Well, I got another text from Annie. “Okay. Got another blog for you: border patrol/control in Texas.”
Why does she ask me to blog about things she knows catalyze infinite rants from me? Does she have no pity on her readers? Did she even read that behemoth of a rant about Arizona? Crazy lady.
I responded, “Okay. Have you blogged about it yet?”
A few minutes later, I got this: “No, I am not going to. I’m not educated enough on the subject. But Glenn Beck sure thinks he is.”
Well, I don’t know exactly what Glenn Beck said on his radio show that made Annie want me to write a rebuttal blog. But I do know that Glenn Beck is an idiot. And that I probably have more experience with the border patrol in Texas than he does. And that my experience taught me that pretty much everything Glenn Beck probably thinks about border control and immigration law is wrong.
See, a few months ago, my Arab and I decided to take a road trip. It was after Christmas, we both had a few weeks before classes started up again, so we decided to drive to the west coast and back to see the sights. We had an amazing time. On the way back, we drove through the extreme southwestern part of the country, through the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.
At one point, in Arizona, we came to a border checkpoint. Now, I should point out that none of the border checkpoints we got stopped at were actually at the border. At no point did we try to cross into Mexico. But the border patrol had stops set up along the major highways.
I was driving. A border patrol officer came up to the driver’s side window as another officer led a drug-sniffing dog up to the car. As the dog sniffed, the other officer asked me, “Both United States citizens?”
My Arab is not a United States citizen. He is here legally, of course, on a student visa. But US citizen he is not. However, I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted to keep going. We were in the middle of the desert, with no civilization in sight, and the fuel light had just come on. In Arizona, no less. As evidenced by certain legal developments as of late, this is not the greatest place in the world to get stopped if you’re not an American citizen (or if you’re an American citizen who is brown or has an accent that indicates that English is not your first language). “Yes, sir,” I said to the officer.
By then, I guess the dog had confirmed that we weren’t hiding a pound of pot in the trunk (that one’s for you, Annie), because he had moved on to the car behind us. I am white as a china plate, and my Arab’s skin is white, too. My English is native. We had passed inspection. The officer at my window said nothing, just stepped back and waved us on.
As we continued driving, my Arab was silent for about a minute before he said to me, “I’m not a citizen.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing what I had done. But to be honest, I didn’t think much of it. I was just glad we had made it through. This checkpoint in Arizona was little more than a couple of border patrol SUVs, a few officers, and a couple of dogs, and I don’t want to think about where they would have taken us had we been detained at that checkpoint.
We were fine until Texas. We had left Las Cruces, New Mexico that morning and set out for an extremely long day of driving, hoping to reach San Antonio by 8 o’clock or so that evening. The plan was to get to our hotel, relax a little, and then have dinner on the Riverwalk. A nice plan, right?
Damn Texas.
There is a border checkpoint at Sierra Blanca, Texas, on I-10. It’s a lot more permanent than the checkpoint we encountered in Arizona; at Sierra Blanca, there are huge carport-like structures that cover the highways, and in between the highways there is a big building; a permanent border patrol station. This time, my Arab was driving. At first, the routine was exactly the same as Arizona; one border patrol officer at the window, another leading a drug-sniffing dog around the car, the same question, “Both United States citizens?”
After the Arizona checkpoint, my Arab had told me that he felt guilty about lying to that officer. “I’m proud of my country,” he had said. “I like the US, but it feels like I was rejecting my country by letting him think I’m American.” But I guess by the time we got to Sierra Blanca, my Arab’s nagging conscience had been silenced by the thought of the barbecued brisket waiting for him on the Riverwalk in San Antonio, because when this officer asked him that question, he said, “Yup.”
But, although his English is excellent, my Arab has an accent. Even that tiny “Yup” was discernible to the officer as nonnative speech. I could almost literally see the officer’s ears prick up, like a cat’s when it hears a can of food being opened. The officer asked again, this time more sternly, “Sir, are you both American citizens?”
My Arab fessed up. “No, I’m not. She is, but I’m not.”
“Sir, I need you to pull your car to the left and park it. I’ll need to see your license and registration.”
He did as the officer told him. We parked the car, dug out my Arab’s paperwork, and waited.
The officer sauntered over to the car, as if just trying to take as long as he possibly could. When he arrived at the window, he said, “Okay, sir, let me see that paperwork.”
My Arab handed it to him.
The officer said, “So, you’re not a US citizen. Why are you here?”
“I’m a student.”
“So what paperwork do you have that shows you’re here legally?”
