I can't imagine the horror of having the Feds have so much power over my life as an immigrant does. Or the fact that you can loose it all in a heartbeat (as happened to my friends in the bay areas in the 90s when they lost their jobs and their VISA sponsors).
I've seen the same differences in the attitudes of Chinese and American immigration authorities. And if my memories of childhood visits to the USSR are correct, the same differences existed between Soviet and American authorities. I believe the main reason is that America is fundamentally suspicious of anything foreign. Authorities are more likely to see threats than benefits in international dealings.
*deletes your comment, welds you into your home, and blocks searches for anything containing your username*
I've seen those machines at Ikea in the US, though they did seem more common in China.
However, it's almost unbelievably superficial to rate "authoritarianess" by the anecdotal cheeriness of front like officials.
Or is it just fashionable on hn to drop a “ha, anecdotal!” comment?
TBH I think I would click the smiliest smiley in any foreign country
I'm completely with Louis CK on this one. We should all fly strapped down completely, upright, I guess with slightly bigger windows as a compromise, realizing the fact of flight and being like "I am flying through the air at nearly the speed of sound, crossing continents and oceans in a mere matter of hours". Just respect it a fuck of a lot more, if flying were easy we'd have flown much sooner. In fact rockets are much older and easier to make than flying machines, rockets got started a little after gunpowder, about the time of the Mongol invasion, and flying machines date to the turn of the century. People think rockets are harder because the space race came after the big improvement in plane speed, nah. Well they're studied together, aero-astrophysics. Basically not going splat.
So 9/11 was about going splat. That's literally what it was, Muhammad Ata and his conspiracy of Al-Qaeda Sunni Muslims decided, let's all go splat with a big plane, at the same building, at the same time. And they did! Because the whole difficulty of flying is not going splat, going splat on purpose is easy (although they were artistic about it, did a lot of difficult maneuvers). Suicide and aviation, interwoven.
So back to TSA, I don't know they actually respond well when you ask them about anything, or thank them for keeping the planes from falling out of the sky. It's not a transportation or border thing, it's an aviation thing.
And one time, when I was repatriating to the states, an agent asked me like what company did you work for, I never heard of that company. As though it mattered, resumes are irrelevant to citizenship once you have it. So yeah there are moments that are rougher. I think I've had good luck.
I would swap "suicide" for "risk". And while I do concede that traveling on an airplane is inherently risky (and argueably one of our most remarkable achievements as a species), I think it's dangerous to deny that TSA - or any other security enforcement body for that matter - is not susceptible to power abuse by their representatives; we have years of evidence to prove it, especially nowadays with social media. Too much blank-cheque power is given them, with little accountability (again, on account of the risk). (Incidentally, airport security is a nice topic to play with error rates conceptually, e.g. precision, recall, etc.)
> It's really goddamn dangerous to fly, you're relying on so many parts to work right
Indeed, the latest systemic failure coming directly from the making and selling of planes. An activity where once safety was held as a sacrosant goal, it's now been placed second to profits and corporate interests (see Boeing).
And they practically never flew together. Then, at most one of them would die at a time, and the other could live to continue defying death. They were the first great aviators to fly and not die. They crashed sometimes and it was brutal, identical to falling out of a building. There were endless deaths in early aviation, all the time, all the time. In the early 30's the Army was charged with paper mail by airplane, and the weather was terrible, and everyone equated aviation with suicide. Young soldiers dying most days of the week. I think even Roosevelt said it was suicidal, that what these pilots were tasked with meant leading them to slaughter.
Like heroism, which I carry out all the time, also intrinsically suicidal, for instance all the times I've fought alone, outnumbered. Everyone says that's suicidal. So it turns out it's not actually that dangerous, any more than aviation, you just need to act perfectly, meaning no mistakes.
I was flying back from Peru through LAX and held by security for about two hours with no explanation. Eventually, a pair of officers came and after a bit of questioning, dumped the entirety of my 65L bag onto the floor. I had a few pill bottles—all labeled—just Advil, Ibuprofen, some other OTC thing for altitude sickness. They emptied them all out onto the table in front of me.
They took a few tablets of Advil with them for testing. About 20 minutes later, they returned and told me I was free to go (with everything still on the floor, the pills all over the table, no apology, etc).
The icing on the cake—as I re-entered the LAX domestic terminal, my hiking poles that I had just flown with were confiscated.
I assume that you are not a white middleaged guy and suddenly the hate is immense. Even with an US Passport ... how in the world ... I mean, WTF.
I m sorry that that happened to you, nobody should go through this.
