[T]he way Sen. Patrick Leahy tells it, in 2008 he was driving through Vermont on I-91 — 75 miles from the Canadian border — when he was forced to pull into a checkpoint run by the Border Patrol.
The Vermont senator asked the agent by what authority he was being detained.
“He patted his gun and he said ‘that’s all the authority I needed.’”
Leahy told this anecdote on Tuesday as he asked the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about border checkpoints inside Vermont, far from the Canadian border, and if there would be racial profiling by the Border Patrol agents.
“CBP is using kind of dragnet vehicle checkpoints throughout the interior of Vermont. Most Vermonters don’t carry their passports but when you board a Greyhound bus or stop a car just outside of Burlington, there’s a feeling there may be racial profiling,” Leahy said on Tuesday morning in a Senate Judicial oversight hearing.
In response, commissioner Kevin McAleenan said that checkpoints and public transportation stops far from international borders are “important border security tools” as CBP tries to target intersections of transportation routes into the U.S.
“In Vermont, it’s pretty rare that we use checkpoints, it’s usually intelligence driven,” McAleenan said.
Under federal law, Border Patrol has broad authority to conduct searches of vehicles within 100 miles of the border, including international waters. Roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in that zone.
Earlier this year, Leahy and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., introduced bills to reduce the zone where officers have enhanced search powers from 100 miles from the border to 25 miles. Under the legislation, authorities would only be able to hold immigration checkpoints within 10 miles of the border. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is a co-sponsor of the legislation.
In November, staff members from the Vermont congressional delegation were briefed by border authorities about plans to operate immigration checkpoints, before Border Patrol released any details of the plans to the public.
Leahy, Sanders and Welch issued a joint statement at the time calling the plans to create checkpoints in the state’s interior as “another escalation of the Trump Administration’s aggressive yet wasteful use of immigration enforcement resources.”
Gov. Phil Scott has also expressed concerns about the plans for interior checkpoints.
CBP have not released where these checkpoints would be located in Vermont.
On Tuesday, Leahy asked commissioner McAleenan if it is a prudent use of resources to place checkpoints far from the Canadian border in order to ascertain whether someone is a citizen or not.
“People have been late for work and, everything else, having to prove they are citizens. They haven’t gone anywhere near the border,” Leahy said. “Does it make sense to be going running around a state like Vermont, climbing on buses and telling people to prove they are a citizen?”
