ACLU Sues to Force Feds to Reveal how Secret Border Search Teams Target Travelers
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
When Andreas Gal, CEO of Silk Labs and a US citizen, returned to the US from a business trip in Europe last year, he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for secondary screening. He claims he was threatened with unwarranted charges, denied access to an attorney, and told he had to unlock his electronic devices before he would be allowed to leave.
[...] Despite being told he had no right to an attorney, he says he refused to answer questions and was eventually allowed to go without unlocking his devices, though his Global Entry card - a subscription-based biometric border entry program to facilitate travel - was taken from him.
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued CBP claiming that the agency maintains secretive units to "detain, search, question, and/or deny entry to people with valid travel documents who present no security risk."
The ACLU complaint, filed in the Eastern District of New York, seeks CBP documents under the Freedom of Information Act that the agency has refused to produce.
It contends that these Tactical Terrorism Response Teams (TTRTs) have operated for the past few years and target individuals, including US citizens, "who do not present a security risk but may hold information or have a connection to individuals of interest to the US government."
"The public has a right to know how these teams operate, how their officers are trained, and whether the guidelines that govern their activities contain civil liberties and privacy safeguards," the ACLU said in a statement announcing its lawsuit.
The complaint says TTRTs target people without valid cause, based on hunches and instinct, raising the likelihood that travelers are subject to profiling based on race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, or proxies for those attributes. As such, TTRTs may be violating protections guaranteed by the US Constitution.
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