When Will We All Need to Carry Identity Papers?

[Better Believe It]

When Will We All Need to Carry Identity Papers?
by Jerry Lanson
August 30, 2010




While Americans debate and litigate the Arizona law authorizing search and seizure of anyone police "reasonably suspect" to be an illegal immigrant, U.S. immigration officials on trains and buses up to 100 miles south of the Canadian border are confronting and sometimes strip-searching dark-skinned passengers whose only "crime" may be that they bought a public-transportation ticket to travel within the United States, The New York Times reports.

It's part of what some consider the new and improved border patrols to protect "the homeland" from potential terrorists. No matter that the kind of people being stopped, The Times reports, include an 60-year-old Ecuadoran-born U.S. citizen who carries a passport while visiting her sister in the Midwest because she's been stopped before and hassled without it. No matter that it includes a Taiwanese-born PhD student who, two days after delivering a paper at a Chicago conference, was taken from a train -- one that had never crossed any borders -- in Batavia, N.Y., strip-searched in a detention center and held, facing detention, because his visa had expired. No matter that a 21-year-old Long Island high school graduate was taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester, N.Y., held for three weeks while her mother frantically tried to reach her and released at night at a rural Texas gas station.

These are not rumors. They are true stories, reported and told by The New York Times. They smack of overt racial profiling: How many blue-eyed Swedes and fair-skinned Russians do you think have been stopped on the trains and buses, whether they are gangsters, terrorists or simply PhD students? And they raise chilling reminders of World War II movies in which Nazi soldiers would walk down the aisles of trains looking for Jews.

"It's turned into a police state on the northern border," Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester told The Times. He said foreign students, scholars and parents all have been questioned and, in some cases, jailed because the patrol did not recognize their legal status, the paper reports.

War and fear erode a country's moral compass and distort its sense of just action. Subtly for most, we've lived in a state of both for nearly a decade. And in the process -- a little domestic wire-tapping here, a few false arrests of foreign-born there -- we've begun to accept the significant erosion of the very principles on which this country was founded: its openness, its acceptance of difference, and its welcoming of those with little in their wallets, but with an ethic of hard work and a can-doism that's always allowed this country to be inventive and thrive.

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/30-3

[opihimoimoi]

1. WHEN??? you ask??? The GOPers wanna do it and came very close to pulling it off

another 8 years of GOP rule after Bush woulda

Obama screwed the notion...he being Patriotic and of Positive Mode

[Gravel Democrat]

19. National ID Card Included In Democratic Immigration Bill

"The Democratic proposal includes increased money for border patrol and drug war agents, equipment, helicopters and unmanned drones. It would create a national ID -- which is dubbed a "biometric social security card." Though Democrats insist that it is not an ID card and can only be used for employment purposes. (UPDATE: See language limiting its use below.)"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/national-id-card-included_n_557721.html

[Lifelong Protester]

2. I read this and it FREAKED ME OUT

What the hell is going on here? Is this the Patriot Act run amuk? If you can find the whole article from this Sunday's NYTimes, I guarantee it will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. This searching on trains is IN THE US, not at a border crossing. It is happening on the Lakeshore Limited that runs from Chicago to Rochester NY. MILES from our border. You have to have papers to ride the damn train from Chicago to New York? What the hell kind of police state are we living in?

[Better Believe It]

4. Armed border patrol agents routinely boarding Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses demanding papers!

Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.
by Nina Bernstein
August 29, 2010

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

Read the full article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30border.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=amtrak%20immigration%20&st=cse

[Silent3]

3. Why bother with papers...

...when we can all be RFID chipped? ;)

[Sinistrous]

5. We already have to carry identy papers.

See what happens when you get stopped for breathing wrong, and can't show ID. I guarantee you will be taken to the police station, if not tossed into the crowbar hotel.

[timo]

6. true dat

its not like its anything new!!

[Better Believe It]

8. That's an awfully poor analogy. Have you ever been asked for your "papers" in your car, on public

transportation or on the street just to find out who you are, where you live, where you have been, where you are going and what your doing in the United States?

Comparing what's happening on the trains and buses in the United States to DUI arrests is a bit silly.

[Sinistrous]

11. Who said anything about DUI arrests?

"breathing" was a substitute for "acting normally".

[Better Believe It]

14. And under what laws can someone be arrested for "breathing wrong"?

That clearly has nothing to do with being asked for ones "papers" in the "hunt" for terrorists so I really don't get your point.

[Sinistrous]

20. You seem to be trying awfully hard NOT to get my point.

Which is - and I will try to put it in simple language so that even you can get it - that we already do have to be able to identify ourselves on demand from any law enforcement officer and some other officials or risk being detained or jailed. Most of us - without thinking much about it - just whip out a DL or other ID when asked. But someone who is out jogging or biking and who doesn't happen to have ID on their person, is very likely to be detained under current law, policies, and procedures.

My original point is that the "show me your papers" policy is less new than you seem to believe.

[Sinistrous]

22. The "war on Terror" is just another excuse to harass and control

us "mere civilians."

[timo]

18. yes

any time I want to drive north of where I live I have to go thru immigration checkpoints and they ask all these questions and more!!

[Better Believe It]

10. No we don't. You have to prove your're licensed to drive if you're operating a motor vechicle.

That's not the same as "identity papers" proving you are "legally" in the United States.

[Sinistrous]

12. Who said anythig about being in or driving a car?

[Better Believe It]

15. So what "identity papers" are you required to have on your person?

If you don't want to be held, arrested or deported.

I've never been worried about government police demanding to see my "papers" as part of a routine "check" until now.

This is new and different.

You don't see that?

[Sinistrous]

23. (Insert reply #20 here)

[emilyg]

7. I carry driver's lic. and medicare card

at all times.

[Better Believe It]

9. So what? Do you also carry your citizenship papers or U.S. birth certificate on you at all times?

If not, why not?

[562dem]

13. Which is why we have to fight the national ID cards with all we got

[gratuitous]

16. Soon, very soon

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, but we're getting there.

And you want to know how it will be sold to the public? Read and learn:

As the Arizona law gets a little more use, there will be a predictable outcry from people who are stopped time and again for EWH, existing while Hispanic. Some black people will also be subjected to the same treatment. In fact even a few of the "good" Hispanics and blacks will be stopped and harrassed, and it will be at that point that a consensus will develop: This is a bad law, as applied. The devil in the details will be "as applied." In order to save throwing out the "national security" baby with the "unconstitutional" bathwater, a "compromise" will be reached. Rather than repeal the law, it will be applied to everyone! If you don't like being stopped for no apparent reason, you're clearly on the side of the terrorists, because they're really the only people who won't like being detained by law enforcement personnel. You don't have anything to hide, do you? Then just get used to carrying a photo ID, and having it ready for inspection at all times. What's the problem with that? You already do it to write a check or go on an airplane. We're just expanding those "safeguards" so that everyone can be totally safe all the time.

And if you're some subversive civil libertarian who really believes that land of the free jazz, well just get ready for all sorts of governmental intrusion into your personal affairs. Living in the United States will no longer carry any expectation of personal privacy, but it's really for your own good and security.

[BeHereNow]

17. Well Halliburton has all those "detention centers" to fill you know-

The stockholders are waiting for the profits.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/171/171_freedom_rider_halliburton_detention_centers.html

The Patriot Act should have been repealed by now,
but that would not be in the interest of those who stand to profit
by the incarceration of the brown people among us.

BHN

[TK421]

21. Who needs identity papers when we all have social security numbers...oh, wait..nevermind n/t