What used to be miserable is now terrifying for some.
There is only one ramp, and this ramp has been going upwards since the Patriot Act of 2001. And it will keep going up, no matter who is in office.
Imagine if you're designing a system, and you notice that a hacker has exploited some issue and is causing damage, do you really tell people complaining about the exploit as "Not all our customers are going to exploit this issue, the next guy who accesses our system would definitely not use this exploit.
You don't see an architectural problem here?
The sheer fact that we have a constitution to limit the powers of the democratically elected govt means that we applied a patch on democracy from beginning itself.
If relying on the goodness of the govt were a feature, then we wouldn't need a constitution (which technically isn't even a patch but rather a unit test supplied with the system, which in itself can be modified).
This could be (and likely was) as simple as a phone call from the powers that be, demanding that "you do this NOW or else". You do know that such things do happen in hierarchies, don't you?
I will grant that ramp down takes immense work, considering the head of CBP hired by Obama last year to reform the organization resigned after the Border Patrol Union went after him.
An indicator that planning took backseat to "decisiveness".
Yes, Obama was not perfect on civil liberties, but there has absolutely been an uptick in these kind of instances since Trump took over. Obama had no Muslim ban. And in general, Trump has given more delegated authority to CBP/DHS and other departments.
Maybe try to put things into perspective? We will never get 100% "pure" politicians and if the left keep staying home or voting for people like Jill Stein, then Republicans will continue to dominate.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-border-patrol-wa...
http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2017/02/21/dhs-removes-obamas...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/us/ice-immigrant-deportat...
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/17_0220...
Consider what happened to people that showed up at Ellis island. Some people would be forced to strip, take a shower, and undergo medical examinations. Remember, this was published as perfectly reasonable things that confirm to social norms. Further 1-2% of people where deported often due to physical deformities. https://books.google.com/books?id=OyL6JatN5KwC&pg=PA129&lpg=...
PS: I don't mean we should go back to a system like this, just crossing borders is very meaningfully different than sitting at home or driving down the street.
Suppose police kill 1 person per month across the US. That's would not be a huge red flag for me, but if police killed 10,000 people per month across the US that's grounds for a revolution. The ground between A and B can be vast, so saying X happens on it's own is less important than the context.
All I am saying is that a 3x annual increase in X can be a bad sign even if the old and new rates are justified because the trend on it's own is concerning.
In the United States, border zones are any areas up to 100 miles inland from a land border or coast. The majority of US population and cities are in border zones and the border rules apply to them:
https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
Or to quote your link: Border Patrol, nevertheless, cannot pull anyone over without "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime (reasonable suspicion is more than just a "hunch").
Further there is a long history of random inspections as people cross borders without a warrants meaning it's simply doing the same things with different means. Basically, border security is one of the core functions of government and the expectation of privacy is minimal.
Or put another way, if you are going to open 1,000 laptops a year then I assume that getting a warrant would not be difficult. If you want to open 100,000,000 laptops a year then your not acting on any kind of evidence just going fishing. But, that kind of fishing tends to be ineffective and expensive both directly and by discouraging people from visiting the US.
PS: The same argument exists in other areas. Having 100 H-Bombs on ICBMs is a very powerful threat. Having 10,000 H-Bombs on ICBMs is just more expense without really changing the threat. You increase the risk of bad things happening, spend ~100x the money and gain what exactly?
Perhaps presidents are mainly there to make speeches and slightly tweek a few policy decisions important to constituents, but government itself is pretty large and goes right on between administrations. (Which isn't always a bad thing either).
The actual "government", in the sense of who determines how life actually goes on in America, is distributed across a web of key employees in major corporations and governments of all levels. These are not necessarily the CEO (who is often the shareholder's & employee's punching bag); rather, it's the anonymous guy who has been there his whole life, has a huge network of connections within the company, has developed a large degree of expertise in the business, and holds the trust of both the nominal decision-makers and the line-workers who do the work.
Witness how we've had 18 government shutdowns since 1976 [1], and life generally goes on during them. (Interestingly, most of them were during the Carter/Reagan years, lest people think government has gotten more dysfunctional recently.) Also observe how the President usually gets blamed or credited for the condition of the economy, which he really has very little control over. People want a figurehead that they can point fingers at; it's usually not the guy who actually holds the reins.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdown_in_the_Uni...
But let's also step back and recognize that "the president" has always been at least the president himself and his adminstration. Of course the network expands from there and the key employees that you mention in important companies include individuals capable of weilding considerable 'asymmetric' power.
Lately, I can't help but think of Cigarette Smoking Man.
Last year, Obama was responsible for it. This year, right on through to the end of his presidency, Trump is responsible for it.
> in 2016, “the number of people asked to hand over their cell phones and passwords by Customs and Border Protection agents increased almost threefold over the year before.”
I mean, it's great and all that the ACLU is working on this, but the repeated attempts to tie this all to Trump is becoming kind of maddening. Pretty soon all this stuff will start being referred to as "Trump-era security measures" in the press and most will forget who actually started most of it (the last two presidents).