<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML> The AP story below (posted by National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights at <A HREF="http://www.nnirr.org/">http://www.nnirr.org/</A> ) was actually filed two weeks ago, but its report on the latest expansion of La Linea's prerogatives offers a grim bureaucratic (jurisprudential?) frame for Mike Davis' remapped Frontera. ======================================================= SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Border Patrol agents can consider ethnicity among other factors when they make traffic stops, a federal appeals court ruled in a case involving two Hispanic men who turned their cars around to avoid a highway checkpoint. The ruling comes at a time when the use of a subject's ethnic background as the basis for traffic stops is receiving increasing attention across the country. In a 2-1 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld the detention of two Hispanic men stopped 50 miles inside the U.S. after they tried to avoid a highway checkpoint. The court said it was appropriate that among the things the officers considered in making the stop was the fact the men turned around, and that they were Hispanic. Writing for the majority, visiting U.S. District Court Judge Frank C. Damrell of Fresno pointed out a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a 1975 case, in which the court listed a number of things the police could consider in such an instance. Among them were the character of the area; nearness to the border; traffic patterns; previous smuggling problems in the area, the officer's experience; and the behavior of the passengers. In the current case, a motorist advised authorities at a checkpoint that two cars with Mexican plates had turned around about a mile from the checkpoint. Officers spotted the cars; they noted the occupants were Hispanic, that the cars appeared to be traveling together and that the passenger in one of the cars began reading a newspaper as they were being followed. The men, German Espinoza Montero-Camargo and Lorenzo Sanchez-Gillen, were stopped and asked about their citizenship and why they turned around. Agents searched both cars and found two large bags of marijuana and a .32-caliber pistol. The men were charged; the ruling upheld Montero-Camargo's conditional guilty plea to conspiracy to possess marijuana with intent to distribute and Sanchez-Guillen's conviction on the same charge and for being an illegal alien possessing ammunition. In the ruling, Damrell, joined by Judge Dairmuid O'Scannlain, said avoiding the checkpoint wasn't in itself enough to justify the stop. But he said there were several other reasons, including the two cars traveling together; the ethnic origin of the men; the agents' prior experience: and the past use of the area as a drug drop-off zone. In his dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski wrote, "None of the 'numerous other factors' cited by the majority justify the stop in our case." He also cited a 1994 case in which the same court ruled that reasonable suspicion can't be based on broad profiles that cast suspicion on entire categories of people. Doug Henwood wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE>rc-am wrote: >more territorialised: border controls being a prime example? Mike Davis has an interesting riff on the Mexico-US border in his NLR piece. Doug ---- [from Mike Davis, "Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City," New Left Review 234, March/Aprill 1999, pp. 15-16] La Linea and the Border Patrol The Mexican-USs border may not be the epochal marriage of cultures that Valladao actually has in mind, but it is nonetheless a lusty bastard offspring of its two parents. Spanish offers the useful distinction, moreover, between La Linea, the physical and jurisprudential border, and the distinctive, 2000-mile-long zone of daily cultural and economic interchange it defines, La Frontera, with its estimated eight million inhabitants. All borders, of course, are historically and geographically specific, and La Linea, even in its present Berlin-Wall-like configuration, has never been intended to stop labour from migrating al otro lado. On the contrary, it functions like a dam, creating a reservoir of labour-power on the Mexican side of the border that can be tapped on demand via the secret aqueduct managed by polleros, iguanas and coyotes - as smugglers of workers and goods are locally known - for the farms of south Texas, the hotels of Las Vegas and the sweatshops of Los Angeles. At the same time, the Border Patrol maintains a dramatic show of force along the border to reassure voters that the threat of alien invasion - a phantasmagoria largely created by border militarization itself - is being contained. An increasingly Orwellian, but deliberately porous, border is the result. 'This bizarre combination of ineffectuality and force at the border', as Josiah Heyman points out, 'determines the niches that undocumented immigrants occupy'. 'In the border area, immigrant peoples are both boundary-defined foreigners and tacit, though bottom of the class structure, insiders.' In the past, and still to a surprising extent today, the absence or non-enforcement of employer sanctions has ensured that only the workers themselves pay the cost of their 'illegality'-in deportation, lost wages, even imprisonment: a powerful tool for intimidating workers and discouraging unionization. The emergence of a dynamic maquiladora - or maquila in border slang - economy employing nearly a million workers, 60 per cent female, on the border itself has done little to stem the flow of surplus labour northward, since Mexico alone produces one million more new workers each year than it can actually employ in its formal economy. Border industrialization, however, has dramatically changed the culture of La Frontera and the inter- relationships of the dozen or so twin cities that span the border from Matamoros/Brownsville on the Gulf to Tijuana/San Diego on the Pacific. The two largest and most dynamic of these binational metropolises are El Paso/Ciudad Juarez (1.5 million residents and 372 maquilas) and San Diego/Tijuana (3.07 million residents and 719 maquilas). Despite some obvious differences, such as the more radical abruptness of the socio-economic divide between San Diego and Tijuana, these ciudades hermanas are evolving along similar pathways that have few analogues within any other system of international borders.</BLOCKQUOTE> </HTML>