Many people must deal with these checkpoints and armed federal agents while traveling along public roadways. You do not have to comply with their questions. There’s no reasonable basis to believe that Border Patrol agents who have seized you at a suspicionless checkpoint removed from the border or its functional equivalent have any legal authority to compel answers to their questions or to indefinitely detain individuals who choose to not voluntarily discard the individual rights enumerated within the 4th and 5th amendments.
You have rights. If you choose not to use them, don’t criticize those who do use them. I will continue to peacefully and lawfully exercise my rights while being seized absent suspicion at internal checkpoints. I will also continue to run my YouTube channel the way I see fit.
United States v. Martinez-Fuerte: “We have held that checkpoint searches are constitutional only if justified by consent or probable cause to search.” The Court also held, “our holding today is limited to the type of stops described in this opinion. Any further detention…must be based on consent or probable cause.”
Justice William Brennan wrote concerning the ruling that allowed these stops as marking a radical new intrusion on citizens’ rights, and that it “empties the reasonableness requirement of the Amendment”.
He also says: “The scheme of the Fourth Amendment becomes meaningful only when it is assured that at some point the conduct of those charged with enforcing the laws can be subjected to the more detached, neutral scrutiny of a judge who must evaluate the reasonableness of a particular search or seizure in light of the particular circumstances. And in making that assessment it is imperative that the facts be judged against an objective standard . . . . Anything less would invite intrusions upon constitutionally guaranteed rights based on nothing more substantial than inarticulate hunches, a result this Court has consistently refused to sanction.”
