There is always more to a story then what is printed. I wonder why the agents would spend hours on one individual. Perhaps they knew something we don’t.
This is actually fairly common. They could be searching for anything from contacts with terrorists to evidence that the person lied on their visa application.
Prior SCOTUS rulings have held that until you clear customs and immigration you are technically NOT in the U.S., and thus Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.
SPAM
“There is always more to a story then what is printed. I wonder why the agents would spend hours on one individual. Perhaps they knew something we don’t.”
1) No, there isn’t.
2) People sometimes get randomly picked for extra screening by the TSA. It happened on a flight I was on when TSA agents arrived at the gate as my flight was about to board and they made every other passenger in line unpack their bags in front of the entire flight and search them. I happened to be one of the odd one’s out. I was flying into Oakland, to go to a photography seminar in San Fransisco and they wanted me a unpack the $10,000 worth of camera gear I was carrying in front of about a hundred “dindu nuffins.” I’m not suicidal and I don’t like getting robbed, so needless to say I missed that flight and haven’t attempted to fly since. Now that flight might have been singled out because of the destination and the odds of finding something... but since the actual passengers selected were effectively chosen at random it can’t be claimed there was any kind of probable cause.
‘There is always more to a story then what is printed. I wonder why the agents would spend hours on one individual. Perhaps they knew something we don’t.’
I agree, it’s a HUGE EFFORT to screen people in that way, and anyone who’s entered this country through a large airport immediately realizes that probably 99 percent of the people coming in are not even looked at, and that of those few who are stopped, probably 98 percent are ‘searched’ simply by putting their bags through an x-ray - it takes a lot of time to rifle through phones and gigabytes of data. While anything is possible, perhaps they’re like the IRS and TSA and look at a small number of people randomly as much to calibrate the threat they face. But our government has access to much more data than we’re aware of - and this guy, for example, may have a rap sheet in Brazil...for all we know [I wouldn’t expect a blog that’s trying to get me mad to tell me something pertinent like that, even if it were the case here].
As to legality, that’s a no-brainer - the 4th Amendment simply doesn’t apply at the borders and if it ever did, we can kiss this country goodbye [as an aside, if the leftists on the Supreme Court want this country to end tomorrow, all they need to do is extend the 4th Amendment to the border]. The fact that people now have some stuff electronic, rather than on paper doesn’t change anything, they’re still crossing the border and are still carrying materials with them - that simple. There’s no such thing as an ‘illegal’ search of someone crossing the border, and that applies to EVERY country in the world, so it’s just hype here.