by Marlys Hersey
Editor

A few months ago, I hit that point where I just couldn’t do it anymore: I just can’t answer every dumb or out-of-line question posed to me at the Border Patrol checkpoint, just to get through in as little time as possible. I can’t smile and pretend that I don’t know they’re violating my civil rights. Not every week.

Not even occasionally.

Maybe some of you don’t go through the checkpoints on a regular basis? Or maybe you just don’t get harassed by the perhaps well-intentioned, but ill-informed (or just plain gleefully annoying) agents and their tactics.

Lucky you.

Maybe it’s a cumulative affect of nearly 4 years of dealing with the harassment since I moved here?

I should say that I am willing to take some responsibility for the bad dynamics.

Like there was that one time when we drank all that coffee from my friend’s new espresso maker right before I left Terlingua to head north. I was definitely a little more amped than usual.

Or that other time, I was aggravated from listening to a radio talk show right before I got to the checkpoint, enduring some sanctimonious woman spout why women shouldn’t ever have the right to have an abortion, no matter what. I could feel my heart racing like I was watching a horror film, and I thought Maybe it’s time for the spa channel these last few miles before the border patrol station, Marlys….

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Smokey Briggs’ columns for The Gazette every month for the past couple of years?

In the last week, there’s not even a maybe about it: I was definitely a little edgier than usual since hearing that Vice President Dick Cheney is claiming that his office is “not really part of the Bush administration,” and therefore has every right to block efforts by the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office to conduct a mandatory on-site inspection of the vice president’s office. (And get this; now even President Bush is claiming somesuch exception to the rule! I’m not making this up – go online and search LA or NY Times, for starters.) Did the 21st Century just get officially declared the Century of Self-Parody while I was on vacation? Am I missing something?

Anyway, when the Vice President refuses to cooperate with the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, yeah, I get a little testy about being expected to answer questions about little old me in the name of “national security.”

Now, before I get into any details of my stories, let me back up. I am no angry teenager looking to rebel against authority just for the fun of it. I am also not a conspiracy theorist. Nor do I have any particular  distaste for federal agents on the whole, nor law enforcement: I’ve been a federal employee multiple times, once in the law enforcement division.

To boot, I am always extremely polite to every “US Customs and Border Protection” agent – at least at the start of each interaction. (Heads up: technically it’s not the Border Patrol anymore, since that agency merged with U.S. Customs to form this new amalgam, under the Dept. of Homeland Security; and CBP’s motto is “Securing America’s Borders.”).

I am always patently aware that these agents are just my fellow human beings trying to make a living.

God knows I have had enough jobs in which I had to be the frontperson for a big, ugly bureaucracy with some really stupid practices and policies [In my world, the phrase “I don’t make the rules, sir. I’m just doing my job” will cease to exist. When that happens, the corporation or agency or whatever the hell it is clearly just too big to be good. When individuals are not permitted to make independent decisions based on the situation at hand, then usually stupidity, irresponsibility, disrespect, and injustices abound.].

I’ve also had the jobs in which although I wasn’t working for a behemoth, I did something equally awful and immoral for the sake of earning my wages, such as trying to get homeowners who didn’t know better than to answer the phone during dinner to agree to let some greasy guys come out and spray carcinogens all over their yard to have the greenest possible outdoor carpet/lawn.

And I’ve had to wait on aggressive people in plenty of pubs & restaurants.

My point is: I know what it’s like to be the ‘bot in the uniform. The helpless frontperson. The federal agent.

The fellow human being just trying to make a living.

True, under the guise of work, I haven’t been expected to talk with potentially desparate drug smugglers in the middle of the night. Oh, wait – I’ve worked the drive-thru on the night shift at a fast food joint, so I take that back.

You’re right, though: I have not worked in the a well-lit-to-the-point-of-glowing building in the middle of rural West Texas some 50 miles or so from the border with a “third world” country. I know that adds many layers of challenges and weirdness.

And I know the CBP agents can’t undo the mess we’re in or the mandates they’re given.

My beef is this: to all you CBP agents, I demand: don’t treat me or anyone else like a criminal right off the bat, and don’t ask me things that you shouldn’t be asking me, especially not with that chip on you shoulder like this is your country more than it is mine.

To wit, do not ask me:

1. Where I am going.

2. Where I have been.

3. Where I live.

4. How long I have lived there.

5. Why I am out so late at night.

6. If I have been in the [national] park. (That’s always asked in this tone, like Have you been shooting heroin?)

7. If I have seen anything “suspicious.” (That’s your job, pal. Get your boss to cut you free from the booth and do some reconnaissance.)

8. Do I mind if you “use the dogs.” (Of course I mind. So do the poor dogs – what a wretched life they must have, being kept on a short leash, sucking exhaust fumes, scratching at the sides of cars & trucks.)

9. “You been to Mexico?” (Perhaps I’m too literal, but really, what kind of silly question is this for someone in the Big Bend, and Terlingua in particular? You could at least be more specific – like, do you mean today? In the past week? Since when?)

