Planning a vacation with Joe Cadillic is probably not a typical planning experience. 🙂
Joe writes:
Since last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have been conducting immigration checkpoints in Hew Hampshire’s White Mountains.
NH’s motto ‘Live Free or Die’ is fast becoming a joke to all who visit.
Why would I say that?
Because this past Memorial Day weekend, State Police with DHS funding, conducted a DWI ‘saturation patrol’ in Conway from 9 PM-3 AM stopping ninety motorists. Anyone familiar with North Conway knows that most bars and restaurants close at 1AM and stopping ninety Conway residents would have caused a public outcry.
So who were the police targeting?
Read more on MassPrivateI.
NH Checkpoints Are A Travesty (Concord Monitor 6/5/18)
Our hiking buddies on Memorial Day clued us in on the Border Patrol stops, saying they were trying to head home from the White Mountains a different way to avoid this. We discussed this, and we read the subsequent article (Monitor front page, May 30), and are embarrassed and horrified. The article mentions that this is “not a change in policy but an increase in funding.” How in the world do they get the funding if not a change in policy? Come on. So nice of the border patrol to let folks spend their money in the state all weekend and then end it with this. And in the process catch folks with a little leftover pot from their camping trip.
New Hampshire’s White Mountains are its crowning glory and an attraction for folks from miles around. If immigrants are afraid to drive within 100 miles of the Canadian border, it’s a very, very sad day in our history. So glad to see ACLU involved in this. Our hiking pals and us are disgusted.
Laura Fry, Bow, NH
http://www.concordmonitor.com/Checkpoints-in-White-Mountains-are-a-travesty-17950810
‘Just Security’ Immigration Checkpoints Are Good At Catching People With Pot:
In late 2017, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a damning report on the relative ineffectiveness of the CBP checkpoints in accomplishing their stated mission: catching and deporting illegal aliens. (https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-18-50)
As GAO noted (p. 38), “CBP reported in the budget justification that apprehensions at checkpoints ranged from 1.34 to 2.52 percent of nationwide apprehensions across fiscal years 2013 through 2016.” A previous GAO study (2009) found that CBP was employing 4% of its personnel at the checkpoints while the arrests of illegals at the checkpoints only accounted for 2% of the total number of undocumented aliens. (https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-824)
This represents a shockingly low return on investment, as my Cato colleague Alex Nowrasteh remarked when the 2017 GAO report came out, “Border Patrol checkpoints would have to have apprehended about 100,000 to 120,000 more illegal immigrants from FY2013-2016 than they actually did to justify the man-hours spent occupying them by agents.”
The CBP checkpoints are good at one thing: catching American motorists with dime-bags of pot, as I wrote in a recent Dallas Morning News piece and the GAO noted in their 2017 report.
Nearly half of the arrests at the checkpoints involve U.S. citizens with an ounce or less of marijuana. So if CBP and its Operation Stonegarden local law enforcement partners aren’t harassing or arresting people like Terry Bressi, they’re arresting Americans for using a substance that more and more states are legalizing every year.
https://www.justsecurity.org/56862/cosmic-legal-collision-engineer-vs-border-patrol/
NH begins using license plate readers to spy on everyone;
“I find the use of these license plate scanners for any purpose to be abhorrent and not in our New Hampshire tradition,” said state Rep. J.R. Hoell, R-Dunbarton. “There’s no other way to describe what this is other than an intrusion into someone’s privacy.”
http://www.unionleader.com/safety/New-tool-for-NH-police-license-plate-readers-06082018