In this photo that has been widely circulated on social media, customs agents can be seen inspecting the IDs of passengers disembarking from a domestic flight from San Francisco to New York City.
It is delusional to pretend that a border enforcement Regime will employ police state methods only at the border. For the past decade and a half, if not longer, the Border Patrol has operated checkpoints within 100 miles of the border, thereby creating a de facto “Constitution-free zone” that encompasses, by one estimate, two-thirds of the US population.
Apparently the Customs and Border Protection agency has simply expanded its “Constitution-free zone” inward — by implicitly claiming that any commercial passenger service operating between San Francisco and New York is subject to ID checkpoints as well. Americans should take note of the fact that from the CBP’s perspective, their agents patrol a free-fire zone in which they can use lethal force at their discretion.
Two days ago, the Trump administration — inheriting a controversy from its predecessor — argued before the Supreme Court in defense of the proposition that a Border Patrol agent can summarily execute someone who is outside the borders of the United States, because constitutional writ does not run beyond the border. That case involved the unlawful killing of a 15-year-old who was standing on the Mexican side of the border when he was shot in the face by the Border Patrol agent.
Two years ago, an appeals court in Texas threw out the victim’s lawsuit, claiming that constitutional protections didn’t apply to the victim because he was a non-citizen with few if any “voluntary” ties to the U.S.
If the Constitution carried out its advertised function, its terms would apply wherever the federal government or its agents claimed the authority to act. In practice, the term “Constitution” refers to a protean and largely unwritten body of privileges that can be invoked to justify practically anything that is done on behalf of the Regime — as the immortal Lysander Spooner warned long ago.
(This essay has been corrected from an earlier version.)
