once my new bus was on its way, I asked the driver what was going on. He told me, in what sounded like a Spanish accent, "They are federal agents; they're allowed to get on our buses. We have to let them." I asked him if he didn't think it strange that they were allowed to ask people their citizenship when we hadn't even crossed a border. "They're looking for illegal immigrants," he said. "That's fine with me. They catch a lot of people that way. They should catch them. Those people are breaking the law."
I asked him how it could possibly be fair to assume we were all illegal immigrants unless we could prove otherwise, when we were not even attempting to enter the country but were already well within it. "What's to stop them from coming into my workplace without a warrant? What's to stop them from stopping me on the street?"
None of these arguments got me anywhere with the driver. "If you are not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about. By doing this, they can stop people who want to come in and hurt this country. And you know what? If they don't stop them, and then they do something, it'll be people like you who will blame them for not stopping it."
I sighed. I told him I would not blame anyone. I argued for the passengers' right to privacy; I argued for the Constitution; I tried to draw comparisons between this practice and those of totalitarian countries; I tried to tell him this was not the America I knew or grew up in. But ultimately I went silent, because I knew debating with him was useless. For one thing, he was obviously under orders to either let federal agents onto his bus or lose his job; for another, he might well himself be a legal immigrant, happy to be here and with no sympathy whatsoever for those who didn't come in the right way, believing that anything done to ferret out such people and deport them is just fine. Besides, if he got irritated enough with me, he could have thrown me off his bus.
When I arrived home, I did some Internet searching and discovered that, much to my surprise, Border Patrol raids on Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains have become an extremely common feature of travel within New York. Agents routinely board buses and trains in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse and ask the passengers their citizenship. If the answer isn't "US," they ask to see the person's passport or visa; if the visa is expired or something else is out of order, the person can be detained. If the answer is "US," they use whatever "profiling" they see fit to decide whom to ask for further proof. If the person in question cannot produce further proof, that person can be detained. On other occasions, persons are identified as fugitives suspected of other crimes, and are arrested.
As it happens, I was not asked to produce further citizenship proof. If I had been, and hadn't even had so much as my birth certificate, I dread to think what would have become of both me and my trip.
What I find most troubling here is that such raids are being conducted so deeply within the United States. Yes, Buffalo is right at the Canadian border, and anyone leaving the United States for Canada or leaving Canada to re-enter the United States should expect and be prepared to produce papers. Even having the occasional inspection of buses and trains within the city of Buffalo seems reasonable, given its proximity only a river away from the Canadian border. But Syracuse? Rochester? These are not "border towns"—unless you assume a huge problem with illegals swimming or boating into the country across 53-mile-wide Lake Ontario (and even then, Syracuse isn't that close to the lake). In Ohio, I live on the shores of Lake Erie, and I can testify, we don't have a really big problem with people crawling out of the lake or rowing little boats of refugees up to our beach. If we did, I imagine we'd have Border Patrol and Coast Guard agents patrolling every inch of the shoreline to send them back.
I suppose the justification is that a bus coming from Buffalo might be as worthy of being searched as a bus in Buffalo. But by that light, why not search every passenger on every bus across the country? And if you're going to search bus and train passengers, why just them? Why not ask everyone taking a flight within the United States to produce proof of citizenship before boarding a plane? Why not have routine traffic stops in which people are asked to produce their citizenship papers, not only in Texas or California, but in Kansas, Iowa, Tennessee? After all, if we're to justify becoming a police state that constantly monitors the movements of its citizens in the name of catching illegal immigrants, capturing criminals or preventing terrorist acts, we might as well go all the way.
You know why we don't, don't you? Class prejudice. The assumption that while people who drive cars (assuming the car is their own) and fly in planes can be trusted, people who ride buses and trains (unless the train is a popular East Coast "commuter alternative" like the Metroliner or the Acela) cannot. Don't these folks have enough money to either drive or fly where they want to go? Or do they perhaps wish to cover their tracks, not have to worry about passing a TSA inspection or ditching a car—just head off into a city and disappear?
Of course, the assumption that all bus and train passengers are either impoverished, criminals, or both is sheer nonsense. Plenty of different kinds of people choose to travel by bus or train, from college students to the elderly to the Amish, and they are not all poor or up to no good. But you can be sure that once you step onto a bus or train, you are presumed to be either poor, a crook, or possibly both, until you prove yourself otherwise. I suppose if I wore a long dress and a sunbonnet, I might not have that problem, but then again, some Border Patrol agent might take me for a runaway FLDS cult member. So much for that plan.
