On the other side of the bridge from Mexico, the young U.S. Customs Service officer asked me to toss my suitcase on the inspection table. He opened it and then tensed up at what he saw.
Sitting on top of the clothes were four thin pamphlets, each about 30 pages long and each bound with a plastic spiral.
“These aren’t something against the U.S., are they?” he asked me, suspiciously.
It was my turn to freeze. I had never heard that kind of question when entering the U.S. before, only when entering places such as Syria, Iraq or the Congo.
I asked the officer: Is it your job to be censoring information people are bringing into the country?
“Actually, sir,” he replied, “if it’s propaganda against the U.S., we can prevent it from coming in.”
As the inspector began paging through the reports, I wondered whether I was seeing how much the U.S. has changed since Sept. 11, how careful Americans are being, but also what kind of security excesses might tempt us as we battle global terrorism and prepare for war against Iraq.
Could the officer be right about confiscating “propaganda?” What about the 1st Amendment, which protects our right to speak freely without government intervention? What about the free discussion of ideas being one of the strengths of our country?
I assumed the guy in uniform was just being extra vigilant. It is a tense time, and all U.S. citizens expect border inspectors to be on their toes.
A few moments later, with a “Thank you, sir,” he waved me through after concluding that the Spanish-language pamphlets were harmless and quite boring Mexican think-tank treatises on the U.S.-Mexico water crisis and migration.
Ironically, the one pamphlet he didn’t look at was titled “The Militarization of the Northern Border of Mexico,” an analysis of stepped-up U.S. patrols and inspections in recent years.
But to check out whether he was on solid legal ground with this literary inspection, I called the U.S. Customs Service headquarters in Laredo. There, I could almost hear a spokesman grimace as he said that the incident didn’t “sound right.”
The official referred me to a section of the agency’s Web site called “Know Before You Go.” But the page didn’t say anything about prohibitions on written materials, except for a special clause describing how “informational material” is allowed to be imported from Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan despite U.S. embargoes against those nations.
Apparently, written materials from Iraq don’t qualify for the exception and can be confiscated.
Hours later, the spokesman called back to say there is an import law. It is 19 USC 1305, a 1913 statute that prohibits written materials “advocating or urging treason or insurrection against the U.S., or forcible resistance to any law of the U.S. . . . any threat to take the life or inflict bodily harm upon any person . . . or any (written material) that is obscene or immoral.”
The law has been a controversial one, with 89 years of litigation focused on how the Customs Service has used it to confiscate smut at the border.
In 1988, 12 people sued the agency, complaining of confiscations of political material after returning from then-Marxist-ruled Nicaragua.
They said some of the confiscated books could be found in U.S. libraries, and one woman claimed agents photocopied the names of friends out of her address book.
In a reprimand, a U.S. District Court judge later ruled that the materials had to be returned and that no records could be kept of people with allegedly “treasonous” material.
This week, the customs spokesman in Laredo said that as far as he knew, obscenity is normally the target, but that the agency is being extra careful these days.
“We are at a higher level of alert, so we are taking a closer look,” he explained. “I really don’t recall anything at all like” something being confiscated for promoting violence or political conflict.
He said in a recent case, inspectors confiscated a carload of pornographic videotapes.