My Arab was flustered. “Uh, I don’t have my paperwork with me.”
“Well, where is it?”
“In my nightstand drawer.”
“Why is it there?”
“Because I didn’t think I would need it just traveling state-to-state.”
“You need to have that paperwork with you at all times.”
“I…uh, I didn’t know that.”
“I need both of you to get out of the car and come with me.”
We did. I walked at the right of my Arab, and the officer walked to the left, hand slightly extended, as if prepared to grab my Arab should he decide to break away and run. The thought of him doing this made me laugh a little in my head; it was as likely as my Arab dancing on a table in a clown suit. The damage to his dignity would have been exactly the same in either situation.
We were escorted into the station. To my left, a long green bench sat against the wall, running almost the entire length of the wall. Handcuffs were bolted to the green bench every few feet or so, and officers’ desks sat facing the bench. At the third desk, three young men sat on the bench, each handcuffed to it. All of them looked scared. One of them had obviously been crying.
“Good Lord,” I thought. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
I was worried that the officer would handcuff us to the bench, but luckily, he didn’t. “Sit there,” he said to us, motioning to the space on the bench in front of the first desk. We did. He sat at the desk.
“Now,” said the officer curtly, picking up a pen from the cup on the desk, “What country are you from?”
My Arab answered. As the officer scrawled down the answer, the crying kid on the bench a few feet down from us lit up a little bit. I noticed the passports on the desk in front of the three handcuffed men; they were identical to my Arab’s, which was sitting safely at home in his nightstand drawer. Apparently these three men had known enough to not go road tripping without their paperwork, but it didn’t seem to be doing them a lot of good. I don’t speak a whole lot of Arabic, but I recognized what the sad guy said when he spoke to my Arab, offering a standard Arabic greeting. I’m sure he felt a little soothed knowing that there was someone here who understood his language, someone else who understood the boat he was in.
My Arab nodded at him, replying politely, then turning back to face our officer.
The officer’s face had darkened; he pointed his pen at us and snapped, “Don’t talk to him, got it?”
“Yeah,” my Arab replied.
The questions continued. “What’s your full name? What’s your birthday? Where do you live? What university do you attend? What degree are you working on? What’s your address in your country?”
My Arab answered all of these questions easily. Then they started asking questions about his parents. “What’s your dad’s full name?”
My Arab answered.
“What’s your dad’s birthday?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
The officer’s eyes narrowed. To him, this was suspicious. “You don’t know your father’s birthday?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
I wanted to explain that my Arab’s culture doesn’t place a lot of emphasis on birthdays, and therefore it is totally normal that he does not know his parents’ birthdays. Heck, he didn’t even know his own birthday until he had to ask his mom for that information to register for college. But I kept my mouth shut.
The officer decided to move on. “What’s your mom’s full name?”
Again, he answered easily.
The officer paused. He scratched his head with his pen. “Wait,” he said. “Your mom’s middle name is Muhammad?”
My Arab was getting irritated, understandably. “Yes,” he said in a slightly annoyed voice.
I wanted to explain that in my Arab’s culture, all children, regardless of their sex, are given two middle names; the first name of their father, and the first name of their father’s father. But I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t help but wonder at the lack of cultural literacy that these border patrol officers were displaying. I mean, they had three other guys from my Arab’s country handcuffed to a bench. Surely they encounter people from that country a lot; it sends thousands of students to study here every year. I hear a lot of arguments that the reason why border control is such an important issue is because it keeps terrorists out. Well, I know that many Americans automatically think “Terrorist!” when they hear the name of my Arab’s country, so you’d think that these border patrol officers would have at least a little bit of cultural training, so that they wouldn’t be shocked or suspicious every time an Arab comes through the border patrol station not knowing his mother’s birthday.
Two desks down, in front of the three handcuffed men, the officer at that desk asked, “What? I’m confused. Your mom’s middle name is Muhammad, too?”
I giggled a little bit. The officer in front of us scowled at me, looked over at the other officer who had asked that question, then got up and left. We sat on the bench for a few minutes. Since we had nothing else to do, we listened in on the conversation going on a few desks down.
“Where are you guys going?” the officer asked the men.
“Back to school,” the crying kid said. “To the University of Alabama. We are students there.”
“And why are you driving through Texas?”
“It’s winter break. We wanted to see some cities. We went to Las Vegas and Los Angeles.”
