When Riding the Bus Turns into a Ticket to Jail

[babylonsister]

When Riding the Bus Turns into a Ticket to Jail
By Caroline Kim and Jenna Loyd, ColorLines. Posted June 23, 2008.

Border Patrol agents are checking the citizenship status of travelers passing through by bus and train every day in New York, deporting immigrants.


In December 2007, Artemio and two of his friends were traveling by bus through Syracuse, New York on their way to their homes in Mexico. Rather than celebrating Christmas with their families, however, the three men were arrested by immigration agents at a bus station. They were then detained at a county jail before being transferred to the ICE facility in Batavia, New York, and eventually deported to Mexico.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, also known as the Border Patrol, confirms that its agents in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo check the citizenship status of travelers passing through by bus and train every day. These three cities are within 100 miles of the US-Canadian border. But more important than the border zone is the location of these cities on a major transportation corridor linking the Northeast (New York City and Boston) with the Midwest (Cleveland and Chicago). Border Patrol agents use Syracuse's location as the functional equivalent of the border to police people traveling within the interior of the country.

Agents check for citizenship in the bus and train station -- often waiting at the Greyhound ticket counter, or watching people as they disembark for food -- and onboard buses and trains already filled with passengers. People who have witnessed or been subject to Border Patrol agents questioning describe two practices: agents explicitly target a group of people or ask everyone on board about their citizenship status.

According to reports from the Detainment Task Force, a Northern New York group, people routinely singled out for questioning include those who appear to be Mexican, Central American, South Asian, Asian, Afro-Caribbean, or Middle Eastern. Border Patrol officials deny that the agency racially profiles, insisting that they look for suspicious behaviors and, "question people with blond hair and blue eyes as much as anyone else." But common understandings of race in the U.S. fuse nationality and ethnicity so that some groups are permanently deemed to be "foreign."

more...

http://www.alternet.org/immigration/89021/?page=entire

[midnight]

1. Remember when you only heard or read about this stuff from

history on Nazi Germany?

[babylonsister]

2. Yes, I never remember having to 'show my papers'. nt