U.S. Border Patrol agents are reported to be dismayed that they are now reviled by many Americans rather than respected. Dismayed, perhaps, but surely not surprised, what with the mistreatment of migrants at the southwestern border and the routine violation of civil liberties at the northern, typified by recent checkpoints in Lebanon and on the Champlain Islands in Vermont.
It’s hard to keep your hands clean when you are tasked with a dirty job.
It wasn’t always this way, as The New York Times reported last week. For many years, Border Patrol agents labored in obscurity, enduring long periods of boredom punctuated by occasional high-octane chases to interdict smuggling of humans or drugs.
That changed when the agency became the face of the Trump administration’s systematic persecution of immigrants. The agency is said to be now undergoing a crisis in morale and mission as the result of the scrutiny it is receiving. Franciso Cantu, author of The Line Becomes a River, a memoir of his years with the agency from 2008 to 2012, told the Times, “The intense criticism that is being directed at the Border Patrol is necessary and important because I do think that there’s a culture of cruelty or callousness. There’s a lack of oversight. There is a lot of impunity.”
Which brings us to the checkpoint that about 20 Border Patrol and Homeland Security agents erected for a full day earlier this month between exits 19 and 18 of Interstate 89 in Lebanon, snarling traffic and impeding hundreds of motorists who were doing nothing more nefarious than going about their busy daily lives.
This police-state extravaganza, mounted 95 miles from the Canadian border, netted a total of four undocumented immigrants, or “illegal aliens” as the Border Patrol would have it.
Three separate checkpoints conducted in June, July and September on the Sandbar Causeway between Milton and South Hero, Vt., have resulted in the detention of exactly one person “illegally present” in the country, according to the VtDigger news organization.
That the Border Patrol, with 1,800 jobs it is unable to fill, should waste resources in such a fashion is nothing less than a scandal.
Border Patrol representatives decline to provide the rationale for the decision of when and where to conduct checkpoints, other than to allude to it being driven by “intelligence.” That certainly cannot be the case, given the paltry yield of detentions. In fact, nobody in their right mind would set up a checkpoint at the same place for three separate months in the same summer. Surely, the word has spread through the migrant community by now.
Moreover, no one with an ounce of intelligence would snarl traffic all day in close proximity to a major medical center, to which patients and health care workers must have unimpeded access, just to inquire about the immigration status of motorists and their passengers. If that doesn’t rise to cruelty, it surely counts as callousness. Or worse yet, trying to make a point.
Not everyone, of course, is troubled by this show of farce.
Ray Allen, sheriff of Vermont’s Grand Isle County, applauds the checkpoints. “If nothing else,” he told VtDigger, “it’s sending out a message that you need to be careful when you’re coming through Vermont, that we are watching.”
State Rep. Leland Morgan, R-Milton, said, “We have to secure our borders, and if it inconveniences a person once in a while, that’s just the way it is. You have to have some compromise, you can’t let everybody do everything they want to do. There has to be some control, and I’m all for that.”
These statements are remarkable in two respects. First, it is doubtful that a state as heavily dependent on tourism as Vermont wants to send a message to prospective visitors that they need to be “careful” when traveling in the Green Mountain State because they are being watched by the authorities. That does not sound to us like an enticing vacation spot.
Second, for an elected Republican official to endorse inconveniencing and controlling the civilian population is the exact opposite of traditional conservative thought, which holds that the essence of liberty is the right to be left alone, to be free from government intrusion in one’s private affairs unless there is probable cause to suspect wrongdoing. These checkpoints are surely the kind of thing that the nation’s founders sought to preclude when they wrote the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.
It is vital to resist these random, warrantless motor vehicle stops. They are a dangerous precursor to a society where armed representatives of the government can stop anyone, anytime, for any reason — at the polling station, at the grocery store, coming out of the library — and demand to see identification.
Having to routinely “show your papers” is a hallmark of authoritarian government, a direction in which America could be headed unless the public says loudly and firmly, “No.”