The airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained

A legal permanent resident claims he was tortured by customs agents after returning home from a trip to Europe. A doctor with a work visa was denied entry into the country — then flown out of the US in spite of a court order halting her deportation. Two German tourists were hassled at a port of entry, then transferred to immigrant detention centers, where they were held for weeks.

President Donald Trump promised mass deportations, vowing to rid the country of so-called “criminal aliens.” But as Trump expands the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) mandate, legal immigrants, too, are finding themselves in the government’s crosshairs. Their arrests are facilitated by DHS’s vast surveillance capabilities, which are largely invisible to the public by design — and where the details of a person’s life, from years-old criminal charges to seemingly innocuous social media posts, are weaponized.

Shocking as they are, these recent events — people with valid travel documents being detained and interrogated, sometimes violently — aren’t entirely unusual. Any noncitizen, including legal immigrants, can end up in deportation proceedings. But Customs and Border Protect …

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