OT - Border incident, legal question with video

by Charles, Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 14:10 (3937 days ago) @ Mark
edited by Charles, Tuesday, December 17, 2013, 14:15

I go through Border Patrol checkpoints every week and know the drill pretty well. It is am immigration checkpoint and also a drug interdiction checkpoint. If there is an obvious violation or reasonable suspicion of a violation of state laws, they BP can detain the person until state officials arrive to take charge.

When somebody pulls through, refused to give their name and in general give some attitude that raises several red flags. There is a line of cars behind and if they need to spend more than a few seconds they ask folks to pull over into secondary inspection so as not to block the highway and impede the flow of traffic.

The girl in this video was a complete and total jerk. I don't like to see law enforcement people exceed their authority and violate person's Constitutional rights, but that was not the case here. The girl was just picking a fight.

I never head the agent say he wanted to search her car. If he wanted to search her car he would either have to have consent or probably cause. But I never heard that, he just wanted to establish her identity and ownership of the vehicle.

A person's citizen ship cannot be established by their looks and their speech.

However, as a practical matter, folks with something to hide don't pick a fight with La Migra. They try and slip through acting as normal as possible.

After a life time on the border, I have been through these checkpoints many hundreds if not thousands of times and only once have I had to make an issue of something because only once was an Agent out of line. Most often they are very professional people who are doing a difficult and dangerous job and don't need little flip tail girls giving them a hard time.

The older supervisor finally showed up and decided it was not worth the hassle and paper work to deal with her. She was lucky they were not as big a bunch of jerks as she was. They could have made her life real miserable if they chose.