Well before President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown further opened the door for agents and officers to question people about their citizenship and legal status, the Border Patrol had been doing exactly that at checkpoints flanking roadways within the United States.
It was at such an inland checkpoint that on Feb. 4 Border Patrol apprehended the parents of five children, four of them U.S. citizens.
They were en route from Rio Grande City, Texas, to Houston for emergency medical care for their 10-year-old daughter who has brain cancer, NBC News reported, when they arrived at the Falfurrias checkpoint. Rio Grande City is about 360 miles southwest of Houston, and about an 85-mile to 104-mile drive from the checkpoint, depending on the route taken.
The parents, who did not have documentation showing they were citizens or had legal status, were deported. Seeing no other options, they took their five children with them to Mexico, uncertain how they’d get their daughter the care she needs.
Located up to 100 miles from the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, Border Patrol checkpoints have long dotted U.S. arteries, serving as something of a secondary border — or tertiary when considering areas where border wall and fencing has been built.
In a 1976 decision, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Border Patrol’s routine stops and brief questioning at checkpoints that are “a reasonable distance from the border” do not violate Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure.
The federal government has defined reasonable distance as within 100 air miles (about 115 miles) or shorter distance, as set by the Customs and Border Protection chief or Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent for a specific sector or district. That 100 air-mile limit creates a boundary that covers every U.S. land border or water boundary.
The up to 100 miles from the nation’s land and water boundaries takes in all of Florida and a number of major cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, New York and Houston.
Not everyone in those cities passes through checkpoints unless they travel to the land borders or live behind them.
But for a large swath of the U.S. population, checkpoints are a regular part of life, where they must affirm — some more than others because of race — that they are citizens or have legal residency in the U.S. and they aren’t shuttling contraband or human cargo deeper into the country.
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, two permanent checkpoints are in Sarita on Highway 69-East and another at Falfurrias, on U.S. Highway 281, where Border Patrol agents stopped the young girl with brain cancer and her family. Both lie between Rio Grande City, on the border, and Houston.
“Anywhere you go north, you will find a checkpoint” in the Rio Grande Valley said Felix Rivera, a social worker with La Union del Pueblo Entero, LUPE, a community advocacy organization founded by civil rights leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
“People that are here undocumented, they are like in a cage. If they go to San Antonio, they will find the checkpoint at Falfurrias, if they go to other areas of the state, they will find other checkpoints, so it’s very hard for an undocumented person to get out,” Rivera told NBC News. There are no checkpoints for traffic heading south.
Many U.S. citizens drive through them regularly with little problem.
Typically, the process goes like this: Vehicles are detoured into the checkpoint from the highway, queuing up if there is a line. Each vehicle then pulls up to the Border Patrol agent on duty, drivers roll down the window, pronounce their citizenship or respond to a question of whether they are citizens, and move on. Driver’s licenses or proof of presence aren’t always requested, but can be when people are pulled out of line and sent to another area for “secondary inspection.”
There are 34 permanent checkpoints on the southwest border and one on the northern land border. An estimated 50 million vehicles pass through the checkpoints daily, CBP said.
The agency said in an email that it does not provide a public map of the checkpoint locations and declined to provide a total number of apprehensions or seizures at checkpoints, saying the information was law-enforcement sensitive.
When vehicles pass through a checkpoint, “if an agent has suspicion that the occupants of the vehicle are present in the United States illegally, or there is reasonable suspicion that another federal crime has been committed, the vehicle and all occupants will be referred for a more in-depth secondary inspection,” CBP stated.
In a 2022 report, the Government Accountability Office, citing CBP data, stated Border Patrol arrested about 35,700 people who could potentially be removed from the U.S. in about 17,500 “events” at checkpoints, during the fiscal years 2016 through 2020. At that time, CBP data on apprehensions of people was unreliable, the GAO said, despite the creation of a Checkpoint Program Management Office in 2013 to oversee the checkpoints.
The checkpoints aren’t always operating. In 2019, some Border Patrol checkpoints were shut down and their personnel shifted to helping process asylum-seekers who were arriving in higher numbers at the border.
The family that was stopped at the Falfurrias checkpoint had passed a few other times through the checkpoint without incident, carrying letters from doctors and lawyers regarding their plans for the trip to seek medical care.
Rivera said LUPE has several members that have children that needed “to go up north” for surgery. Working with their attorneys, LUPE created a letter directed to the Border Patrol that would allow them to travel in that direction, stating “that it was a humanitarian matter.”
“And sometimes those letters do not work, they end up in deportation proceedings,” Rivera said. “It depends on how the officer looks at you, and sometimes they are kind of racist.” He said LUPE always warns families that the letters may not protect them.
Making trips to larger cities is critical for those in the Rio Grande Valley, which has long struggled with health care access. While there have been improvements, the limited availability of affordable health care is particularly problematic given the area’s large uninsured population and higher incidence of certain diseases such as diabetes. That forces families to travel to larger urban areas beyond the checkpoints for care.
Rivera said he was shocked when he moved from Los Angeles to the Rio Grande Valley and encountered the checkpoints, even though he said he has never had an issue passing through one.
In February, a warning from a South Texas school district that agents at checkpoints might board school buses carrying schoolchildren to extracurricular activities panicked parents in the region.
But U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks called the warning “absurd,” leading the school district to remove the warning from public online sites. The Texas Tribune reported that even as CBP said it does not target school buses, it repeated in an email that is has the authority to verify immigration status of any passengers on buses that pass through checkpoints, including students.
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