August 31, 2010
On the Lake Shore Limited
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/o...wed2.html?_r=1
To see what immigration hard-liners really have in mind, ride the Lake Shore Limited between Chicago and New York or Boston. It is a daily Amtrak train that is regularly boarded and searched by the Border Patrol, even though it does not cross any international border.
As Nina Bernstein of The Times reported on Monday, border checkpoints aren’t just at the border anymore. She rode the train in western New York and found agents roaming the aisles, questioning passengers about their citizenship and removing those who could not prove they were here legally. What she described looked like just the kind of aggressive internal immigration enforcement that right-wing politicians have clamored for, but is arbitrary, oppressive and dangerously prone to racial profiling.
The Border Patrol says agents ask for people’s documents as part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation.” Passengers could decline to answer, but some told Ms. Bernstein that was theoretical, if not fictional, especially on a darkened train at 2 a.m. And train riders and civil-rights advocates told Ms. Bernstein that the burden of document checks falls hardest on people who look like foreigners. A woman who encountered the Border Patrol while riding a train with her boyfriend, who is Mexican, said: “You’re sitting on the train asleep, and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”
This should not be happening. We are well aware of the federal crackdown on illegal immigration, sparked by the clamor for fencing and troops at the border. But we do not recall any discussion of imposing internal immigration checks on public transportation, with agents with dogs and guns randomly hauling people off trains.
The Border Patrol’s mission includes interrogating people as they enter and leave the country, and it is authorized to operate within 100 miles of the border. But as its budget and manpower have soared since 9/11, it is looking like an agency distorted by mission creep, especially on the relatively quiet northern border. In the Rochester area, in western New York, border agents removed 2,788 passengers from trains from October 2005 to September 2009. Rochester sits on Lake Ontario across from Canada, but it is no border city; the border is far out in the middle of the lake.
There is probably a reason the Border Patrol is waging its little-noted campaign on Amtrak and buses way out in rural and western New York and not, say, on the D subway to Coney Island, which happens to be near Kennedy International Airport. Border checks on New York City trains would prompt a much louder clamor about misplaced priorities and racial profiling, and harsher questions about whether the crackdown has anything to do with making the country safer.
Administration officials, including the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have recently said their top priority is catching convicted criminals, gang members and other dangerous immigrants. We welcome the call for restraint and discretion in using limited resources. Someone should tell the Border Patrol.