Before President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown opened further doors for agents and officers to question people about citizenship and legal status, Border Patrol was doing exactly at checkpoints adjacent to roads across the United States.
It was at such an inland checkpoint that on February 4th, border patrols arrested the parents of five children and four US citizens.
They were on their way to Houston from Rio Grande City, Texas for emergency medical care for their 10-year-old daughter with brain cancer, reported NBC News when they arrived at checkpoint in Falfrias. Rio Grande City is about 360 miles southwest of Houston and offers a drive approximately 85 to 104 miles from Checkpoint.
Parents who did not have documents indicating that they were citizens or had legal status were deported. Without looking at other options, they took five children to Mexico.
Located up to 100 miles from the US border between Mexico and Canada, Border Patrol checkpoints have long been scattered across the US arteries and are like secondary borders considering the boundary walls and areas where fencing was built.
In its 1976 ruling, the Supreme Court held that routine suspensions and short questions of the border patrol at checkpoints, which are “reasonable distance from the border,” did not violate the Fourth Amendment Protection against searches and seizures.
The federal government defines a reasonable distance as 100 miles or shorter distances, as set by the Chief of Customs and Border Protection or special agents of immigration and customs enforcement agencies for a particular sector or district. That 100 air miles limit creates a boundary that covers the borders of all lands in the United States or water boundaries.
The border up to 100 miles from the country’s land-water boundary incorporates everything in Florida and many major cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Houston.
Not everyone in those cities will pass through checkpoints unless they travel to or live behind the land borders.
But for a large strip of the US population, checkpoints are a regular part of life, and they must assert that more people are citizens than others due to their race or have legal US residences, and they have no deep closure of contraband or human cargo within the country.
In the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, two permanent checkpoints are located in Sarita, Highway 69-East, and another permanent checkpoint is in Falflurias, located at Highway 281 in the US, where Border Patrol agents stopped brain cancer and her family. Both are located between Rio Grande City and Houston on the border.
“Where you go north in the Rio Grande Valley, you’ll find a checkpoint,” said Felix Rivera, a social worker at Lupe, a social worker at La Union Del Pueblo Entero, a community advocacy organization founded by civil rights leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Fuerta.
“The people that are not documented here are like cages. If you go to San Antonio, you’ll find checkpoints in Falflias. If you go to other parts of the state, you’ll find other checkpoints, so it’s very difficult for people who are not documented to leave,” Rivera told NBC News. There are no traffic checkpoints heading south.
Many American citizens pass through them regularly with little problem.
Typically, the process would look like this: Vehicles are decoupled from the highway to the checkpoint and there are lines if there are lines. Each vehicle is then pulled up to a border patrol agent while on duty, and the driver rolls through the windows, responds to questions about whether they are citizens or are citizens, and moves on. A driver’s license or proof of existence is not always required, but it can be when people are pulled out of the line and sent to another area for a “secondary test.”
There are 34 permanent checkpoints on the southwest border, and one on the northern border. An estimated 50 million vehicles pass checkpoints every day, according to CBP.
The agency said in email it did not provide a public map of checkpoint locations, refused to provide total number of concerns and seizures at checkpoints, and said the information was law enforcement sensitive.
When the vehicle passes the checkpoint, “if the agent suspects that the vehicle’s resident is illegally present in the United States, or there is a reasonable suspicion that another federal crime has been committed, the vehicle and all residents will be referred for a more detailed secondary inspection,” the CBP said.
The 2022 report cited CBP data, the government’s Accountability Office arrested around 35,700 people that could be removed from the US in about 17,500 “events” between 2016 and 2020. Checkpoint.
Checkpoints are not always working. In 2019, several border patrol checkpoints were closed, and its staff moved to helping to handle asylum seekers who had arrived in more numbers at the border.
The family, who was stopped at the checkpoint in Falfurrias, successfully passed the checkpoint several times, carrying letters from doctors and lawyers regarding plans for a trip to seek medical care.
Rivera said the Magnificent has several members with children needed “to go north” for surgery. Working with his lawyer, Lupe writes a letter directed to the Border Patrol, stating it is a “humanitarian issue” so that he can travel in that direction.
“And sometimes, if those letters don’t work, they’re going to be deportation proceedings,” Rivera said. “It depends on how the officers see you, and sometimes they’re kind of racist.” He said that Magpe always warns the family that letters may not protect them.
Traveling to big cities is important for people in the Rio Grande Valley who have long struggled with medical access. There have been improvements, but the limited availability of affordable healthcare is particularly problematic given the large uninsured population in the region and the high incidence of certain diseases such as diabetes. This forces families to travel beyond the checkpoints to larger urban areas for care.
Rivera said she was shocked when she moved from Los Angeles to the Rio Grande Valley and came across Checkpoint.
In February, a warning from the South Texas school district caused community parents to panic after a warning that Checkpoint agents could board a school bus carrying school children for extracurricular activities.
However, US Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks was called “absurd,” leading the district to remove warnings from public online sites. The Texas Tribune reported that even if CBP said it was not targeting school buses, it was repeated in an email with the authority to check the immigration status of passengers on buses passing through checkpoints that include students.
