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- Another Border Patrol Boondoggle
I’m sitting in a WalMart parking lot in Calexico, a mile or two from the border that we’ll cross tomorrow — ah, the romance of travel. I just helped a Mexican-American gentleman push an older Mexican man’s truck onto a towbar. He and I couldn’t get it by ourselves, so another Mexican-American was happy to help. Everyone here is bilingual, of course. I’m the gringo. This kind of scene is repeated over and over again in Mexico from my limited experience there. They’re just good, helpful, hard working people.
Anyway, as we were driving here from Arizona, we saw a lot of people pulled over on I-8 by the Border Patrol. My wife and I both wondered what was going on. Welp, here it is:
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.
The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some cases arrested. A network of cameras scans and records vehicle license plate information, and an algorithm flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on where they came from, where they were going and which route they took. Federal agents in turn may then flag local law enforcement.
[…]
In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.
Gutierrez Lugo was pulled over by a local police officer in Kingsville, a small Texas city near Corpus Christi that lies about 100 miles from the Mexican border. The officer, Richard Beltran, cited the truck’s speed of 50 mph (80 kph) in a 45 mph (72 kph) zone as the reason for the stop.
But speeding was a pretext: Border Patrol had requested the stop and said the black Dodge pickup with a white trailer could contain contraband, according to police and court records. U.S. Route 77 passes through Kingsville, a route that state and federal authorities scrutinize for trafficking of drugs, money and people.
[…]
They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash. No criminal charges were ultimately brought against Gutierrez Lugo and an effort by prosecutors to seize the cash, vehicle and trailer as contraband was eventually dropped.
Luis Barrios owns the trucking company, Paquetería El Guero, that employed the driver. He told AP he hires people with work authorization in the United States and was taken aback by the treatment of his employee and his trailer.
“We did everything right and had nothing to hide, and that was ultimately what they found,” said Barrios, who estimates he spent $20,000 in legal fees to clear his driver’s name and get the trailer out of impound.
These guys sure know how to waste money while destroying our rights.
In other news, the “Gen Z” protest that I wrote about yesterday that was supposed to happen in Mexico City was a bust — about 100 people showed up. Being part of an astroturf movement isn’t much fun when there’s violence and arrests, apparently.
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