A video of an immigration lawyer that offers advice on what rights have citizens and visas holders if they stop by customs at airports, they are going viral in Tiktok, accumulating more than 8 million visits.
The post of the New York -based immigration lawyer, Brad Bernstein, comes immediately after the accounts of Tiktok users who say they are US citizens but who were arrested for hours and searched their phones or luggage when entering the country. The videos, and the details, the Twitch streamer, Hasan Piker, shared about being arrested and questioned at the Chicago O’Hare International Airport, many wonder what to do and what rights they have if they are detained by US customs officials.
Bernstein said that one of the most important questions he listens is whether all constitutional rights are protected during CBP projections.
“The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution does not apply until it has entered the United States of America,” Bernstein said. “And although it is physically in the United States at an airport, it is not considered that it has entered the United States under the immigration law until it goes through immigration and custom.”
The legal analyst of NBC News, Danny Cevallos, explained that the Supreme Court has argued “that routine searches in the border do not require a court order, a probable cause or even reasonable suspicions, due to the inherent sovereign interest of the government in protecting its territorial integrity.”
Bernstein said that individual protections depend largely on the status of citizenship of a traveler, and that those in visas or green card holders have less protection.
“An American citizen must be allowed back to the United States. The government cannot take away their American passport, he cannot remove his citizenship,” Bernstein said. But he advised caution.
“There is a much lower standard of constitutional authority at the airport, instead of walking locally in our streets, where the fourth amendment of illegal search and seizure would apply,” he said.
Statistically, advanced searches are rare, but it is important to plan in advance, Bernstein said.
Travelers who wish to protect their privacy that pass through CBP should only take electronics that are absolutely necessary when they travel, close cloud -based services and consider taking a secondary telephone when it goes abroad, he advised.
Above all, although these searches can be intimidating, it is better to keep calm and tell the truth. “The more you say no, the more questions you will have. And the longer your stay at the airport,” Bernstein said.
According to the American Union of Civil Libertads, American citizens do not need to bring citizenship evidence with them in the country.
“If you have valid immigration documents and you are over 18, the law requires that you take those documents. If an immigration agent asks you to produce them, it is advisable to show the documents to the agent or you run the risk of being arrested,” says the ACLU website.
The creator of Tiktok, Savanna, who says he is an American citizen born in the United States, said she was arrested and questioned by CBP for more than two hours at an airport in Miami. His video about the match has received more than 2 million visits about Tiktok. In it, he describes Customs officials by moving through their social and questioning it repeatedly about how much money he earned daily in Tiktok.
“I’ve been traveling out of the country and I have never had this problem,” he told NBC News. “But the only thing that changed between February and now, or February and April, was that I created ‘Trump for the landfill.”
Savanna said that the line is a satirical clothing brand that created with the intention of donating profits to humanitarian causes.
The National Security Department published again Savanna’s video in X and said she was not arrested for political reasons.
“Legal travelers have nothing to fear from these measures, which are designed to protect the security of our nation,” DHS said in a statement, adding “accusations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals have no foundation and irresponsible.”
DHS said his data shows that general border searches have increased since last year, but that advanced projections have decreased slightly.
Cevallos pointed out a recent federal case that determined that searches for “basic” electronic devices on the border are constitutional. “This has been criticized as an” interpretation of the fourth amendment that threatens the privacy interests of people on the border, “said Cevallos.
Piker, the Streamer and the American political expert known on Twitch as Hasanabi, said he believes that CBP stopped him on his trip back from France on May 11 due to his political views, a reasoning that DHS also disputes.
“They invited me to the back room to question me about my opinions about a multitude of different things from Donald Trump to Israel, Palestine,” he told NBC News.
Piker said he was not surprised when the agents asked him aside.
“I knew it was probably going to happen because I had heard many reports about this that happened with immigration lawyers and even Tiktokers and things that have said negative things about Donald Trump,” he said.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in an X post that Paker was “lying for ‘like'”.
“I thought it was really fun because they admitted that it happened,” Paker said in response to McLaughlin’s publication. “The parties that omitted that I think it is very disastrous is that it is an admission that asking people about their loyalty to the current administration or their opinion about Israel-Palestine is part of a routine investigation. Because there is nothing routine in that. It is not pertinent for my entry into the country as a US citizen.”