For me it was clear that I would never be accepted as a citizen regardless of how many years I live there or what passport I hold. People would continue to mock my religious beliefs and culture pretending all the time that it is a joke.
The ICE director has repeatedly made statements under the Trump presidency that they believe the organization is above federal law (like the army) and only beholden to the president's orders
If you look at your comment, apart from the 4th amendment issues, it's kind of like a "have you stopped beating your spouse?" kind of question.
Honestly, I'm not so sure about that, given the commenter. IIRC, in a couple of previous threads they've taken pretty strong positions that they'll do what they want regardless if the law says it's illegal and they're risking jail. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some suspicious or belligerent behavior on their part that they left out of the story.
>they'll do what they want regardless if the law says it's illegal and they're risking jail
So go ahead and quote that, assuming it was said, and go on and explain where it creates articulable probable cause for an x-ray.
I honestly can't believe I'm even responding to this victim-blaming garbage. Try reading Ms. Cervantes complaint, who's circumstances were incredibly similar to mine but she was treated even worse, and think again about your opinion here.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
The situation is this: I don't know what happened, but I also don't trust your account of what happened.
>> they'll do what they want regardless if the law says it's illegal and they're risking jail
> So go ahead and quote that, assuming it was said,
Here you are advocating that convicted felons should manufacture guns that would be illegal for them to possess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29985376
Here you are claiming that you would continue to trade cryptocurrency from a prison ass-phone, in a hypothetical world were it was illegal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29922956
> and go on and explain where it creates articulable probable cause for an x-ray.
Why? I never claimed that at all.
2) I stand by my belief that felons ought to be able to protect themselves with firearms of any type.
3) My belief that felons have 2nd amendment rights is not probable cause of having drugs.
4) There's no nexus by which officers inventing an alert or falsifying evidence is justified by my exercising of my first amendment right regarding belief in second amendment right of felons.
>Here you are claiming that you would continue to trade cryptocurrency from prison, in a hypothetical world were it was illegal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29922956
Again not probable cause of possessing drugs.
Your whole argument is a red herring. None of this is probable cause for possessing drugs.
>Why? I never claimed that at all.
So how is this even relevent? None of this first amendment protected activity and opinions provide any legitimacy to falsely accusing someone of having drugs up their ass.
That thread was not discussing "replica black powder rifles." It was discussing stuff like the FGC-9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGC-9), under the assumption that guns like that were illegal for felons to possess.
> Your whole argument is a red herring. None of this is probable cause for possessing drugs.
I never said nor thought it was "probable cause for possessing drugs." It's evidence of an attitude, and attitude affects the probability of certain behaviors that you may not have reported in your account.
2) Felons can in fact legally own and manufacture modern firearms after having their rights reinstated.
3) Felons can in fact own firearms legally by leaving the jurisdiction of the united states.
4) None of this first amendment protected opinions provide any justification at all for CBP officers faking a dog alert or manufacturing evidence during a strip search.
>It's evidence of an attitude, and attitude affects the probability of certain behaviors that you may have not reported in your account.
Ergo illegal detention and causeless strip searches (which even at border require PC) are justified? I take it Ms. Cervantes was also an HN poster? Did you even stop to think about whether you would like to live in a world where some low level podunk border patrol officers can fabricate evidence merely on the extremely unlikely chance they happen to read my HN and decide to target me because of my absolute stance on 2A and 1A?
No. I'll repeat the situation: I don't trust your account of what happened. That is all.
There are a few other paragraphs in the affidavit that are entirely uninteresting to read and offer no evidence whatsoever. I can tell you '10' and '11' here are the entirety of their argument 110%. Maybe I'll get around to redacting the other paragraphs but they offer nothing. If you want to know the 'other side' -- there it is.
I also have a pile of medical paperwork with doctors documenting there was zero evidence whatsoever other than being 'defensive' of being accused of this crime and being 'anxious' to be dragged up and down 60 miles from city to city in cuffs.
I remember after 9/11 getting detained on a flight out of the country than for no other reason than my family was the wrong kind of brown. I remember how unfair it felt watching my mom and my sister cry under the stress of what we all knew was security theater. I remember seeing my dad pull out some diplomatic reserves from somewhere I didn't know in order to de-escalate the situation and get us on to our flight.
We were lucky that day. Many people were not. These situations shouldn't have to be about luck. They should be about fairness, safety, practicality, and most of all respect.
I flew to Sweden, and then on an entirely different ticket paid for via Swedish company from Sweden to Iraq.
This isn't advice or saying to do that. But when I did it, the computer in the US didn't know to flag my flight -- I looked like a normal person just going to Sweden. It's all horse shit of course, going somewhere the government doesn't approve of isn't evidence of a crime.
