Pinay traumatized by horror trip to US
They do this to me regularly, and I'm a US-born US citizen.  My median time for being arrested and held with no food or water or use of a communications device is around six hours.<p>...all because I politely exercise my fifth amendment rights.<p>This happens about 50% of the time I enter the country.  I live abroad so I enter the US about a half-dozen times per year. I think my file is big enough now that they know not to ask me anything.<p><a href="http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/customerservice/pledge_travel.xml" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/travel/customerservice/pledge_tra...</a><p>> CBP’s Pledge to Travelers<p>> We pledge to cordially greet and welcome you to the United States.<p>> We pledge to treat you with courtesy, dignity, and respect.<p>> We pledge to explain the CBP process to you.<p>> We pledge to have a supervisor listen to your comments.<p>> We pledge to accept and respond to your comments in written, verbal, or electronic form.<p>> We pledge to provide reasonable assistance due to delay or disability.<p>I often wonder which of these "threatening me with prosecution for interfering with a border control point", "lying to me by saying I'm legally required to answer their questions", "refusing to tell me the name of the city I'm standing in" and "throwing me out of the border control point (into the USA) on the highway in Vermont in February in a snowstorm" fall under.<p>(It's the only time I've ever had to hitchhike in my life, as it'd been hours since they'd sent the Montreal-Boston bus on without me.)<p>The one border cop in Detroit told me, after coming through the tunnel from Windsor, that "[she's] just doing her job, making sure the country is safe, and that [she's] there to <i>prove [I'm] innocent</i> and get [me] on my way quickly."  I waited until I was given the all clear to leave the building before mentioning to her that "We're Americans, and this is America. I am innocent until I am proven guilty, and those representing our country would do best to remember that."<p>Despite my opinions about the lot of them, I am calm, polite, professional, and courteous in my interactions with them.  They respond in the most unprofessional manner possible, short of physically assaulting me.  They've cost me thousands of dollars and caused me to miss important business meetings.  (Before you say it: it's not my fault for exercising my basic rights or not "just answering the simple questions" that I missed my meetings. I'd have left except for the fact that men with guns on their belt arrested me after I'd already given them my passport and they'd searched my possessions.)<p>Fuck the police.<p>PS: Their invasive searches of my belongings were clearly punitive, too.  I never travel with contraband but had I been doing so, they would not have found any of it.  They were clearly just fucking with someone who had the nerve to tell them that his travel plans inside and outside of the US were and are "none of their business".