Stop and searches on I-10?

[mlts22]

First time I heard of this, but I was warned several times that I-10 is having random stop and searches of drivers going between San Antonio and El Paso with either drug dogs, or actively ripping a vehicle apart to look for controlled substances or firearms. Because this is considered a Border Patrol search, normal probable cause rules do not apply.

Is this yet another random "conspiracy" story that we read about all the time without any real merit or any concrete facts, or is this something to be concerned about on a trip to NM and back? I just want to fact check this early on.

[Lon-Str]

I really think that unless you are running shine or something similar you can put this baby to bed and worry about more likely happenings. Like being blown out in the pasture by the wind out in that area or run down by some road hog. The speed limit out there in some areas is eighty and as any good Texan knows that means eighty plus fifteen.

[Hank85713]

for those that complain think about what they do in other places. My BIL was raised in mex, his sister born there. Anyhow some years ago she needed proof of birth info, so they went to the local church to get the information required. This is in interior mex. Anyhow after a while the federalies came up with weapons drawn, ordered everyone out and then proceeded to 'search' the motorhome. No reason given, my BIL speaks mexican and they just told them to stay away and be quiet. So if you have a little inconvenience in going thru a check point, just think what it could be. Yes I am retired mil, have had my vehicle searched upon entry to the installation, but have never had any issues with the BP other than some are lazy and dont do much. If you dont want to be stopped I guess you can just modify your travel area to avoid the KNOWN inspection stations! Just think about 15 years ago you had to go thru agricultural inspections in some states and actually surrender any fruit, vegetables, flowers you had in your possession, no one I know of complained then and you actually LOST items under your control.

[W4RLR]

john&bet wrote:

joshuajim wrote:
If you really want to waive all your rights, then just enter a military base. MP's can stop you without cause and totally search your vehicle without cause.

With my wife being a retired Navy CAPT, that doesn't bother me at all.

This is the price for freedom. I am retired USAF.

Ditto. When on the base, we abide by the rules. After all, retirees are still military members, just members on the retired list. Read your DD214 remarks column, and you will probably see a sentences that reads "Subject to recall to active duty by order of the Secretary of the (insert the name of your service here)". You can take the man out of the military, but it's hard to take the military out of the man.

[Heisenberg]

It could be worse. One year we skied in New Mexico. We got on the road when we were ready to go down to town. The traffic was backed up like I635. They had an alcohol checkpoint set up coming down from Taos. Taos Ski Valley was not amused.

[Bmach]

I have to agree with solsprack, why give up your rights just because you are doing nothing wrong? That should make you outraged, you are doing nothing wrong yet you are stopped!!!!

[Howdja]

Since the early 60's, we have traveled I-10 many times through West TX, at all hours of the day and night and have encountered no problems going through any checkpoint we came across. But we have no contraband in our vehicles, so we are not concerned. I would not hesitate to travel that route at any time, unless of course we were transporting illegal substances.

[rocmoc]

I am sorry this is long but the local paper changed it policy to requiring a subscription when you link so I had to copy & paste. This is from the Nogales International, the local newspaper.


"Posted: Tuesday, September 10, 2013 9:06 am

By Tim Vanderpool
Tucson Weekly | 0 comments

Interstate 19 weaves past quaint villages and metastasizing suburbs on its way from Tucson to the Mexican border. But peek beyond the bucolic veneer of this meandering roadway and you’ll find a bristling army of law enforcement, from Border Patrol agents and Highway Patrol down to local sheriff’s deputies.

That means plenty of busts along the well-monitored gantlet, including big-ticket cases that draw TV crews.

Everybody loves a huge, splashy catch. But the small fry? Not so much.

Nonetheless, petty perps are reportedly a mainstay at the Border Patrol’s I-19 checkpoint near Tubac. There, everyone traveling north from Nogales gets the once-over. And with plummeting rates of illegal immigration, agents have more time to scrutinize everyone passing through, including those who may be carrying trivial amounts of marijuana.

But federal prosecutors, on the other hand, tend to see such cases as a waste of their time and often refuse to take them before a judge. Instead, they pressure officials in places like Santa Cruz County – where the checkpoint is located – to pick up the low-level narcotics arrests or risk losing federal funding for everything from jail cells to extra officers.

