[returningfory2]

> I'm confused at why Americans, with the culture of valuing individual freedoms over all, aren't concerned with the hypothetical consequences these powers provide.

I don't think this is as much of a "gotcha" it seems to be. People have all kinds of theoretical beliefs that they routinely violate in practice. It's just part of being human.

The way things like this are supposed to work in the real messy human world is that we encode these "freedoms"/rights into a constitution. We then have a judicial branch that protects these rights, irrespective of individual human inconsistency/hypocrisy. For border searches we have the relevant rights in the US constitution already. The problem is that the judicial branch has incorrectly ruled that protections like the 4th amendment don't apply at the border.