Ticket to Profile: the Border Patrol's Transportation Checks at the Spokane, WA Intermodal Center

Abstract

This thesis examines transportation checks, one of the United States Border Patrol’s operational strategies in the 100-mile border zone. Transportation checks have been criticized as “show-me-your-papers” operations that rely on racial and ethnic profiling and violate constitutional rights. There has been little research on transportation checks, and none covering their increased frequency during the Trump administration. I use U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) own I-213 arrest data from 2013 to 2020 to examine transportation check arrests in the Northwest, most at the Spokane, Washington Intermodal Center. I also examine Supreme Court precedent and policy around transportation checks and racial profiling at the border. The transportation check data from Spokane strengthens the case for constitutional violations and disproportionate targeting of people of color, particularly individuals of Latin American origin. It also demonstrates that transportation checks in Spokane overwhelmingly arrested long-term U.S. residents and people without criminal history, despite CBP’s literature characterizing them as targeting recent border crossers and security threats. Transportation checks have a high “miss rate” of people questioned versus arrested and operate with a dragnet approach that sweeps up many U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and others with legal status. This research concludes with policy recommendations to definitively end transportation checks, which have decreased after advocacy and legal challenges culminated in Greyhound’s 2020 decision to refuse Border Patrol agents access to their buses.