“The feds are always waving that carrot at us,” says Santa Cruz County Sheriff Antonio Estrada. “They tell us, ‘If you don’t take them, we’re just going to have to take your funding away.’”

Such busts also raise questions about how resources are prioritized at Border Patrol checkpoints – and who the real targets are. Every day, for instance, hundreds of law-abiding citizens must pass through the I-19 checkpoint, where ever-evolving rules dictate their interaction with agents.

James Lyall, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Arizona, calls it the “vague but obsessive authority” claimed by the Border Patrol. “Generally, at a checkpoint, it’s OK if the Border Patrol agent asks a few questions concerning citizenship,” he says. “But (the courts) haven’t laid out what Border Patrol can and can’t do with a whole lot of clarity.”

While courts have upheld the use of drug dogs at checkpoints, says Lyall, “they have said that Border Patrol agents cannot search the interior of your vehicle at a checkpoint without probable cause or your consent.”

Yet courts have also ruled that drug-dog alerts are probable cause for a search. The result is not surprising; Lyall cites steady reports from people whose cars were scoured after just such an alert, only to be sent on their way a couple of hours later when no drugs were found.

“It’s well known that Border Patrol uses the sniffer dogs as a pretext for getting probable cause to search the vehicle when somebody doesn’t consent to a search,” Lyall says.

Based on resources

U.S. Customs and Border Protection wouldn’t release the checkpoint’s narcotics interdiction stats. But in an email to the Tucson Weekly, spokesman Victor Brabble wrote that the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector seized nearly 1 million pounds of pot in the fiscal year ending July 31 – a 13 percent jump from the year before – adding that the “vast majority of marijuana seizures are made in remote areas, and checkpoint seizures pale in comparison.”

On the other hand, those nabbed toting a joint through the checkpoint might just walk away. “Regarding prosecutions of ‘personal use’ marijuana,” Brabble writes, “it is very rare to submit those cases for prosecutions unless there are mitigating circumstances.”

That’s echoed by Cosme Lopez, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona. “It’s all based on resources,” Lopez says. “Is our office going to make a case against somebody using the very limited resources we currently have for a joint? Probably not.”

But where does that leave Santa Cruz County, when its top prosecutor has vowed a “zero tolerance” drug policy no matter how small the bust? Not surprisingly, it creates nearly insurmountable momentum for handing small-time offenders over to Sheriff Estrada.

“We do everything to discourage that,” says the veteran lawman, who describes an environment completely reversed from when he first wore a badge in the 1960s. Back then, he says, U.S. Customs actually encouraged local authorities to turn over their drug cases, because it boosted federal prosecution tallies. “They loved it,” says Estrada, “and it took the burden off us.”

He recalls how that changed in the 1970s, “when the feds started saying, ‘You got ‘em, you keep them.’ So now everything we catch that spills across the border illegally, it’s on our dime.”

Quickly inundated

Eventually, CBP likewise began punting small cases his way. Although Estrada insists on his right to refuse, that’s harder to do when it risks a cut to his federal assistance.

Since 2002, the four border states have split approximately $300 million in U.S. Justice Department funding to handle such cases, under what’s called the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative. But since 2010, that funding has dropped from $31 million to only $5 million, and the DOJ made no funding request for 2014.

However, Estrada’s department still receives about $400,000 each year from a program called Operation Stonegarden, which compensates local agencies for border enforcement. Another $400,000 comes from participation in the multi-agency High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas task force, better known as HIDTA.

According to Santa Cruz County Attorney George Silva, this shell game reached its nadir in the early 2000s, when federal attorneys were refusing to prosecute marijuana busts under 500 pounds.

“But here in Santa Cruz County, that’s the bulk of the loads that are seized,” Silva says. “So it was affecting our ability to do our jobs. People being caught by the Border Patrol were saying, ‘Nothing is going to happen to me because it was under 500 pounds.’ That’s the message the community started picking up.”

Even so, Silva initially refused to let those cases go. “We started doing the investigations,” he says, “but we were quickly inundated.”

The tough times eased around 2010, he says, when the feds “got the funding that they needed, and we saw a drastic decline in the number of cases they were sending our way.”

It doesn’t hurt that they also provide money to Silva’s office, including about $180,000 in HIDTA money, which pays for two prosecutors and a detective.

