“We need to
stop letting our public servants be our public masters.”

                      --Brandon
Bryant

                           From comments
made near the end of the film Unmanned:
America’s Drone Wars

 

Below are my
comments responding to this piece by Francisco Goldman regarding his recent
trip through U.S.Customs. Though my slavish need to toss myself
at their feet has abated, I still admire writers and it is especially galling for
me to read about his experience. I was very grateful for this piece, and for
the comments people have left in response. After reading about how frustrated
all of us are, and how angry, I do not feel so alone.

Since my
husband was deported by ICE in late July, I have had to fly back and forth from
the U.S. to Mexico five times—and return. I am white, so are my kids, one even
has blue eyes.  I took my husband’s last
name so on paper we are the same color. ‘Deported by association,’ was a term I
recently saw online.

Even though
I get to see him on these trips and talk to him on the phone, there is
something about the way he went to work one day and didn’t come back, something
about how I had to figure out what to do with all the pieces of our life--without his usual competence and patient assistance--that makes me still feel
like he died and I am again living the nightmare left over from Straight, back
when lunatics, Oh My Brothers! were still controlling every aspect of my life. 

Many of the comments
in response to Goldman’s piece discuss race, and whether or
not certain other races besides Latinos feel singled out for more abuse. I think
it is worth pointing out that Customs agents are also of different races and
some even speak with accents. This is not to say that I don’t think race is a factor
when we talk about these abuses, and I will even go further and note that when
I told my aunt about how we are consistently at the back of the plane and have
these problems with the border patrol agents, she surmised that it was because
my last name now ends with a z. She thinks my last name explains at best my being
treated like a second class citizen, at worst a hostile enemy. I don’t want to
believe this, but I am beginning to wonder.

The people
who join me in these lines and checkpoints are like me—even if they don’t dress
like me, even if they hold different political beliefs, even if their skin is a different color.  They have kids who
are tired and cranky, they have had necessary belongings confiscated, they are
missing flights and have no credible avenue through with which to complain.
The airlines, at least are expected to take some responsibility for missed
flights and wasted time. Congress passed the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights,
but somehow the concerns addressed there don’t apply when you are at the mercy
of U.S Customs and Border Patrol.  

All of us
just want to go home. Some are on the verge of tears, some are already crying,
some bunch their fists, but do nothing further just to get through the process
without adding to the delay. From the Jamaican to the sorority girl returning
from spring break, we are all stuck in the same place at the mercy of the same
people.

In fairness
I should note that the first time we came through Atlanta was impressive, we
were welcomed back enthusiastically, and breezed through the process. I assumed
that this was because I had so many suitcases I could hardly steer the cart. The
agent even helped me with the cart and replaced my daughter’s car seat which
had by then already fallen off the pile several times.  

Another time
coming through Houston I was frustrated by the fact that there were hardly any
lanes open and an enormous backup of travelers. I am amazed that I made my
flight at all, but I did—barely—so in the end I the waiting, the questions, the
process in general was annoying and stressful but not traumatic.

On another
trip through Detroit I had my daughters aged eight and four with me. This was before my surgery and we got to skip the line because
I was in a wheelchair and in a great deal of pain.  I was not cheating, though that was what I
felt like everyone was thinking as we blew by them in line.

 “What was your reason for visiting Mexico?”
asked the Customs Agent, bending so he could address me.

 “I am bringing my daughters back after
visiting their father.”

“And why is
he down there?”

I was hoping
she wouldn’t say anything, but my eight year old puffed out her chest and said
in a loud and clear voice, “He got deported.” She said this with defiance and I
hoped he wouldn’t react. My younger one looked to her sister, then the agent,
and hung her head mumbling, “Yeah.”

My daughter’s
reactions reflect my own conflicted feelings about our government since my
husband was deported.

The customs
agent looked to me and grinned, “I guess you’re not too happy with us then,
huh?”

When dealing
with ICE I arrived at the realization that I was dealing with people who not
only don’t care, but enjoyed taunting me. They actually smile while tormenting people
who are emotionally maxed out (separate post). I didn’t expect anything  better, but still I had hoped for something that
might pass for neutrality, if not compassion. Because after all, unlike the
Mexican officials who I had initially feared--and who are consistently proving
my fears unfounded--these people are my
people. I wonder if they realize that they are teaching an entirely new
generation of citizens to hate them, and by extension, their own government.

