I've recently taken it ones step further to argue that the federal border control agency should be shut down on 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
What about interior states? Are they entitled to the same federal border protection as states that share borders with Mexico or Canada? If the states are sovereign entities, then their borders are their own territory to protect equally, whether interior or facing a foreign country. Do away with federal border control, give that money back to the states and let the states maintain and police their own borders against illegal trespass.
-PJ
“If the states are sovereign entities, then their borders are their own territory to protect equally, whether interior or facing a foreign country.”
That is indeed a correct analysis. Each State is a sovereign entity.
A question - could states have differing standards for what constitutes illegal trespass?
It’s a long debate.
Prior to the 1970s, most states in the West had inspection stations on the Interstates at their borders; California and Arizona specifically. Think Texas did too. They were mainly agricultural but morphed into more then that; they became essentially state border checkpoints where general search and seizure was common.
The Warren court negated all that as un-Constitutional, and now those ports are mainly ceremonial. They stop primarily truckers if at all.
It was the intent of the Founders I think to not have the situation that existed in Europe where every little principality had a customs checkpoint charging a toll and you couldn’t go 10 miles without getting hit for such. On the Rhine, supposedly, it was worse...like every 2 miles.
But that didn’t mean that the entire planet had entry rights and the State had no enforcement rights. That’s not just abolition of State sovereignty but National sovereignty.
We would not be discussing this if the BP were still allowed to do its job and the civil rights laws had not been extended to mean that simply questioning anyone about their citizenship was a violation. So if we end up back with State border controls, and internal policing of such, it shows that the current situation caused it, and that such a laissez faire approach simply led to chaos.
FYI for most people: in the Southwest, as recently as the 1970s, it was routine for local police to detain illegal aliens for BP hand over. This only ended in the ‘90s. SB1070 simply codified the practice which had been abolished mainly through lobbying by La Raza Unida and other immivasion enablers. So we did have internal policing in coordination with the federal police force known as the Border Patrol. This worked just fine.