For the first time, I really looked around the room I was sitting in. There were officers outside, of course, and there were a few officers at desks. But mostly, the room was filled with officers who didn’t look like they were doing much. As time went on, they switched off on outside duty, but when they weren’t holding a dog’s leash or asking drivers if they were United States citizens, they were sitting around at a huge table in the middle of the room, joking around with each other and laughing uproariously, as if they were trying to show us just how much fun they were having being border patrol officers, and that it was just such a shame that we were on the wrong side of the law, because that meant we couldn’t have fun like them.
Except that my Arab and I were not on the wrong side of the law. We were just being treated like we were.
On the opposite wall was a long narrow table. I noticed on that table were several scales. One of the scales held a small plastic bag containing what appeared to be a small amount of pot. So that’s why the three young men were handcuffed.
I nudged my Arab and nodded toward the scales. “I don’t think they’ll get to go back to Alabama. Looks like our friends had a little too much fun in Vegas.”
He saw what I was talking about, then shook his head and said, “Kids.”
Another officer came and sat down in front of us and started asking my Arab the exact same questions, who answered them all, although he got the same weird look whenever he told the officer his mother’s full name. Finally, the officer leaned back in his chair. I suspect he had the urge to put his feet up on the desk and cross his arms behind his head in that classic police “I got you right where I want you” pose, and he probably would have if he hadn’t known it would have made him look like a total douche. He said, “So if you’re here legally, why don’t you have your paperwork with you?”
My Arab answered, “I’m just traveling from state to state. I didn’t think I would need it.”
The officer said, “What made you think that?”
I could tell that my Arab was becoming irritated; the way the officer was speaking to him as though he were an idiot was grating on my nerves, as well. “Well, when I got here, the International Student Services office at my university told us that we needed to have the paperwork with us if we left the country for any reason, so that we could re-enter it. But they didn’t say anything about state-to-state travel. They told us that if we weren’t traveling outside the country, we needed to keep the paperwork in a safe place, not on us.”
“Well, your university’s wrong. You have to have that paperwork at all times.”
I couldn’t help but think, “What a crock of shit. That’s not true.” But I kept quiet. I kept pretty quiet throughout this whole ordeal, because the border patrol officers didn’t talk to me at all. I didn’t seem to cause them any concern whatsoever. I could have been here illegally, even though I’m pale and my English is perfect; I could have been a chubby Russian who came here with her parents when she was a kid, whose visa had long since lapsed. Hell, I could have been an American citizen serial killer wanted in twelve states, but these officers didn’t seem to care about that. I think they were all just hoping that they’d caught themselves a big fat terrorist fish. Keep in mind, this all happened a couple of weeks after that Nigerian guy lit his crotch on fire on a plane landing in Detroit, so these officers were probably in a state of hyper-awareness when it came to terrorism. But it seemed to me like that was all the more reason for them to have some cultural training.
Meanwhile, my Arab replied, “I don’t think that’s true. Besides, I thought my driver’s license would serve as identification when I’m traveling in the States. I had to present all that paperwork, plus a letter from my embassy and a letter from my university, in order to get that license.”
“Yeah, but how are those people at the license office supposed to know whether or not those documents are fake? They don’t have the training to recognize fake documents. No, you have to have all your paperwork with you.”
I wanted to say, “Well, then it seems like you’re all in the same woefully undertrained boat.” But I didn’t.
The officer asked my Arab, “Is there any way you can get that paperwork faxed to us? Is it at your house? Does anyone else have a key to your house?”
My Arab replied, “Well, I can call my friend. He lives in the same apartment complex; maybe he can get into the apartment and fax me the paperwork from the front office.”
“Okay, try that. Do you have any other identification on you?”
My Arab took out his wallet and handed the officer his university ID and his ID card from his embassy. The officer got on the phone and started making calls, getting reports from the state and from the embassy. My Arab took his phone out of his pocket and dialed his friend’s number, as the officer had told him to.
Another officer approached us. “Sir, you need to hang up that phone right now,” he ordered my Arab, who looked confused.
“But he just told me to call my friend so he could—“
“Sir, you need to hang up that phone RIGHT NOW!” the officer repeated, almost shouting the last two words, his hand moving toward the nightstick on his belt.
“What the hell is going on here?” I thought. “This is insane!”
My Arab hung up, tossed his phone on the desk, and threw his hands up in frustration. The officer at the desk, who had told my Arab to make that phone call, was too busy to notice what had just happened, or maybe he didn’t want to contradict his fellow officer. Either way, he didn’t look up from the desk.
The officer at the desk finished his business and said, “We’re waiting to get some faxes from the university, from the state, and from the Department of Homeland Security. We can’t let you go until you’ve been cleared.” He got up and left.