Picture this:
thirty years from now the doctor at the rest home finds out you were once a
customs agent. “By the way your eyes are watering I think you don’t like the
new sandpaper liners we put in your Depends. Guess you’re not too happy with
me right now, huh?”

Three weeks
ago I returned from Mexico with my girls and we came through Atlanta again. I
had an hour and fifteen minutes to connect. The line was so long we were backed
up before we even got to the official section with the roped off lanes. Since
we were not yet in the official holding pen, people were making calls to
friends and family to tell them they were going to be late, and they didn’t
know what was going to happen.

It is still
astonishing to me that there is no system in place to deal with this. How hard
would it be to have someone checking boarding passes for connecting flights and
if necessary send them off to a section of agents who can prioritize them?

By the time
I got up to the counter, I had officially missed our connecting flight. On top
of this, the mistake I made was to bring a bag of food I had purchased on the
plane. The thing about traveling with kids is that they get hungry. The other
thing is that it is most excellent when they sleep through the entire flight. I
stupidly thought I could feed her the lunch we purchased on the plane at the
airport since we were not going to have time to even stop for anything due to
the short connection time.

“Why were
you in Mexico?”

“Visiting my
husband,” to head off the next question I added, “he got deported.”

The agent
looked us over, said something to an agent halfway across the line, then looked
at his screen, “Have you ever lived in New Jersey?”

Bizarre
questions like this make me wonder about the information they have, or if they
just make this stuff up as they go. “No.”

He gestured
to the sandwich bag, “What’s in there?’

“Food I
bought on the plane.”

“What is
it?”

“Sandwich,
chips, nuts. From the plane.”

On one trip
through Mexican customs I was politely asked by a Mexican customs agent to
throw away a bag of pretzels. I thought this was silly, but complied without
complaint. I do know there are rules and we must follow them.  In Mexico, the food I brought through the
line, though it was not fresh fruit, or crawling with bugs that might infect their
crops with some pestilence, is nevertheless confiscated and the whole stupid
thing ends there.

Dumbass, next time don’t bring food
through the customs line. Even if you bought it on the plane. 

Fair enough,
we are dealing with a large system that has been set up to accommodate an
enormous volume of people who bring all sorts of weird stuff through and after
all, the idea is to protect us from whatever weird substance someone might
bring in. Right? Or maybe it is really to make sure we are all really fucking
grateful we get to live in a country that keeps us so safe from the bad guys. Who
are they by the way?  

Instead of
taking the food, or even telling me that if I wished to keep the food I was
going to have to go through a separate line, he writes the letter A on my form.
The A would not be significant until later.

Once we
arrive at the baggage area, I find the car seat was there, but the suitcase
that we needed to bring through customs was not. I panicked, wondering what
that meant. Could I even go through customs without it or would I have to wait
in Atlanta however many days until the airline found it?

Dragging
children and carry-on bags forward, I approached the agent at the next
checkpoint and handed him my form. “The airline lost my luggage. I can’t bring
it though here.”

He motioned
to a separate room with a waiting area and another line and said, “Tell them
that up there.”

The line he
was pointing me toward was marked ‘Agriculture.’ I got in the line, stared at
the people ahead of me, studied the guy with a big plastic bag filled with
something hard and wet  in it and decided
I was in the wrong place. I stepped out of the line and started toward several
high desks behind which sat several agents doing paperwork but not dealing with
the people seated in chairs in front of them, thinking they could answer my
question.

You would
think I had approached the desk with a knife drawn. “Ma’am,” the agent who had
directed me yelled, “get back in line.”

I was
clearly confused, a frazzled woman with two children balancing a car seat and
other assorted bags, attempting to ask a question. This was the moment when I
began to feel afraid, threatened, trapped, and very small. A uniformed woman
answered another lady’s question, and she shot back, “You won’t do that again
will you?” When she breezed past me I asked why I was in the agriculture line
if I had lost my luggage. “What’s that?” She asked and pointed to the bag.

“Food from
the plane.”

“Well now you
have to go through this line with that.”

“What do I
do about my luggage? It wasn’t on the carousel.” I pointed toward the empty
carousel which could be seen through the window I stood next to.  

