This week, an ACLU lawyer named Hina Shamsi was detained by Customs and Border Protection

after returning from a work trip abroad.

As she wrote in a blog post,

Shamsi, a Pakistani national with a green card,

faced hostile questions from a border agent who wanted to know why someone with this passport would be working for, quote, an organization with American in its name.

The agent also asked her, she wrote, why she wasn't yet a naturalized citizen. There is no requirement of green card holders to seek naturalization.

In the wake of the so-called Muslim ban, stories of mistreatment at the borders of visitors

and U.S. citizens alike are everywhere. They are not, however, new.

In 2014, we spent an episode trying to shred the veil of secrecy that shrouds customs

and border protection, the huge police force guarding our borders. We know we have fewer

rights at the borders, but that's all we know. We don't know what rights we retain or how they're

enfeebled by CBP policies under the Department of Homeland Security

because we don't have access to that information. All we have are countless stories of

dehumanizing detentions and intrusions at the border that would seem to be unconstitutional

anywhere else. Since we didn't have and couldn't get hard numbers, we used stories.

The first, the one that started us on this quest,

was from former OTM producer Sarah Abdurman,

who in the fall of 2013 was headed back to New York

from her cousin's wedding near Toronto

when she was detained, along with a carload of family and friends,

for six hours without explanation,

by U.S. Border Patrol agents at Niagara Falls.

...