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British tourist detained by US authorities for 10 days over visa issue

(www.theguardian.com)
205 points n1b0m | 2 comments | 10 Mar 25 18:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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tim333 ◴[10 Mar 25 23:51 UTC] No.43327570[source]▶
The US has always been a scary place to cross the border. I'm a Brit and have been to 50+ countries and the US is the only one that seems like it's trying to find a reason to arrest you. The others generally don't give problems or possibly just refuse entry and you have to go back.

The other thing that puzzles me about the US is they give basically law abiding travellers all sorts of grief while at the same time letting people just wander in from Mexico and live for years. Odd system.

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AlotOfReading ◴[11 Mar 25 00:11 UTC] No.43327721[source]▶
The US doesn't just let people wander in. The US-Mexico border is incredibly militarized, with multiple lines of checkpoints on either side and a massive amount of technology and manpower to support patrolling the desert between ports. It's closer to a conflict border than it is to a typical international border.
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1. gruez ◴[11 Mar 25 00:18 UTC] No.43327771[source]▶
>The US doesn't just let people wander in. The US-Mexico border is incredibly militarized, with multiple lines of checkpoints on either side. [...] It's closer to the DMZ than it is to a typical international border.

Unless "multiple lines of checkpoints" actually means "multiple booths so visitors can be processed in parallel", this is most certainly false. Here's the San Ysidro boreder crossing in Tijuana:

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.5423767,-117.0289817,331m/da...

You can see a wide fanout to a bunch of booths, a secondary screening area north of that, and some administrative buildings. That's not "multiple lines of checkpoints". It's just one checkpoint. There might be more drug sniffer dogs than the average border crossing elsewhere, but for the typical traveler it's otherwise not that much different.

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2. AlotOfReading ◴[11 Mar 25 01:54 UTC] No.43328346[source]▶
San Ysidro is a port, only a small part of a much larger system run by the US CBP that extends up to 100 miles into the US. Here's the map of checkpoints for San Diego sector where San Ysidro is [0]. You can see an outdated map of the commonly used checkpoints for the whole US [1]. There's also a bunch of invisible infrastructure hidden between these checkpoints, from ALPR to facial recognition systems, not to mention regular patrols by USBP. Each sector's run a bit differently in practice, depending on various constraints and the different kinds of crossing they see. Tucson sector uses more mobile checkpoints because of congressional limitations for example, while Yuma sector focuses more on deep-desert patrolling in cooperation with tribal authorities because that's a well-developed coyote route.

A reasonably similar system of checkpoints exists on the Mexican side as well, oriented against people heading north.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/GAO-05-4...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/USBP_Int...