The Obscure Law That Lets the Feds Ask for Your Papers Inside the United States
Remind anyone of anything? 
The Obscure Law That Lets the Feds Ask for Your Papers Inside the United States
So long as the Border Patrol is doing it—up to 100 miles from a land or sea boundary.
Margaret Kadifa
Feb. 8, 2018 6:00 AM
Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown recently has been playing out in an unlikely location: Greyhound buses.
Over the past month, Border Patrol agents have been spotted boarding buses and questioning passengers about their immigration status—and, in some cases, even detaining them. In late January, one encounter went viral when onlookers recorded agents escorting a Jamaican woman off a Greyhound bus at a terminal in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The woman had overstayed her tourist visa, US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) said in a statement to the Miami Herald. She was in Florida to meet her granddaughter.
Link to tweet
In Washington state, an an 18-year-old DACA recipient and his father were asked on January 6 about their citizenship status on a Greyhound heading from Seattle to Montana, according to a local television station. The father, who was in the United States illegally, was detained. About a week later, a man in Maine contacted the state’s ACLU chapter after agents questioned him about his citizenship status when he boarded a Concord Coach bus. And, at the end of January, a man was detained on a different Greyhound bus at the same Fort Lauderdale station, the Miami Herald reported.
CBP did not respond to questions from Mother Jones about whether there has been an increase in identification checks on buses. But Enoka Herat, of the ACLU of Washington, says there’s at least anecdotal evidence indicating an uptick in incidents since Trump’s 2017 executive order prioritized the deportation of all immigrants living in the United States illegally—not just those with criminal records.
Herat notes that CBP’s power to question riders far from our nation’s borders stems from decades-old laws and policy: Legislation from 1946 gives agents the authority to search any vehicle near an “external boundary” of the United States, and subsequent regulations defined that area as within 100 air miles of a land or sea boundary. While that may sound like just a sliver of the United States, 9 of the country’s 10 most populated cities lie within the so-called 100-mile zone, and about two-thirds of Americans live inside of it, according to the ACLU. Ninety-seven percent of New Yorkers lived within the area in 2007, and some states, including Florida and Maine, are entirely inside it.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/the-obscure-law-that-lets-the-feds-ask-for-your-papers-inside-the-united-states/