Actually, upon reviewing Patricia Kerns’ “Civil Rights Primer” (see next article), I guess the CBP agents can ask me anything they want, really. Never hurts to try – to trip us up, see if we’re nervous, see if we seem to be lying or hiding something.

So then more precisely, when I choose to exercise my intelligence and I know my rights and refuse to answer your questions, don’t treat me like a criminal.

Several times in the past few months, for example, after their first question to me is “Are you a US citizen?” [Yes], the second question is “So, you live down South?” or “Why are you out so late at night?” I have responded with “I don’t need to answer that.” Instead of them realizing I’m right, they launch into several more insipid questions, to which I respond the same way “Nah, I’m not going to answer that, either.”

I don’t know if there’s a batch of new hires or if in training the agents, the CBP has a question of the month, but lately I’ve suddenly been getting this new one, from several different agents: “Well, ma’am, the reason I ask is that I see your car was registered in a foreign county.” (Their emphasis, not mine.)

Foreign county?

I bought my used car in San Antonio last fall, and in Texas, the registration (& license plates), if they’re still valid, transfer to the new owner.

You’d think they’d know that.

Apparently there’s something on one of those windshield stickers on my car that indicates that this car wasn’t originally registered in Brewster County.

So what? What does this have to do with illegal immigration?

Again, I blame it on bad training and individuals “just doing my job, ma’am.”

But that’s no excuse.

I am a US citizen, and I am not doing anything illegal.

Which I have mentioned to several agents during such exchanges.

To which one responded “Yeah, but anyone can say they’re a citizen. What if you’re not?”

Aha! But you see, I am a US citizen, and I am not doing anything illegal. Isn’t that what they’re there to figure out? And when it’s determined that I pass, why is it presumed I might be lying? At what point do we end the charade, stop the attempted interrogation, stop the condescension, and let me go?

If they want to know if I’m a US citizen, why not just ask me for some definitive identification and be done with it?

What that agent’s snide comment reveals is that we have come to this: even though I am a citizen, and not breaking any laws, I am treated with doubt, suspicion, and I am harassed – for being a law-abiding citizen in my own country, who’s helping pay the agent’s salary.

The last acrimonious exchange we had at the station south of Alpine resulted in us demanding the agent call his supervisor out of the station (to which he first responded that “There’s no supervisor here;” upon pressing further, we learned that not true).

The supervisor, when asked if we were free to leave, said the problem was that, in essence, “your behavior fits the profile of people who are smuggling drugs.”

What nonsense, I argued. “If I were smuggling drugs, why would I draw more attention to myself and risk get ting delayed here? ”

I have since learned from a local lawyer that the supervisor’s claim was also patently false, as none of the 38 cases reviewed in which suspects are taken into custody via the CBP agents there includes suspects arguing with agents as we were.

Another oddity: the first agent and his supervisor maintained that the receipt taped to our windshield that indicated we’d visited Big Bend National Park that week “says to us that you’re from out of the area.”

Again, nonsense. All that receipt indicates is that I, like everyone else who goes into the park when the entrance station is open, paid an entrance fee. How can agents working so near the park not be made aware of that? Or are they just testing me?

And even if I was from “out of the area,” so what? (Brewster County Tourism Council, anyone?)

During this same interchange, the first agent also asked if we’d “mind” if he “used the dogs” to inspect our vehicle, and when we declined to allow this, he told us we might have to pull over and be detained; that’s when we asked for his supervisor. When we shared this tidbit with his supervisor, the supervisor responded with “I don’t know why he’d say that: we don’t even have the dogs here tonight.”

Meantime, we were surrounded by about 6 CBP agents staring us down, while the supervisor spoke with us, several times suggesting we just needed “to be more polite. Politeness goes a long way.”

(Recently, after another unpleasant albeit brief exchange at the CBP station south of Alpine, we were pulled over around 2:15 a.m. just south of Alpine by a DPS agent for having license plate lights out, and then harassed for about 10 minutes until it was abundantly clear to the agent that we were in fact, totally sober and had no open containers of alcohol, just like we said right from the start and during each of the subsequent three to four repeats of those questions.)

Maybe the law enforcement folks expect that we’re lying because they do it so often themselves.

Really, what good does this serve? I don’t know what the CBP agents come away thinking, but I know I feel even more violated, angry, and uncooperative – INsecure, in fact, despite the agency’s mission stationment/motto.

Yes, I know the agency uncovers a lot of drugs being smuggled into the US; I get weekly press releases from the CBP.

That these tactics work to sift out some illegal immigration and some illegal drug trade does not in any way justify me or any of us being harassed in, and expected to act stupid, in our own country.

On a recent vacation in Florida, a family member asked us what we thought of immigration reform and the proposed fence along the US border with Mexico. My husband and publisher of The Gazette, John, made a very salient point: “I don’t know that this is likely to be resolved anytime soon...I do know that the enthusiasm for the notion of a border fence and border enforcement in general increases greatly the farther one gets from the border.”

Funny how that is.

And when we share stories with friends and families who are unfamiliar with being harassed by agents of their own government on a regular basis for merely driving to the grocery store, they are somewhat incredulous. Aghast, even.

This doesn’t sound like the land of the free to them. It sounds like a police state.