Border Patrol exception to the 4th Amendment

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be searched.

U.S. courts have held that this does not forbid the U.S. Border Patrol to inspect belongings of people entering and exiting the United States, even though they don’t have probable cause to think such persons have committed a crime.

However, the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction over “border areas” was expanded some years back to cover everything within 100 air miles of a U.S. border.  The border areas are shown in the map below.

As the map shows, Border Patrol jurisdiction covers the entire populations of Michigan, Florida, New Jersey, Delaware, all of New England except a tiny sliver of Vermont, and most of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

What makes this worse is the common attitude in the Border Patrol is that “contempt of cop” is a crime, and insistence on Constitutional rights is obstruction of justice.  The video above of a young engineer’s experience with the Border Patrol shows this, and it is not the worst example I have ever heard.

LINKS

Fact Sheet on the U.S. “Constitution Free” Zone by the American Civil Liberties Union.  This is from 2008, but the Obama administration has not proved to be an improvement over the Bush administration.

ACLU Files FOIA Request for Unreleased DHS Privacy Report on Laptop Searches at the Border by the American Civil Liberties Union.

2 out of every 3 Americans  lost Fourth Amendment protections to DHS by Darlene Storm to Computerworld.

I live in Rochester, N.Y., which is part of the Border Patrol zone.  I have never been stopped by the Border Patrol while driving within the country, and I have never had any problem crossing the border into Canada.  I have never observed the Border Patrol acting in other than a highly professional way.

But this is not true of everybody.  Read this and this and this and this and this for harrowing and unjustified ordeal of Peter Watts, a Canadian science fiction writer, in what should have been a routine border crossing.

Hat tips to BlogTruth and Washington’s Blog.

Tags: Border Patrol, Constitution, Constitution-Free Zone, Fourth Amendment