Will Customs and Border Patrol agents pull me from the customs line as they did to Amir Makled? He’s an American citizen too, a lawyer born and raised in Detroit who was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic. But he happens to represent a pro-Palestinian student protester. CBP detained detained Makled and demanded access to his phone.
If you’re thinking, No problem, if that happened to me, I’d demand to see a warrant, you’d be wrong. Even citizens do not have the same Fourth Amendment rights at the border that they (theoretically) enjoy inside the country.
Last month, a French scientist was denied entry into the United States because border guards searched his phone and found texts critical of Trump—and speaking ill of the Dear Leader is close to becoming a crime in the United States
And yet, consider that Trump is now openly speculating on sending “home-grown,” U.S.-citizen criminals to the Salvadoran gulag. At his Monday meeting in the Oval Office with strongman Nayib Bukele, while beaming at Bukele’s refusal to return the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Trump mused about expanding El Salvador’s prisons to include American citizens, saying that some of our criminals are just as bad as immigrants and that “I’m all for it.” He floated this idea while his government is actively defying court orders to give the wrongfully deported Abrego Garcia a chance to enjoy due process. If they can do it to him, is it inconceivable that they’d do it to me?
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-any-of-us-safe-now-makled-abrego-garcia-krebs-taylor-rule-of-law-due-process-bukele-salvador
