Sandoval took her place in the long line of people waiting to have their passports checked by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). When it was her turn, she handed her American passport to a customs officer and smiled amicably, waiting for him to wave her through. But the officer said she had been randomly selected for additional screening. Sandoval was led to a secondary inspection area nearby, where two more officers patted her down. Another walked toward her with a drug-sniffing dog, which grew agitated as it came closer, barking and then circling her legs. Because the dog had “alerted,” the officer said, Sandoval would now have to undergo another inspection.
She was taken to a fluorescent-lit, windowless room inside the port of entry office. Two female officers entered and announced that they were going to search her for drugs. They patted her down again, but found nothing. At that point, Sandoval assumed they would release her, but instead they told her they were going to conduct a strip search. The officers put on latex gloves, picked up flashlights, and asked Sandoval to remove her clothes and bend over so they could look for signs of drugs in her vagina and rectum.
By the time they finished, Sandoval had been detained for more than two hours in the stifling room. Her passport and cell phone had been confiscated; her husband and children had no idea where she was. Sandoval begged to be released. “I was shaking and I was in tears,” she told me. Saying nothing, the officers put her in handcuffs and led her to a patrol car waiting outside. They left the international bridge and drove north into Texas. Frightened, Sandoval asked the officers if they had a warrant for her arrest. “We don’t need a warrant,” one of them replied.
CBP IS THE AGENCY TASKED WITH GUARDING AMERICA’S borders, as opposed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which investigates, arrests, and deports undocumented people throughout the country. Over the past 18 months, as resistance to President Trump’s immigration crackdown has grown, most of the criticism has been directed at ICE, whose interior enforcement mission often targets long-term residents without criminal records. Immigrant rights groups have begun a campaign to defund or abolish the agency. “ICE is terrorizing American communities right now,” Angel Padilla, national policy director of the Indivisible Project, told the Nation. “They’re going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day.”
Increasingly, Padilla’s description applies to CBP as well. It turns out that the legal definition of “the border” is troublingly broad. Some 200 million people—nearly two-thirds of all Americans—live within the “border zone,” which is defined by the Department of Justice as the area up to 100 air miles from any US land or coastal boundary. Nine of the country’s 10 largest cities lie within the zone. It touches 38 states and encompasses all of Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
Within the border zone, Congress has granted CBP powers far beyond those of other law enforcement agencies. CBP, which largely consists of customs officers at ports of entry and Border Patrol agents who monitor the highways, has the authority to set up checkpoints almost anywhere within the 100-mile zone, and to search and detain people without a warrant as long as they feel they have “probable cause” to suspect that someone is in the country illegally or smuggling contraband. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but CBP operates with wide discretion, often using alerts from dogs as a reason to pull people aside for secondary inspection. Within 25 miles of any border, Border Patrol agents have even more expansive powers; they can enter private land without a warrant or the owner’s permission.
Being a US citizen doesn’t protect you from harassment by CBP. Even if you never leave the United States, you can encounter Border Patrol at the 35 fixed checkpoints and dozens of temporary checkpoints they operate deep in the interior. The locations of these checkpoints are not made public, but the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has developed a project to track them. In a recent report, Cato mapped checkpoints as far as 80 miles from the border.
Agents at these checkpoints interact with more than 27 million people annually, the vast majority of them US citizens or legal residents, and conduct thousands of searches and seizures. Latinos in particular are routinely stopped and searched, in what has come to be known as the “Southwest stop-and-frisk.” Over the past 10 years, advocacy groups have seen complaints about harassment and abuse at these checkpoints rise, and they have raised concerns that CBP is slowly creeping farther into the interior of the country. “In court cases, we’ve seen roving patrols 200 miles beyond the border,” said Chris Rickerd, a policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “People are surprised to see CBP in Los Angeles or in Houston, but it’s a consequence of the agency not having any limits.”
A CBP spokesperson, responding to written questions, insisted that Border Patrol does not have significant operations in major coastal cities north of Los Angeles or in the Mid-Atlantic region. “We are a border security agency, not an interior enforcement agency,” she wrote. But she also noted that CBP’s activities “are not geographically restricted by law.” Even beyond the border zone, the spokesperson asserted, Border Patrol agents have the authority to question individuals and make arrests.
Any political coalition seeking to reform immigration enforcement in the United States will not only have to rein in ICE; it will also have to halt CBP’s inward expansion and push its agents back to the borders. But Trump has emerged as the agency’s greatest defender. He has pledged to add 5,000 more Border Patrol agents to the force while signaling with his rhetoric about “bad hombres” and “animals” how they should treat those they stop.
IN MARCH, I MET SANDOVAL AT A SMALL CAFE IN DOWNTOWN Albuquerque, New Mexico. A slender woman in her 50s with pale green eyes, Sandoval wore a tailored gray business suit and sat down apprehensively at a table in the corner. Before our interview, she had never spoken publicly about her experience with CBP.
Sandoval, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, told me that after the officers forced her into the squad car, they drove her to University Medical Center, a public hospital in El Paso. The officers found an empty room and shackled her to the examination table. A nurse entered and asked her to swallow a laxative so they could observe her bowel movement. Then a group of doctors came in. Sandoval pleaded with them to let her go. “A nurse told me to calm down,” she said. “That this was something they did any time Border Patrol brought people in.” One of the doctors conducted a vaginal and rectal search using a speculum and his hands. “The agents kept saying that they knew I had drugs,” Sandoval told me. Still not satisfied, the doctor ordered an X-ray and a full-body scan. Again they found nothing. “The only thing left was to cut me open,” Sandoval said.
After more than four hours, the officers called off the search. One of them asked Sandoval to sign some government forms. “She wanted me to give my consent,” Sandoval explained. “She said that if I signed the papers, they would take care of the hospital bill. They would be ‘good guys’ and pay, because it would be expensive.” Sandoval pushed the papers away.