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by KennyBlanken 18 days ago
A friendly reminder that the CBP has decreed itself to have authority within 100 miles of any US border, as that it is its interpretation of "a reasonable distance" from said border.

That basically encompasses two thirds of the population.

The last two years have demonstrated a radical need to curtail that range of authority and shift from it being vaguely specified to a concrete legislative specification.

Even ten miles seems (pardon the pun) borderline excessive. There is no reason CBP can't hand off stuff to local, county, state, or federal domestic law enforcement. We have no shortage whatsoever of law enforcement in this country and they're able to communicate inter-agency better than ever via cell phone, tools like slack/teams, text messages, email, and long distance digital radio systems.

Maybe in the 1950's when all they had were shitty radios given them that sort of range was appropriate. Not anymore.

2 comments

This is false. It's an old fundraising claim used by the ACLU; they have since set up pages backing away from it (because convincing people in the US that they don't have rights they do in fact have is not good civil liberties advocacy). There's direct SCOTUS precedent on this.

There's a 100 air mile border definition that's material to immigration enforcement (with complicated limitations). It does not determine where searches under the border search exception can occur.

Congress's own website with a map showing the exception area seems to indicate that nearly the entire state of Hawaiʻi is within the exception zone.
"The exception zone" is a myth.
Tell that to the US Government:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46601

Nobody disputes that border searches are constitutional at the functional equivalents of the border; if you fly in from Canada and land in Tulsa, Tulsa includes a de jure international border.

The dispute (it's not really a dispute, there's a line of SCOTUS precedent explicitly about this question) is whether a 25-100 mile zone extends outwards the airport customs gates. No.

> 25-100 mile zone extends outwards the airport customs gates

No one in this subthread has claimed that but you.

We're talking about this: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46601#_Ref40429957

More importantly, they count ocean as border.
International airports as well.
And Lake Michigan, as it’s connected to international water. Suppose next they’ll claim all rivers as borders.