We sat there on the green bench. I absentmindedly played with one of the handcuffs bolted to the bench. Officers came and uncuffed the three men sitting on the bench with us, and led them to a back room.
Awhile later, yet another officer came back to our desk. I was beginning to think that a requirement of being a border patrol officer was that you had to have a flourishing case of attention deficit disorder, since none of them seemed to be able to focus on us for more than a few minutes. They all moved on to other things and left other officers to deal with us…because we were such troublemakers, obviously.
This officer was carrying a stack of papers. He sat down at the desk. He asked my Arab for his name, and his country of origin. Again. My Arab complied.
The officer said, “Well, we got a lot of faxes on you. You clear at your university, and your background check is fine. Homeland Security’s says you’re here legally. So…I guess…” The officer didn’t seem to know what else to say, but he seemed reluctant to admit that maybe, just maybe, we weren’t criminals after all.
Yet another officer approached. He leaned on the desk and asked the other officer, “Did you talk to the big?”
My Arab and I looked at each other, confused. The officer looked just as confused as we did. He said, “Uh…the big?”
The standing officer heaved a frustrated sigh and shook his head at his colleague. “The FBI, you idiot.”
“Oh! Oh, no, I didn’t. Should I?”
“Well, yeah. You might want to give them a call and see if they’ve got anything on this guy.”
I wanted to point out that the officer at the desk hadn’t actually made any calls at all regarding our case; some other guy, who was now nowhere to be seen, had. But I didn’t. The officer at the desk looked up a number from a book in a drawer, painstakingly dialed it, identified himself to the person who answered, and requested a check on my Arab, reading back his name and all of the numbers that the border patrol had collected to identify him. Throughout this whole experience, not one of them ever pronounced my Arab’s name correctly. That drove me crazy.
After the officer hung up with “the big,” he said, “Okay, so we’re just waiting for the FBI to get back to us.” Then he, too, got up and left.
I learned a lot of things that day, but one of the main things I learned is that the FBI is slow. Really, really slow. We sat there for what seemed like forever as officers came in and out of the building, some arriving with huge sandwiches that filled the big room with their yummy smell and made my stomach growl. My Arab and I were realizing how hungry we were. It had been a good seven hours since we had eaten breakfast, and we had come to this border patrol checkpoint right before we planned to stop for lunch. At one point, a female border patrol officer came in (the only one I encountered during this ordeal), sat down at the big table with her sandwich, jerked her head at my Arab and me, and asked her colleagues, “What are they in for?”
I wanted to speak up and say, “I might very well be here illegally, I may have human body parts stuffed in a freezer somewhere, but I do speak English, so, you know, you could ask me,” but I did not.
As we watched the officers eat, much the same way my dogs sit and stare at us sadly when we eat dinner, a man approached us. He was wearing a dress shirt, khakis, and a tie, completely unlike the rest of the officers, who were all wearing uniforms similar to that of police. He was wearing some kind of badge around his neck.
He walked up to my Arab, and, with no introduction, said, “What is your name?”
My Arab looked at him suspiciously, but he answered.
“And where are you from?”
I could tell my Arab was getting sick of answering the same questions over and over again, and I didn’t blame him one bit. And I was suspicious, myself. I was wondering who the heck this guy was, where he had come from, and why he was dressed like this when the rest of the officers were in uniforms.
My Arab must have been thinking the same thing, because he said, “Who are you and why should I tell you anything?”
It was at this point that I realized that the officers at the table really had, to an extent, been putting on a show for us, and that they had all been paying attention to us, regardless of how indifferent they seemed. The room went silent at my Arab’s rebuttal.
The plainclothes officer, or whatever he was, said, “I’m a border patrol officer. But c’mon, dude, you know who I am.”
“Uh, no, I don’t,” my Arab responded. “And I don’t know why I should have to tell you anything. Who are you?”
A few officers sauntered over, as if they sensed a situation that might need to be taken care of. The guy with the badge said, “I’m a border patrol officer. But c’mon, dude, you know that. There’s no need to act that way. I mean, it’s your right to ask, but c’mon, why would you?”
I could think of about a thousand reasons why, and I was relieved that someone had actually used the word “right” in this place, even if it was only to imply that someone should waive theirs. Because to be honest, in this place, “rights” seemed to be a concept as foreign as my Arab, especially the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
My Arab responded, “Fine, but I didn’t know that, and I’ve been asked these questions over and over again. Do you think the answers are going to change?” Finally, he rattled off his name, country, and parents’ names.