And then there's the whole "profiling" issue. If agents ask everyone on board a bus or train to state their citizenship, yet don't ask for proof at the same time as they ask, the only people they can obviously justifiably request for paperwork are those who readily admit to being citizens of other countries. With those who claim to be US citizens, they must make a decision as to which ones they are going to believe vs. which ones they will ask for proof. And I cannot think of how they can do this other than to "profile."
Among many items related to the subject that I discovered during a Web search was a surprisingly uncritical article and photo essay by a student at my own graduate alma mater, the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. (Doesn't my old school produce critical journalists anymore?) In his February 2008 story, "Caught in Transit: The Rochester Border Patrol Station," Tim Martinez describes the work of Border Patrol agents in Rochester, conducting a search on a passenger train at the local Amtrak depot, in a manner that little questions either the legality or value of the patrol's work. Instead, we are bombarded with statistics: in 2007, they captured 1,223 illegal immigrants, more than any of the 55 other stations along the Canadian border, and made more arrests than some entire sectors of the northern border.
"Under the section of the United States Code on Aliens and Nationality, agents have the right to board and search any means of transportation for illegal immigrants within 25 miles of the border," Martinez' article explains. "The law also states that all foreigners are required to carry valid identification." However, the article fails to explain how Rochester, which is about 75 miles east of the nearest US border at Buffalo, qualifies under the 25-mile rule. (Syracuse is about 70 miles southwest of the nearest border.) Nor does the author address what happens if a passenger is asked to produce proof of citizenship and cannot.
We are told, however, that experienced agents, when profiling passengers, "analyze body language and look for suspicious behavior." Says one, "It's not what they’re saying, it's what they’re not saying. It's sweat, it's shaking, it's stuttering, it's bad breath."
Bad breath? You can now be suspected of being an illegal immigrant or a terrorist because you have halitosis?
I had not realized before reading this that even if I claimed to be a US citizen, I might be taken for a lawbreaker simply because I was hot, stuttered, or made the mistake of having onions at lunch.
An immigration lawyer is quoted accusing the patrol of racial profiling, but again, the agent is quoted defending their methods: "We question people with blond hair and blue eyes as much as anyone else." What's never asked is whether the people with blond hair and blue eyes are taken at their word, while those with darker hair, skin and eyes, or certain accents, get requests for proof.
At least, from reading this article, I now know what would have happened if I'd refused to state my citizenship and/or been unable to prove it satisfactorily, and been detained. As a female, I would have been transferred to a county jail to await my date in Immigration Court, rather than ending up where the men do, at a federal detention facility. I can just picture meeting the other women in the local lockup and explaining my situation to them.
"So, what are you in for? Busted for drugs? Drive drunk? Pick up a john who turned out to be a cop?"
"Nope. I went Greyhound."
If you think all this is scary, consider the kind of crimp that could have been put into your vacation if you like to fish on the Great Lakes. In March, Ohio charter boat captains were told by Customs and Border Protection officials in Cleveland that pleasure boaters and anglers would now have to report to Customs if they motored into the Canadian waters of Lake Erie on fishing trips. This would have meant being unable to boat more than halfway across the lake, or to anchor in Canadian waters, without taking proof of citizenship along and having to check in with Immigration upon their return—even if they never touched Canadian land or tied their boats to a dock in Canada. Turns out that advisory was a mistake, and you won't really need your papers just to try to snag some nice walleyes or perch. Whew.
As for the Border Patrol bus and train raids, however, they are very real, and stand as yet another way that something that at one time would have been considered illegal and unthinkable has quietly become accepted American practice. The justification is that it is highly successful at doing what it's intended to do: detaining illegal immigrants and other lawbreakers.
Is it legal? Is it constitutional for US citizens to be expected to produce proof of citizenship even if they have been born on our soil and, quite possibly, never left the country in their lives, simply because they chose to travel from one part of it to another by Amtrak or Greyhound? Is it legal to demand proof of citizenship of anyone simply for that reason?
If I read the Fourth Amendment correctly, if the Border Patrol asks me to state my citizenship anywhere but at a border crossing, I can refuse to answer without being detained. Next time I travel in New York, if I have occasion to, I'm going to give silence a try. But before I do, I suppose I'd better have the phone number of a good lawyer handy.
Otherwise, who knows? I might, as they say, get thrown under the bus.
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