When Will We All Need to Carry Identity Papers?
by Jerry Lanson
Once again, what we don't know about the erosion of rights in this country can be as bad as what we do.
While Americans debate and litigate the Arizona law authorizing search and seizure of anyone police "reasonably suspect" to be an illegal immigrant, U.S. immigration officials on trains and buses up to 100 miles south of the Canadian border are confronting and sometimes strip-searching dark-skinned passengers whose only "crime" may be that they bought a public-transportation ticket to travel within the United States, The New York Times reports.
It's part of what some consider the new and improved border patrols to protect "the homeland" from potential terrorists. No matter that the kind of people being stopped, The Times reports, include an 60-year-old Ecuadoran-born U.S. citizen who carries a passport while visiting her sister in the Midwest because she's been stopped before and hassled without it. No matter that it includes a Taiwanese-born PhD student who, two days after delivering a paper at a Chicago conference, was taken from a train -- one that had never crossed any borders -- in Batavia, N.Y., strip-searched in a detention center and held, facing detention, because his visa had expired. No matter that a 21-year-old Long Island high school graduate was taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester, N.Y., held for three weeks while her mother frantically tried to reach her and released at night at a rural Texas gas station.
These are not rumors. They are true stories, reported and told by The New York Times. They smack of overt racial profiling: How many blue-eyed Swedes and fair-skinned Russians do you think have been stopped on the trains and buses, whether they are gangsters, terrorists or simply PhD students? And they raise chilling reminders of World War II movies in which Nazi soldiers would walk down the aisles of trains looking for Jews.
"It's turned into a police state on the northern border," Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester told The Times. He said foreign students, scholars and parents all have been questioned and, in some cases, jailed because the patrol did not recognize their legal status, the paper reports.
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http://realityzone-realityzone.blogspot.com/2010/08/when-will-we-all-need-to-carry-identity.html
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