Think about arriving at the airport from a foreign country. You are tired from a long flight, anxious about your baggage, and thinking about meeting your family in the arrivals area. You may not have seen them in years. Perhaps it is your first time in the United States. Perhaps you do not speak English well. Perhaps you plan to ask for asylum. Perhaps you are coming from a country where interactions with people in uniform generally involve bribery, intimidation, or worse.

The FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection work closely together to turn these vulnerabilities into opportunities for gathering intelligence, according to government documents obtained by The Intercept. CBP assists the FBI in its efforts to target travelers entering the country as potential informants, feeding the bureau passenger lists and pulling people aside for lengthy interrogations in order to gather intelligence from them on the FBI’s behalf, the documents show. In one briefing, CBP bills itself as the “GO TO agency in the Law Enforcement world when it comes to identifying individuals of either source or lead potential.”

…

“One client was straight-up approached at the airport by FBI agents as he was returning from his honeymoon,” said Diala Shamas, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, who worked as an attorney with Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility, or CLEAR, an initiative providing legal services to communities in New York impacted by counterterrorism policies.

…

Diala Shamas, the former CLEAR attorney, said that she prepared her clients “to recognize a line of questioning by CBP officers that goes beyond legitimate questions — whether related to their identity, border enforcement, the safety of the flight, or customs enforcement — and into the realm of intelligence gathering.”

Read More