What is DO have a problem with, though, is that they seem to have deliberately structured the procedures this way in the first place precisely for this goal. People should be granted/denied entry first, then searched afterward if entry is granted -- because it would seem that their permission to be present inside the country should be independent of what they are allowed to bring into the country. So if the ACLU is fighting against this, I sure hope they're making this argument rather than the first one.
Does this make sense, or do people disagree?
Are you saying US citizens have zero constitutional rights the second they step out of the US?
This gets kind of close to word-play territory (no pun intended).
IMHO you still have your rights, but when you're outside the country, you can't expect the government to automagically recognize you as a citizen among the foreigners who don't have the same rights as you, and hence may not be able to exercise them. So that means you first have to convince them that you have the rights you claim before you can expect your rights to be recognized.
This would work just fine in a world where authorities were keen to recognize your identity before inspecting your belongings, so I'm saying the fact that they refuse to do that is the real abuse/violation here. So that's what you really have to argue against. Otherwise, if you assume that is OK, the rest of the logic doesn't really seem faulty to me.
What do you suggest instead?
No. It doesn't seem like you made any effort to understand what I'm saying. What I was saying did not reduce to something this trivial.
Apparently even that is not true, because the US can actually assist foreign governments in detaining and torturing their own citizens [1].
I haven't though this through, so I don't know what the implications are, but I think it makes sense to say there are multiple "borders" that we need to think about here -- an "outside" border, which other countries recognize as the border of your territory & jurisdiction, and an "inside" border, which is the one you cross by showing your passport. In between these two borders -- assuming (crucially) that you're crossing these borders out of your own volition -- I would say that the country has every authority to do more or less anything it feels like: you're in its territory, and they have no reason to believe you belong there (effectively, you're a trespasser). At that point, the best you can hope for is that you're entering a sane country that does something humane. If you're not, then either you're a citizen and should have been advocating to change the system before leaving, or you're not a citizen, in which case it's other people's country and they get to run their country however they like (sorry).
Again, I haven't thought through all the implications, so there might be some glaring problems... but this is what my brain right now thinks would be logical. None of these would apply if you're being forced to cross borders (war, persecution, refugee, etc.); I don't really know what to do in that case. But those are rare enough that you can't expect the country to treat every single traveler as a potentially persecuted refugee.
So, are you saying that a US citizen, before entering the US, would be allowed to kill a customs officer without any consequences? Or are you saying that customs officers could torture citizens as long as they are outside the US without any consequences for them?
The US government and its courts have ruled that yes, that is exactly the case.[1][2]
Eight years after Mr. Meshal’s rendition, his case ended up before a three-judge
panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The
questions hanging over the proceeding were: can the United States government
allow, or even facilitate, the rendition of an American citizen to another
country for interrogation? And can United States officials themselves conduct
rendition and interrogations of American citizens, including threats of torture,
on foreign soil?
According to a decision handed down last week, the answers appear to be yes. If
this decision stands, it will mean that an American citizen overseas who is
unlawfully targeted by the United States government for rendition, interrogation
and detention with the help of a local government will have no form of redress
in the courts.
Obama administration lawyers argued that Bivens did not apply to Mr. Meshal’s
case because the incident took place overseas and involved unspecified “national
security” concerns.