After reading this opinion, I so desperately want to drive down there. Desperately So much so that I thought about not writing this post and instead actually doing it.
But it's a 25 minutes drive (plus another 25 back), and I would have to do it at 7:30 a.m., which is a bit early for me. So I have very reluctantly come to the conclusion that I will never, in fact, do it.
Hence today's post.
It's a border stop. Border Patrol agents see someone walking down a street at 7:30 a.m. in the morning. The opinion calls the street "a divided highway" and never mentions its name, but from the facts in the opinion, I'm virtually certain that it's Camino De La Plaza down in Imperial Beach. As you can see from the map, that road is a couple hundred yards from the border, abuts an extensive residential subdivision, and leads to a shopping mall and set of outlet stores.
Anyway, it's 7:30 in the morning, and (as is often the case down there) there's a decently heavy fog (since the ocean's nearby). Border patrol agents see a guy walking down Camino De La Plaza, but he's walking on the side of the street without a sidewalk, and he's also got some mud on his legs and boots.
The agents stop him on the theory that he's just illegally crossed the border, and think that the mud came from crossing the nearby Tijuana River and its environs. They ask him if he's illegally crossed the border and he admits that he has, and that he's a citizen of Mexico (not the United States), so they arrest him for illegal entry.
He gets convicted of illegal entry and sentenced to time served, but appeals, claiming that there was no reasonable suspicion to stop him. The Ninth Circuit affirms. All of the facts above, the panel holds, gave the officers a reasonable basis for believing that he might have illegally crossed the border.
And, honestly, you can see why the case might well come out that way.
But here's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to drive down to Camino De La Plaza at 7:30 a.m. on a foggy morning, put some mud on my pants legs and boots, and walk in the exact same place, at the exact same time, and in the exact same way as Mr. Bejar-Guizar. A 58-year old white guy walking on the same street in the same context.
Do you think that Border Patrol agents would stop me? Or would they think that I'm just a guy out for a morning walk -- probably from the next-door subdivision?
I wanted to do it half a dozen times and see how often they actually pulled over and stopped me. My suspicion -- right or wrong -- was: rarely, if ever.
There's zero about Mr. Bejar-Guizar's race in the opinion. But it seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that this had absolutely nothing to do with him being stopped.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe agents would similarly stop me every single time and demand proof that I was a legal U.S. citizen.
But I suspect not.
