Another Reason Long-Distance Relationships Don't Work
Jacob Sullum | May 14, 2008, 1:21pm
Domenico Salerno, a 35-year-old Italian lawyer, comes to Virginia several times a year to visit his American girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, a 23-year-old copy editor he met a couple of years ago in Rome. Evidently that travel pattern triggered the suspicions of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent, who stopped him from entering the country when he arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport on April 29. Although visitors from Italy do not need visas, CBP agents have the discretion to deny them entry—and exit. Instead of being sent back to Rome, Salerno was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which shipped him off to a jail in Virginia, where he was detained for 10 days, still officially not in the United States and therefore without legal recourse. The CBP agent claimed he thought Salerno would turn out to be an asylum seeker because he expressed a fear of being killed if he returned to Italy. Salerno, whose English is spotty, told Cooper he never said anything of the kind. ICE kept Salerno on ice despite the intervention of Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) and the efforts of two former immigration prosecutors hired by Cooper's family. After Cooper contacted The New York Times, he was finally released and driven to Dulles, where he caught a flight back to Rome on Friday. Cooper is thinking of following him there, and staying.
Salerno had the benefit of affluent, well-connected American friends. Other visitors who are arbitrarily detained are not so lucky:
"We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians," said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper's father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. "They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn't happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans."
Kolohe | May 14, 2008, 6:38pm | #
John makes a pretty good point...in fact I think he makes 3 or 4 good points.
One last time:
1) John:"Something came up on this guy's record that caused them to ask him questions.:
TFA: "their admission is up to the discretion of border agents. There are more than 60 grounds for finding someone inadmissible,
including a hunch" (my emphasis)
So there does not need to be anything in the record.
2) John:"Once he is in secondary and the CBP agent believes that he has a credible fear of death if he is returned to his country"
If CBP agent thinks that the Govt of *Italy* is out to get someone - and will kill them - he/she has no business working at CBP. They should be working for Alex Jones.
3) John:"if CBP ever lets an inadmissible alien in at the border and that alien later goes on to commit some crime or act of terrorism"
Well so much for the maxim of '10 guilty men vs one innocent'
4) John "CBP lets someone in the country to do mischief or sends someone back to their country to their deaths."
Again ITS GODDAM ITALY.
Nearly all the Visa waiver progam countries are EU/Anglosphere members. Do people really think people request asylum from these sort of govt's for legitimate reasons?
5) John:"I would like to know what about this guy caused him to get taken into secondary"
jc:"And the NYT KNOWS there was no valid reason...which is the exact same thing."
TFA: "Angelica De Cima, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, who said she could not discuss any individual case."
Well, CBP had their chance to explain their side and declined.
Y'all's hatred of the librul media should be tempered by Balko's reporting, who shows law enforcement malfeasance is far more common than anyone expected.
James Anderson Merritt | May 14, 2008, 6:47pm | #
Pro Liberate wrote, "...as a general rule, due process and other such fundamental rights should apply 99.9% of the time..."
I think it goes even deeper than that. Most of our rights that we say are protected by the Constitution are acknowledged there by blunt prohibitions on government doing things that would violate those rights. So, when government argues that it should be able to engage in activities that violate rights when foreigners are involved, or when operating on foreign soil, it is actually arguing that the Constitution does not apply in these situations. But the Constitution protects people and their rights by restraining government, generally without qualification concerning the location or citizenship status of the person with whom the government interacts. So the Constitution applies EVERYWHERE our government acts, and in every situation. This means that the government is charged with respecting the rights of EVERYONE, with whom it deals.
You can be the most humble peasant, halfway around the world, with little or no knowledge of the US and its system, but if and when the US government ever deals with you, THEY must respect your rights, at least as encoded and acknowledged in the Constitution, even if YOU do not need to respect or obey US law. Similarly, the power of US law to constrain citizen freedom ends at our borders. If you go to a place that has no law, or where things that are illegal in the States are permitted, the US government can't touch you. But if they ever TRY to touch you, THEY must abide by the constitution and respect your rights, not so much because you may be a citizen, but because the Constitution says clearly what the government can and cannot do to people. That's the way I read the document, anyway.
Of course, many in the government have, for years, tried to sell us on the idea that US citizens have special, "constitutional" rights on the one hand, and on the other, that the US government only needs to obey local law, if anything, when operating in foreign lands. That's all pretty much crap.
The only rights that can be credibly reserved for US citizens are the ones described as, "the right[s] of the people..." I would think, for example, that a law or executive order to disarm a foreign population or even non-citizens living in the US (especially in time of war) would pass constitutional muster, as the 2nd Amendment speaks of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." "The people" means "the US population," basically citizens and resident aliens who are specifically under our protection and jurisdiction. But if congress passed a law to prohibit religious worship or restrict free speech or press in a country we occupied, that wouldn't be constitutional, because the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." There's no mention there of "the people's" right to free speech or press, the location of religious worship, or the citizenship of worshipers. So these prohibitions must apply to government operation and policy with respect to all people, everywhere. Not that you'd conclude such a thing by observing how our government has actually operated in history (especially recent decades). But that is what the straightforward writing seems to say.
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