Those sniffer dogs are very accurate. Clearly, there were no actual drugs in the bag at the time of entry, but earlier is a different question.
Don’t you have to declare any food upon entry to the United States? I know I always fill out those customs forms. No mention in the WaPo article, but did Mr. Haughton declare the honey? It probably would have gone very differently if he had.
No, quite the opposite. It depends a lot on the handler – but bottom line, they are dogs, not machines. There’s up to about a 50% error rate, and dogs often alert because of their handler’s unconscious body language. From https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/05/supreme-courts-alternative-facts-about-drug-sniffing-dogs/
“Don’t you have to declare any food upon entry to the United States? I know I always fill out those customs forms. No mention in the WaPo article, but did Mr. Haughton declare the honey? It probably would have gone very differently if he had.”
Besides just being pure speculation, 3 months of incarceration seems like a crazy ass amount of time to pay had he not mentioned his honey. Plus, the sniffing dogs usually come before you reach the counter to declare anything.
In addition to being a huge overreach in this case, what an absolute waste of taxpayers’ dollars.
BTW, three months incarceration is on the justice system not the TSA, so save your disgust for them. Again I am not a big fan of TSA, don’t really like getting searched, but they get a bad rap for having to do a job no one likes.
It wasn’t TSA in any case – TSA screens outgoing passengers, not incoming. It was U.S. Customs and Border Protection - both for the honey-carrier and the Harvard-admit. That’s who does the screening when people enter the country from abroad, and obviously there are separate lines for citizens & non-citizens. Totally different agencies.
Sure I blame TSA. They get a bad rap because they deserve a bad rap. Even GAO reports agree. I’ve travelled enough in other countries to know the job can be done more efficiently. TSA needs an overall. We citizens deserve a better system. No shortage of articles on the topic.
https://www.smartertravel.com/how-to-fix-the-tsa/
Ditto for CBP. Plenty on what they need to fix as well from GAO and others. And they overreach in their powers and continuously run into constitutional rights issues.
@Calmom is correct that CBP does inbound screenings.
@doschicos Well if your talking policy then that is quite different then grouping all TSA and CBP personnel into your blame game, what I am talking about are individuals doing there job. You should be blaming your congressman for setting up the TSA/CBP. Put the blame where blame is due not on some hapless individual doing a job nobody appreciates. Trying calling your representative if you don’t like what is happening.
@CU123 Let’s be clear, I’m also talking about individuals doing their jobs. There is plenty of incompetence to go around. Rather than defending it, you too should expect and demand better from our governmental agencies. Don’t worry about my political engagement. Nothing wrong with placing blame when it is warranted. How else do things get better than holding people accountable, especially when innocent folks’ lives get messed up?
I question what kind of response you expected when you chose to post this thread? That we’d all be jumping up and down with joy because they kept a “bad guy” from going to Harvard?
Nope but its clearly the government that makes policy not TSA or CBP. As far as individuals go, I just ask for a supervisor and it usually gets taken care of. Seems like there are some whom decided that all TSA/CBP personnel are to be despised.
The coin-flip conclusion doesn’t sound quite right to me and I suspect the author would’ve failed a statistics class. If a dog sniffs 100 people and signals positive on 2, and one of those 2 is a false positive, then the dog’s accuracy is 99%, not 50%. If you look only at the two he signaled on, then you would say the false positive rate is 50% which is completely different from overall accuracy.
Alternatively, I suppose the dogs could be signaling positive on literally everybody and being wrong 50% of the time (which would imply that 50% of the public is carrying illegal drugs), which kinda defies credulity. But I’ve seen drug sniffing dogs at airports (3 in the past year) and I’ve never seen a single one signal positive, ever.
And my own TSA story - I was chosen for a pat-down once and when asked if my pockets were empty replied yes. But I forgot I had my paper boarding pass in my pocket. The agent was pissed and proceeded to give me a loooong, stern lecture about being truthful, blah blah blah. Because of my paper boarding pass in my back pocket.
You are spouting statistical nonsense.
In the case you describe, someone stopped by a sniffer dog has only a 50% chance of having drugs. That’s a coin flip.
But what chance does someone with drugs have of being stopped by a dog? We don’t know. It only follows that it’s 99% in your case if you assume that only 1/100 people was carrying drugs.
@CU123 wrote:
Nice that that works for you but it would be a mistake to assume that’s the norm.
One of my college age kids was detained upon return from Mexico because apparently CBP felt she’d been there a suspicious number of times. They kept insisting she was bringing in drugs (she wasn’t) and when that failed, that she had had a DUI (she hadn’t) and other nonsense. It was clear they were just trying to rattle her with random accusations. Luckily for her she has a squeaky clean record. She repeatedly explained that she had gone on vacation with friends to a resort and had also visited her grandmother, who lives in Mexico. I don’t know that they yelled but they certainly scared the heck out of her. They finally let up on her when she started to cry.
She is a privileged, white, well to do, college-educated, American-born citizen, and she came out thoroughly shaken. I can’t imagine what this experience would have been like for someone with a hazier legal status or past record. She was traveling with her dad but he wasn’t allowed to see her and had no idea what was going on until she was released. The next few times she travelled she was flagged for secondary inspection on both ends. No TSA Pre on departure despite having Global Entry. Sent to the long line upon return to the US. We had to go through an appeal process to have her record cleared.
FWIW, before the TSA was formed after 9/11 the security screening jobs at the large airport near us was staffed in part by people transitioning out of recovery halfway houses getting into, or back into the working world.
I don’t believe anyone getting into Harvard can be so naive. Also, I would expect Harvard to have prepped an incoming foreign student on the ins and outs of getting into the country.
I’m not sure any university does more than refer kids to US regulations.
I’ve been patted down here and abroad, had my hands wiped, been questioned. (Not threatened.) And there’s nothing unusual about me or my travels.
I can. As an 18 year old, I would never have thought to scrub my phone (not that I have anything bad on it).
If they did not make it crystal clear before, my understanding is that they have been doing so since Trump’s first executive order in in January 2017.
@skieurope you’re right - things have changed and that’s why I think a student of that caliber would have known better or have been coached by Harvard. My son volunteered for a semester tutoring exchange students. His student was a grad student from an interesting country so I asked if he planned on keeping in touch. He said that his university prohibited exchanging numbers with their students, who may or may not have legal status. If his student got interviewed by ICE or something they did not want my sons contact info on his exchange students phone to get swept up in the mess. If the info was provided by Harvard and student ignored it maybe he lost his shot at attending school here.
Remember, this wasn’t on the student’s phone:
““I responded that I have no business with such posts and that I didn’t like, share or comment on them and told her that I shouldn’t be held responsible for what others post … I have no single post on my timeline discussing politics,” he added.”
Young people can have thousands of “friends” on their social media.
To be fair on a couple of points.
1/ We have one article with one perspective written by a Harvard student who uses the word “deported” incorrectly which has been turned and spun by various other media outlets. We don’t have the full story.
2/ Harvard sends a lot of information over the summer. Although arguably this was a piece of key information,it could have been lost in the volume of mailings.
New article in the Crimson, but no new details about Ajjawi: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/8/30/Ajjawi-petition-entry-harvard/
Comments by poster “Nancy Morris” on that article and on initial Crimson article on 8/27 are well worth reading.