> That's your opinion.
You are quite correct: that is my opinion.
> I invite you to read this excerpt [0] affidavit and decide for yourself whether that reads like anything other than made up garbage designed to fabricate probable cause.
Honestly: it could be made up or it could be true. There's nothing there to tell either way.
One thing I don't doubt is that you weren't, in fact, smuggling drugs.
It doesn't, and it's pretty clear you're grossly misunderstanding me.
Are you employed?
The situation in this thread.
Am I supposed to believe everything I read on the internet, or always believe I'm getting the whole story?
> Are you employed?
Of course.
Every single 'search' along the way was used to fabricate evidence against me. Remember these people are professional psychopathic liers so every inch you give them, they just use it to justify something even worse.
1) The dog -- never alerted -- they lied and said it alerted on my anus (WTF!?!). Used to justify a scan of my body with some x-ray looking machine at the border.
2) The "machine" (IDK what it was, but looked like a body scanner type thing) -- there was nothing, but then someone claims they "Saw something" which turned out to almost assuredly to have been my belt buckle.
3) The machine was used to justify strip searching me.
4) Fabricated evidence from the strip search was used to justify dragging me to hospitals for an x-ray.
Now what was to be expected next? It just doesn't end. I did nothing wrong.
It's understandable (and not necessarily wrong) to vent here, and I'm not going to ask whether you have done this already, because it's not useful to draw out an answer, but: if you can, find the relevant anti-corruption agency and report the events to them.
There's a chance that doing so might increase the likelihood of harassment again in future -- I have no idea how these things show up on border entry systems -- so it's your choice, but the key idea is to get a paper trail in place that will show up if (and hopefully when) investigations are later taking place.
I haven't worked in law enforcement, but I imagine that the same way that good policework involves collecting statements and records of events to put together a case, internal (or independent) investigations into misconduct require similar records. The ability for individuals to get away with bad conduct is, I'd guess, based on people believing that it's not worthwhile to file reports against them. They do get caught when they are.
>There's a chance that doing so might increase the likelihood of harassment again in future
I'm probably already at max likelihood already. I am detained 4+ hours everytime I enter the country. In 2015 I fought alongside the Kurdish militia YPG in northern Syria against ISIS, and ever since the CBP has targeted me. There is a flag on my passport that basically says 'harass him' as best as I can tell.
>if you can, find the relevant anti-corruption agency and report the events to them.
Still in the process of filing the complaints against the relevant medical professionals who violated patient consent. I am currently working in order of operations from where I expect justice to be most likely (complicit medical workers) to where I expect justice to be impossible (CBP officers).
Sounds like you've got a good, considered approach, so keep up the work to improve the environment and keep in mind other ways you can develop (and enjoy) your time is probably the best platitude I can offer (and one you probably already understand).
Criminal 'justice' in US is in dire need of overhaul, and an actual plan on how to get our imprisonment rate down to other first world nations.
Persons such as Mr. Eckert who went through the x-ray, found that after that there were even worse things to come such as a colonoscopy [0]. Thes entities just want to dig deeper and deeper, and there will basically be no stopping until they even knock you out and insert a camera into your colon. The only winning move is not to play.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2014/01/16/justice/new-mexico-search-set...
This is not to be understated.
I was born a US citizen. Last time I entered the country, officers faked that a dog had alerted "on my anus", forcibly strip searched me, and fabricated a story that plastic baggies that they suspected 'could be drugs' were coming out of my ass.
I was shackled and cuffed and dragged around the state of Arizona for 16 hours while publicly paraded in Hospitals, including the waiting rooms. Officers attempted repeatedly, across two different cities one hour apart, to get medical staff to perform unwarranted and consentless x-rays and/or probing of my body, which I repeatedly refused. Doctors, despite having zero medical evidence I had did anything wrong, wrote on their paperwork I was 'suspicious' because I denied the allegations.
After 16 hours of this harassments I was release, uncharged, with no apologies.
On yet another occasion, I was told by border officials they would not let me in my own country, despite providing full proof of citizenship (immaculate condition passport, plus identifying myself fully). After 4 hours of probing questions including going practically line by line on what's on the IRS 1040, most of which I didn't answer, I was released.
Now imagine this same happening, legally entering the country at the proper port of entry with full authorization -- except as not a citizen or looking like a boring middle-class corn-fed white guy like me. These sick fucks would treat you even worse. A woman (actually a citizen) who went through a few years before me brutally had her orifices probed in a 'search' for 'contraband.'[0]
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6451513/cervantes-v-uni...