One of the things that makes the United States of America a free and open country is the fact that as citizens we are not forced to carry “papers.”
We do not have a national ID card. The police can’t stop us for some random reason and demand that we show our documents.
That’s why it was both shocking and illegal when federal agents asked every single passenger on a domestic airline to show appropriate papers.
The incident happened last week on a Delta airlines flight from San Francisco to New York. Customs and Border Patrol agents confirmed that when the domestic flight landed at JFK Airport last Wednesday evening, every passenger was stopped. Every one of them had to show an identification document.
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The agents said that they acted because they suspected that a person with a deportation order might have been on the flight. He wasn’t.
An attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union was not happy with the way the operation was handled. The attorney, Jordan Wells, said that it was very unusual for federal agents to set up this kind of “dragnet.” He said:
“They’ll occasionally pull someone off of a flight, or officers will come on and make an arrest. It’s a much more surgical thing than setting up a dragnet. That’s what is so alarming about the way that this played out.”
The problem with this approach, obviously, is that our Constitution protects us from “unreasonable search and seizure.” The Fourth Amendment insures that unless officials have a reason to suspect us of a crime, they are not allowed to search our homes, our vehicles, our purses or our papers.
What would have happened to those innocent airline passengers, none of them suspected of any crime, if they had declined to show their documents? Would they have been detained and questioned?
If so, we have a serious problem here.
There are countries in the world where every citizen has to carry a national id card. There are countries where the police and other federal agents can stop people on the street, or on the train, or at an airport and demand to see those papers.
Up until very, very recently, none of us thought we were going to become one of those countries.
Now it’s time for all of us to make a plan, before we need it, of how we’ll respond if we are ever asked to show our “papers” for no apparent reason. It’s time to plan the resistance.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
