Introducing “Checkpoint: America

launching a new online initiative: Checkpoint America: Monitoring the Constitution-Free Zone.

For over 60 years, the executive branch has, through regulatory fiat, imposed a “border zone” that extends as much as 100 miles into the United States. Within this area–which, according to the ACLU, encompasses two-thirds of the U.S. population–are a series of Soviet-style internal checkpoints run by the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service. The majority of these stretch across the southwestern United States from southern Calfornia to the Texas Gulf Coast. As outlined below, CBP agents operating these checkpoints routinely violate the constitutional rights of citizens and other who are forced to pass through them to get to work, go to the store, or make it to a vacation destination in the American Southwest.

Because these checkpoints can be either fixed or mobile, research for this project involved the use of multiple data sources to help provide precise geolocational data and detailed physical descriptions of a given fixed checkpoint, or, where captured on overhead imagery, a temporary checkpoint. In particular, prior reports by the Government Accountability Office (2009 and 2017), as well as Google Earth and the Streetview functionality in Google Maps, were critical in helping pinpoint existing checkpoints and making possible relatively precise physical descriptions of the facilities and equipment present at each. The ACLU, including it’s Arizona chapter, also provided valuable data.

The need for this project, and for greater scrutiny of these checkpoints, is more pressing than ever.

A 1976 Supreme Court decision, U.S. v. Martinez-Fuerte, provides the primary legal justification for CBP’s operation of these checkpoints. Because of the sweeping nature of the decision and its ongoing impact, it’s worth looking at some of the key particulars of the Court’s ruling.

The case, which centered on three separate incidents involving the illicit transportation of Mexican nationals into the United States, examined the question of whether the use of such checkpoints for warrantless seizures and visual inspection (i.e., searches) violated the Fourth Amendment.

Writing for the Court’s majority, Justice Powell asserted that given the huge problem of illegal immigration and CBP’s responsibility to prevent it, under “the circumstances of these checkpoint stops, which do not involve searches, the Government or public interest in making such stops outweighs the constitutionally protected interest of the private citizen…In summary, we hold that stops for brief questioning routinely conducted at permanent checkpoints are consistent with the Fourth Amendment and need not be authorized by warrant.”