Aide Aguirre says a drive home from dinner turned into a frightening encounter with ICE agents at a Highway 21 checkpoint. She fears the stop may have been motivated by racial profiling and sought emergency medical care afterward. Read her firsthand account of the tense moments and what it means for the community.
weird anecdote time: 20 years ago, I was paid to drive a car from New Orleans to San Diego. It is important to know that I did not have a drivers license at the time and I was very stupid. Eventually, the drive took me on to Interstate 8, which runs directly on the US-Mexico border. Along this interstate, they had immigration checkpoints, where an armed border agent would check your license to make sure that you were not jumping the border (which was like 50 feet in the other direction) or carrying contraband. Not once, when stopped, was I asked to produce a drivers license that I did not have. I just told them where I was going, I was a white male, they let me go on my happy way.
TL;DR - they just want to check non-whites in more places, this is an expansion of something that has been in place for a good while
weird anecdote time: 20 years ago, I was paid to drive a car from New Orleans to San Diego. It is important to know that I did not have a drivers license at the time and I was very stupid. Eventually, the drive took me on to Interstate 8, which runs directly on the US-Mexico border. Along this interstate, they had immigration checkpoints, where an armed border agent would check your license to make sure that you were not jumping the border (which was like 50 feet in the other direction) or carrying contraband. Not once, when stopped, was I asked to produce a drivers license that I did not have. I just told them where I was going, I was a white male, they let me go on my happy way.
TL;DR - they just want to check non-whites in more places, this is an expansion of something that has been in place for a good while