Let Me See Your Papers, Please

The NY Times rightly suggests that the Border Patrol is getting a bit aggressive in their work away from the border:

Editorial - On the Lake Shore Limited - NYTimes.com

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.

[…]

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.

But we are headed for an increasingly policed state, where we will be forced to prove our identity, the purpose of our travel, and to be subjected to search whenever the ‘authorities’ — any clown with a badge — brace us; especially at 2am on a darkened train in the middle of nowhere.

It will take only one ‘terrorist’ incident on a train or a bus, and we’ll be passing through metal detectors before getting into the subway. You wait and see.