“You will
have to go see the airline about that when you make it through here.”

Here is
something else I have thought about. If so many people come through with stupid
stuff like food items purchased on the plane, so many that this agent is almost
laughing about this scenario, wouldn’t it behoove everyone involved to put some
sort of procedure in place to deal with this before passengers waste valuable
time, and agents are paid however much money to deal with it?

I have
worked with the public, I have worked with processes and policies and
procedures, and people who never seem to get it. I understand that it is easy
to become jaded, there are behaviors that are idiotic that nevertheless many
people continue to do, but at those jobs, once it was determined that there was
a problem that could be dealt with en masse, we did try to address it before it
could come up again. Here agents delight in noting that this is a common
problem and ridiculing you for being yet another person to have this problem. Which
leads me to ask, if food purchased on the airplane really was a problem, like a
real threat, wouldn’t they take it away from you before you made it through the
first checkpoint?

While my
girls who were at this point complaining quite loudly and quite often, “When
are we going to be donnnnneeeeee?”  I
watched what was happening in the waiting area several feet away. These people
got seats. I still wonder why they were there and had seats and we were herded
into this agriculture line. They must have committed some really high level
infraction like bringing in too many Rolexes or hiding their doggy-poo in their
carry on.  An agent was standing in front
of a tall desk, talking to an agent behind it. He appeared relaxed, with his
elbow on the counter and one leg hooked over the other. He said something to a
nicely dressed older couple who were sitting in the chairs in front of him. The
man stood up and took a step toward the agent.

“Sir, sit
down!” The agent’s tone was somewhere between a bark and an order.

The man said
something in a soft voice to the agent, who then moved toward him and said, “I
was talking to her, not you.”  His tone
was harsher, but it reminded me of the way my mother used to lower her voice and
speak to our dingy Doberman when she started bouncing around and running in
circles. “Sit. Down.”

The woman
rose, the man sat, his shoulders curled over his knees. In any other scene this
is someone who I would expect to see treated with extra respect. This was a man
who was muscular enough to fill out the shoulders of his elegant sweater. He
wore dark dress shoes with laces, and his cream trousers were of a heavy shimmery
fabric. He wore shiny, but not too shiny jewelry, and his mostly grey hair was
neatly cut and styled at the top. Here, in this place, though, it was OK to treat
him as if he were a serf plotting murder instead of responding to a question. Unlike
me, who offended them by not doing as instructed, he was responding to whatever
it was the agent had said!

I was in a
nightmare, like the president in Dreamscape
who took a valium and couldn’t wake up, I just had to ride it out. The panic
sets in when you realize there is no way to opt out of this, not if you want to
ever see the light of day again.

After close
to an hour, I made it to an agent at the head of the line who did nothing more
than point me to another agent who was seated in front of a table with his
hands folded in front of him. He offered a weak but warm smile. He looked at
the sandwich bag and asked me the same questions. I gave the same answers, and
then he sent my carry-on bags through a machine with a conveyor belt and
gestured for me to move around to the end of the machine.

Here I was
met by one of two more agents, the one helping me seemed possibly apologetic, even
friendly. “What’s this?”

“Food from
the plane.”

“What’s in
it?” He looked over the outside of the bag.

“A sandwich,
and some chips, nuts that aren’t even opened still.” By this time all I wanted
to do was to go to a hotel and cry.

“What kind
of sandwich is it?”

“Turkey.”

He put his
hand inside the bag and moved the plastic with his fingertips and then said,
“Collect your bags here,” and pointed to our bags which had come through the
screener.

“You mean I
get to keep it?”

“Yes.”

This is the
part of all this that makes me the most insane and sad about the customs mess
in general. The larger problem here was not the fact that some agents were
bullying and scary. The problem wasn’t ONLY the laziness, or the callousness,
or the frustration, the fact of the matter is that this system does not work.

In fact, it
is beyond broken, it costs money. It costs the government money and it costs
each of us individually money. It costs money in the form of all the salaries
that have to be paid, and it costs us, the people who pay these salaries by way
of tax dollars, immediate money by way of the cost of rebooking flights, hotel
rooms, cabs to get to the hotels, food that needs to be purchased on layovers
and whatever other incidentals are necessary. This does not even begin to
calculate the other costs associated with missed work time and appointments
that result due to the missed flights.

