Or if you really want to be scared, visit 3 Quarks Daily to read Abbas’s story of being arrested at JFK airport for beating himself up several years before. It should give pause to people who think that legal representation for suspected criminals is a sign of bleeding-heart weakness. Not, apparently, that being represented by a public defender is any better than simply throwing yourself on the mercy of the court.
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Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
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October 31st, 2005 at 4:40 pm
hi sean, i read abbas’s post, and i thought i’d just point out (as its usually only immigrants and visitors that may encounter the fact that) that united states immigration law and civil law are two separate things. of coure, immigration law is informed upon civil law, but is usually much less rigourous in its standards of proof of guilt. at the present, immigration law borders on the draconian. there is always the possibility that what heppened to abbas could have turned out very differently, shocking enough as his story was.
October 31st, 2005 at 4:41 pm
On a much smaller scale, my wife is on no-fly list apparently. We discovered this fact after she was stopped a few times in the border- they of course did not say why. Apparently she has a name which is similar to some wanted terrorist (she is originally Korean, now an american citizen, so names are just approximate transcriptions anyhow). Now that we know about the list we can bring up the fact that the wanted person is an older man, wrong gender and age, it works in the second or third iteration. Still, apparently not very easy to discover the existence of the list, and practically impossible to get off that list, at least we did not succeed so far. I’ll be curious to see if there is any good advice emerging from that discussion.
October 31st, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Heh.
I’ve been singled out by the immigration before. The INS officer stopped me at the checkpoint, and lead me to a large empty section of the immigration hallway, and asked me to sit there. After being on a 36 hour trip, I was so tired and hungry and the last thing I needed was to be “isolated”.
Well, they took all my documents, passport and all, and I saw the bunch the INS people huddled excitedly over a computer screen. A few of them were pointing at the screen once in a while, and I was amusing myself with fantasies of what the Carribean looks like. Eventually, after 40 mins or so, one of them came back to me and hand me back my documents and said I could go. I wanted to ask what was that for, but I forgot why I didn’t at the end (probably because I was too tired to care). They didn’t volunteer to tell me.
Luckily this was in Chicago and I had no connecting flights to catch.
That was in 2002, so 9/11 paranoia levels were still high. I didn’t have any problems with INS since then.