When a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent tells you to step out of the car, give him the keys, and put your hands on the roof over the back passenger door and assume the wide pat-down stance, you don’t hesitate. For one, he’s not alone, and second, they all have guns.
You’re relieved when they tell you they’re sorry to have to do this, but it’s their policy and standard procedure. You’re a little dismayed, though, when they ask you to put one hand behind your back and the cuff goes on, then the other hand comes back, and the other cuff goes on.
And when they take you inside and have you stand face in a corner, you figure it’s serious even if you didn’t do anything remotely wrong.
You do think, could that bottle of fancy olive oil we bought in Toronto be a problem? Maybe the bag of loose tea -- could it somehow be misconstrued? Could I make a wrong step and suddenly look like a threat?
So it was a day ago moments after driving across the U.S. border between St. Catherines, Ontario and Lewiston, New York. My wife, Denise, and I had a great weekend visiting her old friends in Toronto. It had been an uneventful drive. Denise had driven through Toronto to our lunch stop at the duty-free shop on the Canadian side, but she had some papers to review, and I took over driving. I pulled into the border gate, which looks so much like a Thruway toll plaza that I had to fight the instinct to look for my toll ticket, and instead Denise handed me our passports. I handed them to the blue-uniformed agent in the booth.
The agent, youngish, with dark hair and sunglasses I couldn’t see through, was nonchalant. Then he paused and looked again at his computer screen.
He asked where we’d been and where we lived. Then he asked me if I’d ever had any trouble crossing the border.
I took the question too literally. No, I’d never had any trouble crossing the border back into the U.S. Of course, I hadn’t been across the Canadian-U.S. border in probably 19 years. Then Denise reminded me about JFK in August.
We had been returning from three-plus weeks in Ghana, the trip featured elsewhere on this blog. The immigration agent at the returning-U.S. citizens’ line told me to follow her. She led me to a room where about a dozen people were waiting in seats as if called for jury duty, and in the front of the room were about a half-dozen uniformed immigration agents. “You have a common name,” she said. She left me in the hands of another agent who took my passport and told me to sit and wait; it’ll only be a little while, he said. And it was. Within 15 minutes they called my name and led me to the international-concourse exit gate, passport returned. There was no explanation, and I figured it was all bureaucratic misunderstanding.
I don’t think my forgetting about the JFK incident had any effect Monday. They were going to get me out of the car, pat me down, handcuff me, and bring me inside the border station no matter what I said.
The border officers were professional and apologetic. It’s just their procedure, they said. Then an older officer, whom I took to me the supervisor on-duty, explained that a man who shares my name, age and ethnic appearance is listed on a detain-and-hold bulletin. The apparent-supervisor explained, though, that they were 99.9 percent sure I wasn’t the wanted man because I didn’t match a couple of key details of the other David’s description.
Yep, that name again. My mother’s given and family names have unusual spellings, and she once told me, my sister and brother that she wanted her children to have simple, mis-spelling-proof names. At times like this I think maybe she went a little too far: Bobby, Susan, David Hill.
It’s gotten me in trouble before. More than once I’ve not been able to use airport kiosks to check in for flight departures. At times I’ve been told to step aside by gate agents. Once I called the newspaper where I’d worked years before to talk to a former colleague who was now the city editor. A reporter who’d joined the company since I’d left asked who should she say was calling. I told her my name. There was a pause. When my former colleague came to the phone, she explained that the paper had been covering the case of a David Hill, arrested for killing a police officer and who was then in jail awaiting trial. I’m pretty sure he was the same man who, a few years earlier, caused the local sheriff to have fun with me on my daily incidents-and-arrests check for the paper when another David Hill had gotten arrested for stealing a vacuum cleaner.