The plainclothes officer chuckled and said, “Okay, dude,” and walked away. Evidently only the cool border patrol officers who were up on the latest youthful slang were allowed to not wear a uniform and to have a badge around their necks.
After that officer walked away, a few of the others hung around the desk. “I have to pee, “ my Arab said to them. “How much longer is this going to take?”
One of the officers escorted my Arab into a back room. When he got back, the officers at the desk had dispersed, apparently having decided that I wasn’t a security threat on my own. My Arab sat down and said, “There are jail cells back there. The three other guys are locked in cells. I had to pee in an open cell. That officer stood there and watched me.” He shook his head. “Fuck.”
All I could think was, “Is this Texas or Guantanamo?”
We sat there a little while longer, when finally an officer sitting at the fax machine grabbed a paper off the machine, spun around in his chair, and announced, “We’ve got something from the big!”
About six officers, a couple of whom had spoken to us at the desk, converged at the fax machine and studied the printout. They took turns looking at us, and then looking back at the paper, as if just waiting for one of us to go on a shooting spree and give them something to put on this FBI report. Because right now, it was clean. And they all looked sad about it. The Sierra Blanca border patrol checkpoint would not be on the national news for capturing a terrorist sought by the FBI.
One of the officers came back to us and said simply, “You’re free to go.” He motioned to one of the other officers and said, “Escort them out.”
I wanted to scream at them as I left. I had learned so much. This blog has gone on for far too long already, so I won’t enumerate all my lessons here, but I will say this. One, it doesn’t matter whether racial or linguistic profiling is legal, it is going to happen, no matter what. Technically, if someone says that he is a United States citizen, federal law requires that law enforcement officers take him at his word, and he must be afforded all of the rights of a U.S. citizen. So, when my Arab said, “Yup,” when the first officer asked if he was a United States citizen, he should have been allowed to pass right through. But that wasn’t going to happen, because of his accent. And even if my Arab had continued to insist that he was a citizen when the officer asked him, legally, the officer would not have been allowed to ask him to prove that. The whole situation screams “profiling.” Funnily enough, most of the border control officers we dealt with were dark-skinned and had accents that indicated they were not native English speakers; they would be the first ones to be legally profiled in Arizona.
Two, I would just like to say to Glenn Beck that Arizona’s law does not simply require people to carry their drivers’ licenses, as Mr. Beck announced on his show, because a driver’s license is not sufficient proof to a law enforcement officer that someone is here legally. Suck on that, Mr. Beck. If you don’t believe me, I hope that someday you travel to a foreign country legally and they catch you with just your driver’s license and you end up having to pee with a border patrol officer watching you.
Three, if you are on the run from the law for cooking meth in your basement or for beating the crap out of your wife or for kidnapping and killing a child, don’t worry; as long as you’re white and sound like a native English speaker and aren’t smuggling anything that a dog can sniff out, you’ll make it through the border patrol checkpoints just fine.
I could tell that the guy that had been assigned to escort us out was a good ol’ boy right away. He was tall, a little chubby, light-skinned, and bald, and he had a plug of chew stuck in his lip. Maybe it was because his demeanor reminded me so much of my brother, or maybe it was just because I was so hungry, but now that we were finally free, I let loose as he walked us across the highway back to our car. “Well, that took forever,” I said to him. “We’re starving and cranky and we just wanted to get to San Antonio for dinner. Four hours? You guys kept us there for four hours, violating our rights, just to act disappointed that you couldn’t throw us in jail?”
The officer looked truly apologetic, which threw me off guard a little bit. “I know, I’m sorry,” he said. He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. “They did keep ya’ll there forever. Hey, let me tell you something—the next time ya’ll come through here, when they ask you if you’re citizens, just say yes.”
I stared at him for a few seconds. Although I knew I had no reason to, I wanted to kick him. But I didn’t. I said, “Thanks. That’s great advice.”
My Arab and I got in the car. The driver’s side window was still rolled down from the initial stop. The officer leaned on the car and repeated to my Arab, “Seriously, man…just say yes next time. Just say yes.”
My Arab forced a smile and said, “Okay. Thank you.”
The officer said one more time, just for good measure: “Just say yes.” I started to wonder if this guy had been jamming out to Taylor Swift on his way to work this morning, or if he just had a lot of practice trying to get girls to do things they didn’t want to. He tapped on the roof of the car as a final farewell, and waved us on.
We drove in silence for about a minute. Then my Arab said, “Just say yes, my ass. I know he was trying to help, but damn it, that guy was about to make me a terrorist.”
