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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

But the 100 mile rule? That covers damn near everybody in the US (>200 million, or 66%, give or take) subject to warrantless searches on the whim of whatever the police want?

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It's more than that, it's being "close" to a border (you can argue if 100 miles is "close") and not on a whim but reason to believe you recently crossed it.

I've heard (but can't back up) that any city with an international airport counts as a 'border' for this purpose.

Probably. If international flights are arriving, why wouldn't it?

Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane. It should be pretty trivial for customs to funnel travelers through a checkpoint where they can search at the time of the actual border crossing.

Likewise we now have the technology to automatically surveil the border 24/7 (maybe modulo tunnels, though I wouldn't be surprised if we could detect those too?), so a 100-mile exception only ever becomes more and more dubious. We could've built the wall and lined it with a surveillance system for less than the cost of this Iran war (never mind all the m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶n̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ stimulus this decade), shutting up the whole border debate once and for all, and ending justifications for internal surveillance for trafficking.

> Because you can't exactly sneak on/off of an international airplane.

I'm actually pretty curious about this. You can't easily sneak on/off a commercial international airplane, but that's because they've got the gates set up in the airport to funnel you through a specific path that leads to customs. Showing up on an international charter or GA flight seems squishier. http://www.canada.eaachapter.org/FLYING%20TO%20and%20FROM%20... The process seems to be that you schedule an ETA, taxi to a CBP station and wait there until a CBP officer arrives.

On the other side of it, it looks like CANPASS would let you land in Canada even if the CBSA station is closed...

On the other hand all aircraft are tracked (we are surely not trying to account for the possibility of a stealth aircraft transporting illicit goods across the border and secretly landing somewhere), and they can decide what they're going to demand from international flights. They might be somewhat lax on runway security, maybe? But it's a pretty constrained problem and easy to keep it localized if they want to tighten it.

It's still quite hard to sneakily fly into the US in a GA or charter plane and land unexpectedly at an international airport which is why they seem to not count. I say that because places like the SBCC don't include 100 mile bubbles around international airports on their maps of the issue.

https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_z...

If you fly up from countries south of the US you have a tight list of airports you can clear customs at. Wilmington NC is the odd one on the eastern seaboard. Its about 520 miles north of the nearest one. For flights coming up from the Caribbean headed to New England its a lucrative place to be.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-19/chapter-I/part-122/sub...

I don't see many maps that include them in the visuals of border so I'm not sure of the status of that and if the feds are arguing it would count and I think they would if there was an indication they were. I do remember that that was part of the discussion when the policy/rule first got a lot of attention a few years ago but it's not showing up in the visuals now. Maybe there was a clarification or restriction added either by courts or by the executive?

See the map here: https://www.southernborder.org/100_mile_border_enforcement_z...

Sure, but if you're driving in NM or TX or AZ, what constitutes that reasonable basis for a stop? As long as the car is legal, there can't be any, yet they still do roving patrols. The also stop buses and trains mid-transit (not at stations), which again, hard to conceive of why that would be necessary - if they know an illegal is on a bus/train, sure stop it and get the person, but asking everybody onboard - should be illegal.

Yeah, where does this come from? Who keeps defending this, has it been challenged?

About 213 million people live in this zone, so 2/3 of people in the USA. So I guess the 4th amendment doesn't actually apply to most US citizens?

Two main cases and the interpretation there-of [0]. The most expansive interpretation of the 100 mile zone that includes all coastal areas hasn't really been tested and AFAIK CBP mostly uses it in a more justifiable area around land borders so far relying on other justifications for more inland operations.

[0] ^f Supreme Court: https://forumtogether.org/article/explainer-u-s-border-patro...

That's a separate issue I don't support outside of situations where they can reasonably prove/show you crossed without alrady going through the search. Luckily, at least so far afaik, it hasn't really been deployed in the maximalist way that turns the whole country into that zone. It's a lot easier to justify near physical land borders like Canada and Mexico than it is if it's being used within 100 miles of very controlled impermiable borders like international airports. Has it been used outside of the land borders?

Well intentioned laws today can be used by illintentioned actors in the future, and mild legal exceptions can become significant ones with a couple additions.

The 100 mile zone is a good example - that 100 mile zone assumes the entirety of the great lakes is international waters, even though Lake Michigan is 100% American Territory and over 300 miles long. So, you could be in a landlocked county of Indiana, and be harassed by the federal government for being in a border zone.

Whats to stop someone from saying, the entire Mississippi river and its tributaries are a border zone? With that you could get 80% of the US population into the border zone.

By enabling some "rule based" decisions that skirt the constitution, you enable a legal mechanism for constitutional rights to be violated without any legislation.

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