The Border Patrol’s jurisdiction isn’t confined to southwestern deserts or isolated northern checkpoints: Federal law empowers agents to board vehicles and vessels “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States,” whether inland or offshore. “Reasonable” is 100 miles as the crow flies—meaning some 200 million people live within an expansive border zone.
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This happened to a friend of mine. He was undocumented but doing fine, riding a bus from one place to another, and didn’t realize that when the bus wandered a little close to the southern border, CBP could essentially pull the bus over and asked to see everyone’s papers. And that’s exactly what they did. TL;DR long detention in jail and a big fight to be able to stay in the country.
In the current system, he’d probably already be gone, and under Trump 2, someone in that situation might have something really really bad happen to them.
That’s too bad about your friend. I don’t understand the papers deal, why would anyone have their immigration papers on them? Being able to check for them is the first thing that should go.
You can check, do you have a driver’s license, what state is it from, what’s your SSN, and start poking around in the databases and see if there start to be lies or missing entries where there should be some, or is the person clearly evasive or terrified, and then you can go from there. In practice I feel like it’s often possible to tell if the person you’re talking to is legal or not pretty easily. And yes of course what color is your skin is a significant factor in all of that.
And yes it’s fucked up. He is doing fine now and still in the US; Obama’s immigration reforms happened in time that he could delay the case and do appeals until he wound up getting married to an American girl and that solved the problem.
That’s hard to hear what everyone goes through during the process. I’m terrified of a trump victory for even my legal friends. Remember when he was going to take away people’s citizenship?
And yes of course what color is your skin is a significant factor in all of that.
That’s what those illegal Canadians want you to think. I’m joking, but I live in Seattle which is pretty close to the border. I don’t hear about any of those Canadians staying longer than their visa or sneaking across to go shopping at our outlet malls, lol.
Yeah.
Usually I can be pretty aloof talking politics on Lemmy with the bad faith people, but having had some distant second hand contact with the reality and I think some concept of what it might become, under Trump 2, means that the people who say they don’t want to vote Democratic because they care about immigration can sometimes make me feel genuine rage.
They may have the power to do so in the US, but step onto foreign territory and they’re just border hopping like any other criminal. Their US powers mean nothing unless that foreign nation also provides them with diplomatic immunity or some similar power.
I think this is more a warning to immigrants and people who have family that are undocumented that if Trump gets elected, that you’re not safe 100 miles in. That’s my take, but I could be wrong.