Back at the border Monday: By this time, they’d long removed the handcuffs and had me sitting once again in the jury-duty room, in a small row of seats in a well-lighted, big-windowed room, facing once again the row of uniformed agents in front of computers. They asked what happened at JFK. Was I fingerprinted, they asked? No, I told them; I couldn’t remember being fingerprinted, though it was a discombobulating day after a tiring 12-hour flight back from Ghana, so I could be mistaken. In any case, the tallest agent took me to the back and had me press my fingers, one by one, on a digital scanner. He was a little rushed and at times the scans wouldn’t take. Relax, he kept telling me. I think he knew that wasn’t so easy under the circumstances.
The agent in charge of the row of desks explained that the fingerprints would now be electronically attached to my passport record. Every time it’s scanned, it’ll come back showing that I am not the David Hill being sought. He wasn’t sure why that wasn’t done at JFK two months ago.
The one disappointing thing is I never got to learn the stories of the other eight or 10 people also being detained. If you search the internet for Customs and Border Protection, you get a lot of articles and rants about being detained either at the border or at an international airport, many by people who aren’t U.S. citizens and who look Middle Eastern or South Asian or Latin or black, or are coming from what others describe as sketchy countries, meaning Latin America or Southeast Asia. Many of the rants accuse the CBP of racial and ethnic profiling, and indeed, my furtive glances in the larger room left me with the impression that most of my fellow secondary review subjects looked that way -- though while I was waiting, a white family that looked like mom, dad, and two elementary school-age kids were brought in; they looked and sounded vaguely European, but I couldn’t be sure.
But I can’t presume the CBP was profiling. I don’t know why any of these people were being detained. They might have met the physical description of wanted people. They might not have had their passports in order. They might have misunderstood the duty rules. They might not have had sufficient English to answer the gate agents’ questions. They might also be up to no good for all I know. I can only relate what I saw and heard and what happened to me, and I know I might have been the beneficiary of white privilege or U.S.-citizen privilege. I was indeed the last one in but first one out, just as at JFK two months earlier. Or not: The CBP might deal with this all the time and has the routine down pat.
In handcuffs, though, I sure didn’t feel privileged. Let me be clear: My experience is not remotely the same as that of black people, especially big, young black men, or of anyone who looks Middle Eastern or South Asian or Latino, or like a strung-out meth or heroin addict or homeless person or immigrant with little English ability, and has said they think they’re profiled by the CBP or local law enforcement. And I don’t mean to disparage the border agents. Quite the contrary: Theirs is undoubtedly a tough job. It’s tedious yet tension-filled: You have to be the bad guy and detain people you all but know aren’t a threat, but who wants to be the agent who lets in the next terrorist or who lets through a rampaging criminal? Politics aside, enforcing immigration law and keeping the borders secure is an important job. I’m glad they’re doing it.
But it’s good to get a little empathy education and know what it’s like to be completely powerless and vulnerable through no fault of your own. A mile in someone’s shoes, grace of God, all that stuff. I wasn’t really afraid. All the same, I was glad when it was over.
I can't even imagine being actually arrested and charged with a crime you didn't commit, held in jail and having to get a lawyer and making bail to get home. I know many people don't have to imagine.
The desk agent explained that the fingerprints weren’t foolproof. They should enable me to move on through next time I’m coming back to the country, but something could happen with the wanted man, for instance; I couldn’t quite follow the details.
Today, I found a page on the CBP website about what to do if you’re frequently stopped while traveling or crossing the border. It seems to mostly explain how to complain if you think you are being stopped unfairly -- I don’t think I was -- and how to correct information about yourself. It also says you can file under federal freedom-of-information law for what the Department of Homeland Security has about you. Check back on the blog to see what I find out.
I told the desk agent that getting into Canada Friday was no problem, taking all of 45 seconds. He had no explanation other than evidently they use a different system. It’s up to Canada, he said.
He had one more piece of advice.
If I ever cross back in at Detroit, he said, the agents will draw their guns and have me exit the car at gunpoint. The wanted man is listed as armed and dangerous, and at the Detroit border crossing, well, it’s just their policy. They don’t mess around.
So much for crossing through southern Ontario on the way to Chicago.
Meanwhile, Denise says I should take her name. I’m not ruling it out.
