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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.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:20PM (3 children)
They haven't given up completely, but they are definitely getting soft [aclu.org].
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 21 2019, @09:51PM (1 child)
Yeech, they really went full-rootless cosmopolitan NPR-style with that one. I wonder how those lawyers would feel when these "immigrant families" move next door to them and illegally vote for more in federal elections because "voting rights."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 21 2019, @11:09PM
Thank you for finding this. That was my point.
Fight for immigrants' lawful rights, yes. Fight to actively import more / let illegals stay, hell no.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NickM on Saturday December 21 2019, @10:51PM
I don't think there getting soft but I think that you misunderstand their purpose. They are not called the traditionalist constitution association nor the freedom of speech organization, they are called the American civil liberties union. It's right in the name they are an union so they are to the left of the political spectrum. And they work to defend civil liberties : rights that the government commit not to infringe either via positives (granting a new right) or negatives (limiting an existing right to avoid infringement on a more fundamental right) legislation. But rights are sometimes conflicting, from your link
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !