6 ms·

>a border guard who is having a bad day. This is not to be understated. I was born a US citizen. Last time I entered the country, officers faked that a dog ha

>a border guard who is having a bad day. 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 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6451513/cervantes-v-uni...

lmarcos 4y ago
And that's another reason I will never visit the USA.
- mistertester 4y ago
  No one cares
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  I know an intellectual, talking about Harvard inviting him to go talk there, and he was like nah, traveling to the States is too hard. Too much security, too painful, flying hurts. It's not the same America it was back then, either, the Rolling Stones in New York type of thing. A lot of anymosity.
- Maursault 4y ago
  Me either. That's why I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia where I enjoy strong mental health patients' rights. Of course, this also means living without 4th or 5th Amendment protections.
- refurb 4y ago
  Exactly. I'll only visit safe countries like China.
  - ngc248 4y ago
    dunno whether your comment is sarcastic or not... But it is definitely not safe to visit china. After the case of the two canadians, it is always a risk and there were some incidents before that also.
    - DocTomoe 4y ago
      In all fairness, I have no doubt the very same thing - getting detained and/or imprisoned under dubious pretences - can happen to you in the US. In fact, given US policing culture, I expect hundreds of such cases happening in the US right now and no-one caring because 'that's just what the yankees do'.
ddorian43 4y ago
Why did you deny an x-ray? I understand anal probing but don't understand x-ray?
- gumby 4y ago
  The commenter had done nothing wrong, and anyway had no need for gratuitous exposure to radiation. 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.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > The commenter had done nothing wrong... 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.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      You know it all don't you, even though you weren't there? Care to use your 'belligerence behavior' to embellish more tales? >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.985537/gov.uscourts.azd.985537.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > You know it all don't you, even though you weren't there? Care to use your 'belligerence behavior' to embellish more tales? 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 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 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.
ROTMetro 4y ago
I was super upset after visiting China and returning to the USA. Our immigration people were so much more authoritarian scary than the Chinese had been. And the Chinese had this cool smiley computer interface where you rated the chinese immigration official for their interaction on the spot. So China was not only friendlier and more welcoming, but also more accountable. We really need to check ourselves in America. Our Federal Government is out of control (I say this as someone who was failed by the Courts only to have them completely reverse themselves with respect to their rulings against me when COVID came because it would have been inconvenient to follow their precedent because people would die so they finally had actually follow the law, not the Bureau of Prison's Court supported 'interpretation' of the law, and as someone who was abused (I guess we no longer use the torture term) while incarcerated). 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).
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Yeah I don't know most of the TSA was just doing their job the best they could. I've come to respect their mandate a lot, reading the history of aviation and how it's all a crazy game to not go splat. It's not the fact of traveling, it's the fact of traveling ON AN AIRPLANE. Everything about it. The basic nature of aviation is it's closely tied to suicide. It's like interwoven with suicide. They are the two threads of one fabric, that give it a color in between, like cloth woven with gold. It's really goddamn dangerous to fly, you're relying on so many parts to work right, despite letting random guys on the street in their pijamas on board with their cellphones, and asking for fucking internet connectivity, no. 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.
BonoboIO 4y ago
As a guy from Europe i m just speechless. 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.
austinl 4y ago
Also born a US citizen. My experience was fortunately not as bad as yours, but it still gives me a bit of anxiety every time I return to the US. I can't imagine what it'd be like as non-white foreigner. 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.
culi 4y ago
ProPublica did a story on this type of stuff. There have been many instances of ICE agents doing "mass deports" where they round up groups of people and deport them all. It's hard to keep track of this sort of thing but likely hundreds of people with full citizenship and mental disabilities have ended up deported to a country they know nobody at. Not that the fact that they're us citizens makes this any more fucked up, but it highlights how much power they really have 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
perfopt 4y ago
It is because of things like this and more that I decided not to live in the US and moved home after grad school. Of course many of my friends and (then) countrymen/countrywomen decided to live in the US and chase the dream. 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.

lmarcos 4y ago

And that's another reason I will never visit the USA.

mistertester 4y ago
No one cares
daniel-cussen 4y ago
I know an intellectual, talking about Harvard inviting him to go talk there, and he was like nah, traveling to the States is too hard. Too much security, too painful, flying hurts. It's not the same America it was back then, either, the Rolling Stones in New York type of thing. A lot of anymosity.
Maursault 4y ago
Me either. That's why I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia where I enjoy strong mental health patients' rights. Of course, this also means living without 4th or 5th Amendment protections.
refurb 4y ago
Exactly. I'll only visit safe countries like China.
- ngc248 4y ago
  dunno whether your comment is sarcastic or not... But it is definitely not safe to visit china. After the case of the two canadians, it is always a risk and there were some incidents before that also.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    In all fairness, I have no doubt the very same thing - getting detained and/or imprisoned under dubious pretences - can happen to you in the US. In fact, given US policing culture, I expect hundreds of such cases happening in the US right now and no-one caring because 'that's just what the yankees do'.

ddorian43 4y ago

Why did you deny an x-ray? I understand anal probing but don't understand x-ray?

gumby 4y ago
The commenter had done nothing wrong, and anyway had no need for gratuitous exposure to radiation. 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.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > The commenter had done nothing wrong... 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.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    You know it all don't you, even though you weren't there? Care to use your 'belligerence behavior' to embellish more tales? >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.985537/gov.uscourts.azd.985537.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > You know it all don't you, even though you weren't there? Care to use your 'belligerence behavior' to embellish more tales? 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 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 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.

ROTMetro 4y ago

I was super upset after visiting China and returning to the USA. Our immigration people were so much more authoritarian scary than the Chinese had been. And the Chinese had this cool smiley computer interface where you rated the chinese immigration official for their interaction on the spot. So China was not only friendlier and more welcoming, but also more accountable. We really need to check ourselves in America. Our Federal Government is out of control (I say this as someone who was failed by the Courts only to have them completely reverse themselves with respect to their rulings against me when COVID came because it would have been inconvenient to follow their precedent because people would die so they finally had actually follow the law, not the Bureau of Prison's Court supported 'interpretation' of the law, and as someone who was abused (I guess we no longer use the torture term) while incarcerated). 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).

daniel-cussen 4y ago
Yeah I don't know most of the TSA was just doing their job the best they could. I've come to respect their mandate a lot, reading the history of aviation and how it's all a crazy game to not go splat. It's not the fact of traveling, it's the fact of traveling ON AN AIRPLANE. Everything about it. The basic nature of aviation is it's closely tied to suicide. It's like interwoven with suicide. They are the two threads of one fabric, that give it a color in between, like cloth woven with gold. It's really goddamn dangerous to fly, you're relying on so many parts to work right, despite letting random guys on the street in their pijamas on board with their cellphones, and asking for fucking internet connectivity, no. 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.

BonoboIO 4y ago

As a guy from Europe i m just speechless. 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.

austinl 4y ago

Also born a US citizen. My experience was fortunately not as bad as yours, but it still gives me a bit of anxiety every time I return to the US. I can't imagine what it'd be like as non-white foreigner. 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.

culi 4y ago

ProPublica did a story on this type of stuff. There have been many instances of ICE agents doing "mass deports" where they round up groups of people and deport them all. It's hard to keep track of this sort of thing but likely hundreds of people with full citizenship and mental disabilities have ended up deported to a country they know nobody at. Not that the fact that they're us citizens makes this any more fucked up, but it highlights how much power they really have 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

perfopt 4y ago

It is because of things like this and more that I decided not to live in the US and moved home after grad school. Of course many of my friends and (then) countrymen/countrywomen decided to live in the US and chase the dream. 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.