Roving Border Patrols conducting illegal checkpoints inside the U.S.
TX - Jaime Zaldaña was driving to work on Interstate 35 through the San Antonio suburb of Schertz on a winter morning in 2010 when his red pickup passed a U.S. Border Patrol unit on the side of the highway. He was 150 miles from the nearest border crossing, in Eagle Pass.
The agents would later write that Zaldaña and two co-workers “appeared to be startled” and looked “straight ahead,” never acknowledging them — reason enough, they claimed, to pull the truck over. Zaldaña was eventually deported as an undocumented immigrant, but not before the U.S. government paid $25,000 to settle his claim the agents stopped him only because of his ethnicity and race, according to public court documents.
Most Texans probably think of the Border Patrol as doing what the agency’s name suggests: interrupting illegal activity along the line separating the U.S. from Mexico. Yet over the last decade, agents have regularly made arrests deep inside Texas, according to an American-Statesman investigation into the little-known realm of the Border Patrol’s interior enforcement operations.
Between 2005 and 2013, agents apprehended more than 40,000 subjects at the nine most inland Border Patrol stations representing locations as far as 350 miles from Mexico — an average of more than 10 per day, according to numbers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
In numerous cases, the arrests occurred more than 100 miles from the border, a blurry line of demarcation drawn a half-century ago. Some resulted from the same controversial roving highway patrols that nabbed Zaldaña, in locations not typically associated with border enforcement: San Antonio, Odessa and San Angelo.
While the agency has insisted the 100-mile line doesn’t limit its activities, courts have ruled that agents need stronger justification to stop motorists the farther they are from the border. And critics say roving interior patrols inevitably lead to agents pulling over motorists based only on their racial appearance, resulting in unconstitutional stops of American citizens and legal residents — the Border Patrol says it does not keep track of the numbers of those stops.
Judges have voided Texas stops because of agents’ flimsy pretexts, though the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which adjudicates immigration cases, doesn’t track that number, either. Advocates say the number of decisions understates the reality because immigrants rarely challenge the stops.
“You ask yourself: what else do (Border Patrol) agents have to go on besides race?” said San Antonio immigration attorney David Armendáriz, one of the few attorneys nationally to regularly pursue such cases. “What does an immigrant without papers look like? Because your average immigrant without papers looks like your average Hispanic.”
In response to the Statesman’s requests seeking details of the agency’s enforcement actions far from the border, it provided only general numbers on arrests — and those only after the newspaper formally appealed the agency’s initial refusal to respond to a Freedom of Information request.
Those numbers show apprehensions have fallen steeply in the Texas interior to 1,459 last year, down from 4,448 in 2010 and 9,234 in 2005. During the same time, staffing levels at those interior stations have remained relatively stable — ranging from 47 to 66 agents over the last decade. The agency wouldn’t reveal staffing levels or apprehension numbers at individual stations.
But in important ways, the information fails to provide a full picture of the agency’s activities deep within the state.
Officials wouldn’t provide the location of the interior arrests, for example. So, while all of the substations are close to, or beyond the 100-mile zone, it is impossible to determine which apprehensions occurred beyond that line. Nor would the agency say how many of the inland arrests were the result of roving patrols, rather than checkpoint stops or joint operations with other agencies.
Others seeking information about the agency’s work away from the border have also encountered obstacles. American Civil Liberties Union chapters in Arizona and Washington state sued the Border Patrol last year in an attempt to obtain roving patrol information in those states. A congressional effort to require annual reports of the Border Patrol’s interior activities failed earlier this year.
The Border Patrol also says it doesn’t track how many U.S. citizens or legal residents it pulls over during its roving patrols far from the border. The agency denied a Statesman request to visit an interior station and speak with agents.
In 2007, a Border Patrol agent on roving patrol in San Antonio — about 130 miles from the Mexico border — stopped a Guatemalan immigrant based on his apparent nervousness and the appearance of his “cheekbones, jaws, ears, and forehead.” The agent said the facial features gave the man the look of an “OTM,” or Other Than Mexican immigrant.
In declaring the stop illegal, immigration Judge Glenn McPhaul wrote that the arresting agent couldn’t answer “how one Hispanic person might stand out from another as an illegal alien when the Hispanic population is so high in San Antonio.”
Border Patrol agents operating in the state’s interior have cited other vague suspicions to stop drivers. In 2010, agents stopped four men driving on FM 187 in the Hill Country town of Vanderpool, 90 air miles from the border crossing in Del Rio.
“The typical drivers on these roads are very friendly and courteous, especially when they see our marked Border Patrol vehicles,” one of the agents said in a sworn statement. “Instead of waiving to me like the typical drivers in the area, the driver’s facial expression changed immediately upon making eye contact with me.”
Roving patrol stops of U.S. citizens also sparked a 2012 lawsuit by the Washington state ACLU, which accused the agency of failing to establish reasonable suspicion before stopping motorists in the Olympic Peninsula. According to the lawsuit, the Border Patrol’s actions often seemed “based on nothing other than the ethnic and/or racial appearance of a vehicle’s occupants.”
Last year, the Border Patrol settled the lawsuit without admitting wrongdoing and agreed to provide its agents in the area with additional training in constitutional privacy rights. The agency also agreed to publicly disclose its traffic stop information for 18 months. According to that data, in the year following the settlement, Border Patrol made only seven roving patrol stops in the area.
Border Patrol smashes their way into vehicle after man refuses to comply with illegal checkpoint:
A man in Texas was dragged from his vehicle by border patrol agents who smashed through his window after he refused to answer their questions at a checkpoint more than 50 miles away from the Southern border.
“I am pretty sure my rights were infringed upon at the Hwy 281 Border Patrol Checkpoint just south of Falfurrias, Texas,” Thomas Sauer wrote on his YouTube Channel, following the incident during which he was arrested and held at the facility.
During the exchange, captured on Sauer’s cell phone, six Border Patrol agents are seen gathering around his truck threatening to smash their way in as he refuses to entertain questions over whether he is an American citizen.
Sauer repeatedly tells the lead agent “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve not broken any laws.”
The agent cites a law, 18 U.S. Code § 111, which pertains to “Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees.”
“This is the only basis that the agent tried to use to detain me. As invalid as his basis was, even if he managed to actually find a way to properly execute this, it is still subordinate to the constitution.” Sauer notes, citing Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure, and the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
When he accuses the agents of using intimidation tactics, the lead agent says “it is not intimidation, it is the law,” before smashing his way into the truck through the window, and dragging Sauer out. Sauer was held, questioned and subsequently released.