All because
someone at the front of the line couldn’t do exactly the same thing that the
guy at the end of the line did. If the problem is that we don’t have enough
competent people to staff and manage a system like this, we shouldn’t have it
to begin with.

This agent,
as nice as he was, as apologetic as he seemed to be, didn’t even open the bag
and dump everything out to make sure there wasn’t anything sinister inside. All
of this, almost two hours since I had seen the first agent, the one who marked
my form with an A, the agent who could have taken the food and NOT marked my
form with the A, thereby saving me and my kids the time and hassle, not to
mention his five fellow agents.

I have dealt
with rude agents and decent agents. What strikes me is that they are also my
fellow Americans. I have had lots of time standing in these lines to think
about the system and the managers that have set up this process. We-The-People
pay their salaries with money we work for. Money my husband worked for fifteen
years for, and contrary to popular rhetoric, he did pay his taxes. All of these
people whether they are doing a good job or a bad job, will all say they were just doing their jobs. Isn’t that what Eichmann
said? At what point in his career did he start telling himself that?

In the end,
this entire experience has opened my eyes. I used to live in a country where government
officials could be lazy—just like me. They could make mistakes—just like me. They
could be rude when provoked by idiots who wouldn’t follow procedures properly
and chose to blame them instead of their own stupidity—just like me. But most
of the time, they could be said to perform something like a useful service and
my life went on. I shut my eyes to the fact that some races were treated
unfairly, and some abuses occurred within the government, mostly outside our
borders (like that should matter).

To top it
off, thanks to Edward Snowden, it has been confirmed that since I have vented
my rage and fear to family and friends over the telephone, the NSA has probably
caught some key phrases and I could be being monitored for anything further
that could be construed as worrisome. At what point would they decide to act on
their suspicions? If they are as diligent, thorough and efficient as these Customs
agents, this concept is terrifying.

One reader said
in her comment that she took the time to submit an official complaint and every
time after that was harassed each time she came through.  If we can’t complain through the CBP’s
processes and feel like they won’t retaliate, there is some comfort in knowing that
there are other people who feel just as offended and are just as bothered as I am
by this whole undignified and unreasonable
process.

When I
finally did make it to the airline counter, I was so tired I forgot to ask for
a later flight in the afternoon and we ended up on a flight that meant we had
to come back and do it all again in seven hours. We still had not even made it
through TSA.

I almost
cried when she told me that I still had to go through the huge snaking line
twenty yards farther away.  A couple next
to me were visibly upset, the woman was crying and moving in circles. She was
explaining something about contact lens solution and she had the same question
I did, “Why do I have to go through TSA if we are leaving the airport?” I
caught glimpses of her puffy red face the whole way through that line, her face
mirroring my internal struggle not to completely freak out it in front of my
kids, a battle I would later lose anyway over a malfunctioning drinking
fountain (they confiscated our water bottle at TSA).

My question
for the rude but competent airline attendant who was helping me was how they
could get away with this?

“Das da
gubmt.”

I knew that,
but I just had to ask, and in that response and the way her face softened when
she met my eyes, there was connection and understanding. I also stopped to
wonder if I am the only one who thinks that isn’t good enough anymore.   

Just because the president says it, doesn’t make it true. I was much older before I learned
this. My kids watched the last State of the Union with me, you know the one
where he talked about immigration reform? They know that their government lies to them and no longer cares if they get caught in
that lie.

I used to
feel safe as an American Citizen, not so much anymore. Both because of how I am
treated by representatives of my own government, but also by the fact that the
more I travel, the more I hear about Americans who say they are Canadians to
avoid being treated badly or worse, just give up their citizenship altogether.

The sense that
I am now a fundamentally different person has been growing with each pass
through the checkpoints, and it solidified with this last trip. I am harassed
and abused—as are my fellow Americans—we are treated as if we have done
something wrong by returning to our own country, when all we want to do is make
it home. 

For the love
of God I cannot figure out why this would be true, but I believe a new truth.
The proof is in the actions of agencies like ICE, the people who issue
passports through the State Department (separate post to follow), and now Customs
and Border Patrol. The U.S. government is very heavily invested in separating
families, but that is not enough, it then goes further with Customs and Border
Protection by punishing them each time they manage to reunite.

                                   God
bless the United States of America.