Such money is hard to pass up, at the end of a busy highway where federal priorities remain a bit opaque.

(This story was originally published on Aug. 29 by the Tucson Weekly, a sister publication of the Nogales International. Reprinted with permission.)"


rocmoc n AZ/Mexico

[The_Mad_Norsky]

paulj wrote:
Has anyone had experience with an internal border patrol checkpoint other than established ones like the Sierra Blanca one?

The internal ones, Border Patrol, as far as I know, no longer exist.

The last interior Border Patrol checkpoint I knew of was at Miami, Oklahoma, closed quite some years ago.

Now this does not mean that another agency may not be leading at a checkpoint set up somewhere in the interior.

Those internal type checkpoints may be set up like the one I worked in Nebraska some years ago. It was actually being run by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. Late fall, and checking primarily for game violations coming into and across Nebraska on I-80 near North Platte, Nebraska. Game and Parks were the officers folks first met on the interstate, but many other types of violations, or possible at least, were sent into the rest area we used where Border Patrol and many other agencies were waiting to interview and investigate.

Those multi-agency checkpoints are probably the ones referred to here, and would be the only ones set up in the interior of the US.

[paulj]

Has anyone had experience with an internal border patrol checkpoint other than established ones like the Sierra Blanca one?

[pronstar]

The Mad Norsky wrote:
I was not going to comment. I am former Border Patrol, now retired.

....

Thank you for your insight into this.

[coolbreeze01]

I don't know anyone that has had an unsatisfactory encounter near the border on I8 or I10. I just hope the searches are legitimate. Too many crooks posing as cops, border patrol, homeland security, dea, etc.

[The_Mad_Norsky]

I was not going to comment. I am former Border Patrol, now retired.

But solsprack has it correct.

There has never been more than one checkpoint along I-10 in Texas that had the functional equivalency of a border crossing checkpoint. And that was the I-10 checkpoint at Sierra Blanca, Texas, east of El Paso.

Functional equivalency means that through pattern/practice of the Border Patrol, traffic surveys and court cases, the checkpoint at Sierra Blanca has demonstrated the percentage of its vehicle traffic that comes directly from Mexico, in this case. Through such a long time period as it has been in existence, Sierra Blanca, through the aforementioned facts, has demonstrated it is in fact exactly in the same situation as any of the river crossing ports of entry at say El Paso or McAllen, etc.

So that gives Sierra Blanca the search authority for vehicles.

BUT, there are no other locations in Texas along I-10 that have such authority.

Repeat, there are no other checkpoint locations along I-10 in Texas that have such blanket authority to search vehicles.

So if one does encounter such a checkpoint at some other location along I-10, then those authorities at that location MUST have indisputable facts BEFORE they can search your vehicle. Things such as the building blocks of law enforcement work, reasonable suspicion leading to probable cause. A drug dog alerting on your vehicle would be one of those facts. There are many more that could be used. These facts are ascertained by the trained observers most all professional law enforcement officers need to become. Things that most in the general population never see or notice are caught by these officers. Meaning things such as eye contact, occupants behavior, things most do not see, but as a law enforcement officer, things that set off alerts to odd, possibly criminal behavior of some sort.

So indeed, know your rights. Know what the Constitution offers you in protection.

But also know these same officers have rules they also must follow.

[john_bet]

joshuajim wrote:
If you really want to waive all your rights, then just enter a military base. MP's can stop you without cause and totally search your vehicle without cause.

With my wife being a retired Navy CAPT, that doesn't bother me at all.

This is the price for freedom. I am retired USAF.

[solsprack]

This isn't meant to be an attack on anyone here, but this has to be said.

Some previous posts here are just shameful. There are people on this forum who have served honorably. A lot have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution against all enemies. However, when it is time to preserve the Fourth Amendment, they break that oath and waive that right on the spot.

If someone wants to search my vehicle, they are either going to go through procedure with at least trying to make the dog alert, or they will find another person who will hand over their Constitutional rights on command. Yes, it causes delays and makes it hard on myself, but someone has to stand for the Constitution somewhere, even if it means actually having the cajones saying "no" to someone demanding access to something they have no right to.

Now, access to a military base is another animal entirely, because that is part of the implied contract of entering. But, stop and searches on an interstate so the local LEOs there can play the lottery and perhaps score a seized vehicle or two is totally different.