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Another Canadian Banned From the U.S. for Past Drug Use

posted by martyb on Thursday August 17 2017, @05:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-get-past-your-past dept.

takyon writes:

A Canadian woman was issued a lifetime ban from entering the U.S. after officials searched her unlocked smartphone, found an email to her doctor about a fentanyl overdose she survived, and asked her questions about her past drug use:

A British Columbia woman was issued a lifetime ban at the US border after officials found an email with her doctor about a fentanyl overdose she survived a year ago.

Chelsea, 28, whose last name is being withheld due to fears that it could affect future employment, answered a series of questions about drug use while attempting to cross the Washington-British Columbia border. She said her phone, which didn't have a password, was searched for about two hours. During questioning after her phone was searched, she admitted to using illegal drugs before, including cocaine.

At the US border, the searching of electronic devices, including smartphones, is allowed as part of inspection. Warrantless searches on phones are also allowed at the Canadian border—a practice defense lawyers are trying to end.

"It was super violating—I couldn't believe they went into my sent emails folder and found something from a year ago that was addressed to my doctor," Chelsea said. "It was really humiliating, and it felt terrible having to bring that up."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently released a one-page security assessment of the U.S.-Canadian border that identified drug smuggling (including cocaine and fentanyl) as well as "unidentified [Canadian] homegrown violent extremists" as security challenges:

The drugs that are commonly transported into Canada from the United States are cocaine and methamphetamine. Ecstasy, fentanyl and marijuana are smuggled into the U.S. from Canada.

[...] "This report identifies several areas where we can improve border security — especially in combating drug trafficking and preventing potential acts of terrorism," Katko, R-Camillus, said. "Stopping the influx of drugs coming into our country through the northern border is of particular concern, given the heroin and opioid epidemic plaguing central New York."

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:50AM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 19 2017, @02:50AM (#556249) Journal

    Any dictionary will tell you that the noun right can mean a general authority to do something, particularly in an idiom like that, not merely your circumscribed definition.

    Not the Oxford Dictionary [oxforddictionaries.com]:

    A moral or legal entitlement to have or do something.
    [with infinitive] ‘she had every right to be angry’
    ‘you're quite within your rights to ask for your money back’
    [mass noun] ‘there is no right of appeal against the decision’

    Earlier, you wrote:

    If a businessman was carrying a giant filing cabinet on his shoulder across an international border, and they searched it and found records of embezzlement and illicit transactions

    Why should they have the "right" to do that? Those records of embezzlement and whatnot are irrelevant to anything the border guard should be searching for. As it turns out, apparently, they can't just do that. They need [wikipedia.org] legal justification before they can go beyond the routine.

    The Supreme Court has held "that the detention of a traveler at the border, beyond the scope of a routine customs search and inspection, is justified at its inception if customs agents, considering all the facts surrounding the traveler and her trip, reasonably suspect that the traveler is smuggling contraband in her alimentary canal." (emphasis added)[22] Characterized in terms of the Fourth Amendment, the Court was saying that such a detention ("seizure") was "reasonable", and therefore did not violate the Fourth Amendment. (The federal agents in this particular case did not X-ray ("search") her because she claimed she was pregnant. They instead decided to detain her long enough for ordinary bowel movements to evacuate the alimentary canal, despite her "heroic" efforts otherwise.)

    The Supreme Court expressly did not rule what level of suspicion would be necessary for a strip, body-cavity, or involuntary x-ray search,[23] though they did say that the only two standards for Fourth Amendment purposes short of a warrant were "reasonable suspicion" and "probable cause" (rejecting a "clear indication" standard).

    In the border search context, reasonable suspicion means that the facts known to the customs officer at the time of the search, combined with the officer's reasonable inferences from those facts, provides the officer with a particularized and objective basis for suspecting that the search will reveal contraband.[24] To form a basis for reasonable suspicion, a customs officer may rely on his training and prior experience, and may rely on entirely innocent factors, if the totality of the circumstances provide the officer with reasonable suspicion.

    In particular, the claimed basis of rejection, indirect evidence of illegal activity within a year, is not within the purview of the border officer or customs agent. It'll be interesting to see who actually made that judgment to bar her from entering. It shouldn't have been a flunky in the field.

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 19 2017, @10:19PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday August 19 2017, @10:19PM (#556510) Journal

    Any dictionary will tell you that the noun right can mean a general authority to do something, particularly in an idiom like that, not merely your circumscribed definition.

    Not the Oxford Dictionary [oxforddictionaries.com]:

    A moral or legal entitlement to have or do something.
            [with infinitive] ‘she had every right to be angry’

    I think you need to go back and read what you just quoted. The border officials had a "legal entitlement" (in your definition) under their "general authority" (as I put it) to search in this manner. Whether or not they SHOULD have such authority/entitlement is a separate question. Regardless, your sense of "right" is a subset of that definition you quoted, which was my point.

    As for the rest, you do realize you were quoting a Supreme Court decision dealing with body cavity searches, right? That's a bit different from going through your papers -- which customs officials DO have the right to request to do, as they can with anything you're carrying with you and transporting into the country. What they can't do is do personally "invasive" searches (like body cavity searches, strip searches, etc.) without "reasonable suspicion, nor can they do "destructive" searches (though they can do non-destructive searches, even including disassembling parts of your car, with no suspicion whatsoever). And they can't REPEATEDLY detain you at the border without some justification, though a single extended detention as happened here is pretty common even without suspicion.

    So yeah, they could definitely spend some time leafing through your filing cabinet. As to whether they could take any action based on information of illegal activities they might find there.. well, that depends a lot on the particular situation. As you say, they're mostly tasked with stuff related to what comes into the country, so obviously they can't themselves arrest you for embezzlement or whatever in my scenario. They could in most cases report you to the authorities, and if you weren't a citizen, they could likely definitely deny you entry if such evidence appeared to point to a serious crime.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 20 2017, @10:49AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 20 2017, @10:49AM (#556640) Journal

      The border officials had a "legal entitlement" (in your definition) under their "general authority" (as I put it) to search in this manner.

      If you need to use "quotes" when discussing definitions, then you probably are doing semantics quibbling.

      The thing that gets me here is in a story about a potential violation of a visiting foreigner's rights to due process (and to a lesser extent, privacy), you're choosing to conflate the word "right" in a different and incorrect context? The border guard or whatever has some authority, power, or duty to search people at the border. But it is not an entitlement.

      It sounds a lot like claiming that allowing people to pass through the US's borders without arbitrarily intrusive searches of their property at the whim of the searchers is somehow a violation of the rights of the border guards? What do you think?