Border Letter

It’s been several weeks since the border meeting here in Pt. Roberts and I’ve finally decided that I want to write a letter to Ms. James, who is the CBP Field Office Director for a large region including Pt. Roberts; the one who came with her large contingent to meet with us here in P.R. By now, of course, she has probably lost track of the meeting at which she had to listen and we got to talk. Well, maybe not. But I imagine that as cranky as we are here, we are yet only a very small potato on her plate.

But, the thing is, I want to write to her about things that she has no control over, so it doesn’t really matter whether she is thinking of us while we (or at least I) am thinking of her. Not going to change because they are things that nobody in the government could possibly care about. There are three of these things.

First, is the name of the Nexus Program. I don’t mind that it is called the Nexus Program (just as I didn’t care that the previous program was called the Pace Program). Both are largely meaningless names so neither provoked much response from my lizard brain. However, when she and her colleagues refer to it as the “Trusted Traveler Program,” the lizard goes into full enraged mode. It is NOT a Trusted Traveler Program. It is a Distrusted Traveler Program. After all, if they are routinely checking to see whether people with Nexus Cards are bringing nuclear warheads into the country, we can’t really be thinking that they trust us, can we? And when they ask us where we are going when we come to Point Roberts and they have our name and address right in front of them, but they need to see whether we sound guilty...well, I think they don't trust us. They need either to use the latter name when referring to it so that we all know where we stand , or they need to stop using ANY name other than the Nexus Program. I urge the second choice.

Second is also something of a language issue. Ms. James and her colleagues should stop telling the public to understand that, in the difficult work lives of her many CBP minions, said minions are occasionally liable to be having a bad day. It is not that I don’t want to or can't understand that, it is just that I don’t want to hear about how understanding I should be. Well, I don’t want to hear about it unless they are also willing to understand that occasionally the Nexus Card holder may also be having a bad day: the kind of day wherein they forget to notice that their spouse or child or grandchild has left something in the back seat of the car that shouldn’t be there when crossing the border. The thing is, when I have a bad day, I am likely to lose my Nexus Card; when the CBP folks have a bad day, I am likely to lose my Nexus Card. There’s something there that suggests we don’t have the kind of level playing field that would encourage my sympathy for their bad days.

The third and last is more of a process issue. Apparently, from all the stories I have heard from people who have lost their Nexus Cards, the individual CBP agents standing in their little booths are allowed to look you over and decide whether you have offended them sufficiently with your lettuce head or grandchild’s sweater and then confiscate your Nexus card on the spot. That seems to me a whole lot like letting the beat cop send you directly to prison without his first having to go through some tiresome legal process. I believe Lewis Carroll already caught the Red Queen in that maneuver: ‘Off with their Nexus Cards!” Sentence first, verdict later. Maybe better if they recommend, but somebody else makes the actual decision after thinking about it for more than five minutes.

That’s what I’m writing to Ms. James about.